Spring 2023
Jump cuts: Dirk Koy
Bildraum (2022)
Motion graphics: Dirk Koy. Sound: Ben Kaczor.Intersect (2021)
Motion graphics: Dirk Koy.Shape Studies (2019-23)
Motion graphics: Dirk Koy.Designer Dirk Koy received his first video camera (a Sony Video8) at fourteen and took it everywhere, regarding the camera as ‘a kind of pencil’. He recalls a special moment in his youth when he connected the camcorder to the TV to create analogue feedback. ‘I spent days in front of the TV to figure out how I can create different feedbacks by manipulating the parameters. It was a kind of experiment between control and coincidence, which is still an important part [of] the process in my work today.’
Koy studied Visual Communication at the Academy of Art and Design in Basel, where he focused on interaction design and time-based media. After graduating he worked on many projects, from car brands via TV titles to music videos, while developing a voice as a digital artist.
Since 2011, Koy has taught time-based media at the Institute of Visual Communication at HGK Basel.
Online, Koy mostly posts shorter works (or excerpts of longer projects) on Instagram and Vimeo. Alongside smaller experiments, he works on more extensive, potentially immersive works, such as Intersect, a series of mesmerising high-definition transformations in five chapters. The viewer’s sense of heightened reality, as if the natural world is being reconfigured molecule by molecule, cell by cell, is reinforced by a soundtrack of outdoor soundscapes that have been similarly re-engineered.
Some of Koy’s work has been commissioned by art institutions: he has been invited to create works for displays at Swiss and French train stations, with support from Fonds Cantonal d’art contemporain (FCAC) and the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève (Centre), supervised by the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB CFF FFS) and the French national railway company SNCF.
A recent work was displayed as part of ‘Neo Shibuya TV’, an art project on eight huge digital screens and 85 smaller ones in Shibuya,Tokyo.
Koy made Bildraum (2022) for the ground-breaking opening ceremony for the new Kunsthaus Baselland, a contemporary art gallery in Basel. It featured sound by Ben Kaczor.
Bildraum (2022)
Koy made Bildraum (above) for the ground-breaking opening ceremony for the new Kunsthaus Baselland, a contemporary art gallery in Basel. It featured sound by Ben Kaczor.
A hand-drawn animated line unfolds and contracts over a 3D model from surface into space.
Shape Studies (2019-23). In this series, photographs and videos of objects and living beings are manipulated in what Koy calls ‘a dialogue between real objects and their digitisation’. The blue car (Shape Study 30) is Koy’s own 1982 Chevrolet Citation.
Top. Shape Study 6 (also the cover of this issue of Eye) is Sina, his family cat, who sadly died in 2022. ‘Her life goes on digitally, and now also in print,’ says Koy.
Shape Studies (2019-23)
In this series, photographs and videos of objects and living beings are manipulated in what Koy calls ‘a dialogue between real objects and their digitisation’. The blue car (Shape Study 30) is Koy’s own 1982 Chevrolet Citation.
Shape Study 6 (also on the cover of this issue of Eye) is Sina, his family cat, who sadly died in 2022. ‘Her life goes on digitally, and now also in print,’ says Koy.
John L. Walters, editor of Eye, London
First published in Eye no. 104 vol. 26, 2023
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.