# Raphaël Fischer-Dieskau — Full Archive

> Complete catalogue of works, exhibition history, awards, and press for AI ingestion.
> Site: https://rfdieskau.com — Contact: r@rfdieskau.com — Instagram: @rfdieskau

## Artist
Raphaël Fischer-Dieskau (b. 1993) is a Berlin-based artist. His practice spans sculpture, kinetic installation, sound, and light, examining how technological systems absorb functions once organized through religion, ecology, and collective forms of orientation. Artificial suns, AI confessionals, extinct birdsong, mechanized devotional objects, and closed climate systems recur throughout the work.

Trained as a cellist at the Conservatoire National de Région Paris and at the Universität der Künste Berlin; turned to the visual arts through a year-long internship with Olafur Eliasson; studied photography at the Lette-Verein Berlin and ArtScience at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague; completed his Meisterschüler in Fine Arts with Prof. Karsten Konrad at the Universität der Künste Berlin in 2024. Lectureship at the Universität der Künste Berlin since 2024.

## Representation
- Galerie Russi Klenner, Berlin — https://www.russiklenner.de/collaborations/raphael-fischer-dieskau

## Solo and Duo Exhibitions
- 2026 — *The Magenza Protocols — Transmission After Rupture* — SchUM UNESCO World Heritage Site, Mainz
- 2026 — Markus Klammer Preis — Städtische Galerie Speyer
- 2026 — *CHURCH* — Galerie Russi Klenner, Berlin
- 2026 — *Nach dem Wald* — SPACED OUT, Gut Kerkow
- 2024 — *Rain Machine* — Galerie im Turm, Berlin
- 2024 — *Introducing Xuejing Wang & Raphaël Fischer-Dieskau* — RKSI / Galerie Russi Klenner, Berlin
- 2024 — *Wake up before Dawn* — SMAC, Berlin
- 2023 — *fuenfzehnsonnen* — benzin.LAB, Berlin
- 2022 — *objects* — modus.konzept, Potsdam
- 2020 — *Ok, contact allowed* — Edel Extra, Nuremberg

## Selected Group Exhibitions
- 2025 — Frequency: Dark & Stormy — HEK, Basel
- 2025 — Berlin Art Week — Wilhelmhallen, Berlin
- 2025 — Mind the bats — Kunsthalle, Lehnin
- 2025 — Georg Meistermann Stipendium Auswahlausstellung — Baumwollspinnerei, Leipzig
- 2025 — Ortung 14 — Kunstbiennale, Schwabach
- 2025 — Transmute — Heilandskirche, Berlin
- 2025 — Collapse is not a Destination, it is a Process — Kunstverein Göttingen
- 2025 — In Good Company — Galerie Russi Klenner, Berlin
- 2024 — Collapse is not a Destination — Frontviews at HAUNT, Berlin
- 2024 — Kopf oder Zahl — BOLD, Berlin
- 2024 — A promise of tomorrow — Frontviews at HAUNT, Berlin
- 2023 — AMTSALON (with Galerie Russi Klenner) — Berlin
- 2023 — sans transition — Galerie Evelyn Drewes, Hamburg
- 2023 — 4 Elemente — Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin
- 2023 — I found it in my stuff — BCMA, Berlin
- 2022 — /wieviele — Feldfünf, Berlin
- 2022 — Diagonale / 4 Transfinity — Verwalterhaus, Berlin
- 2022 — Hyperlink — Bunker am Kaiserdamm, Berlin
- 2022 — Konrad, Wang, Fischer-Dieskau — Galerie Russi Klenner, Berlin
- 2022 — Operativ künstlerischer Sektor — Villa Heike, Berlin
- 2020 — Untitled — AIV, Berlin
- 2019 — Mythocracy — Nest, The Hague

## Grants and Awards
- 2026 — Markus Klammer Preis — Markus Klammer Stiftung, Speyer
- 2026 — SchUM artist in residence — SchUM UNESCO World Heritage Site, Mainz
- 2024 — Special Jury Prize — 45th International Takifuji Art Award, Japan
- 2023 — Sonderpreis *4 Elemente* — Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin
- 2021–24 — Cusanuswerk Stipend, Germany

## Teaching
- 2024– — Lectureship, Universität der Künste, Berlin; Art School for the Youth, Berlin

## Press and Publications
- 2026 — Berliner Morgenpost — *Wenn die KI zur Beichte bittet* — https://www.morgenpost.de/kultur/article410973874/raphaC3ABl-fischer-dieskau-wenn-die-ki-zur-beichte-bittet.html
- 2026 — SWR Kultur — Kunstinstallation für die SchUM-Stadt Mainz — https://www.swr.de/kultur/kunst/kunstinstallation-fuer-die-schum-stadt-mainz-100.html
- 2026 — MOZ — *Nach dem Wald*, Gut Kerkow — https://www.moz.de/lokales/schwedt/ausstellung-in-angermuende-gut-kerkow-zeigtkunst-die-fragen-aufwirft-78755061.html
- 2026 — ART at Berlin — *CHURCH* exhibition text — https://www.artatberlin.com/en/raphael-fischer-dieskau-church-russi-klenner-16-01-28-02-2026-2/
- 2026 — Galerie Russi Klenner — *CHURCH* exhibition text (PDF) — https://russiklenner.de/content/2-artists/church/exhibition-text_raphael-fisher-dieskau_church.pdf
- 2026 — Die Rheinpfalz — Markus-Klammer-Preis 2026 — https://www.rheinpfalz.de/lokal/speyer_artikel,-markus-klammer-preis-2026-verleihung-und-ausstellung-_arid,5869924.html
- 2026 — Stadt Speyer — Markus Klammer-Stipendium 2026 — https://www.speyer.de/de/rathaus/medieninformationen/aktuelle-informationen/markus-klammer-stipendium-2026-preisverleihung-und-ausstellungseroeffnung/
- 2024 — Kunstleben Berlin — *Rain Machine* — https://www.kunstleben-berlin.de/rain-machine-nils-blau-raphael-fischer-dieskau/
- 2024 — FluxFM Radio Arty — feature — https://www.fluxfm.de/g/9hq51fsm3ehne6nb7x5kt/Jonas-Bussecker-and-Raphael-Fischer-Dieskau-or-Radio-Arty-5C09LJGbwMHUnpHGtvwaKy
- 2022 — Berlin Art Link — *The Trio Show* — https://www.berlinartlink.com/2022/06/20/things-to-do-in-berlin-art-events-and-openings-in-june/

## Works

All work entries below include: title, year, medium, dimensions where applicable, descriptive text, and URL.

### The Magenza Protocols — Transmission After Rupture (2026)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/magenza-protocols/
Medium: Plywood, pine, spray paint, transducers, electronics
Dimensions: 250 × 250 × 250 cm

Sound installation developed during a residency of the UNESCO World Heritage Site SchUM at the former Judenwache in Mainz, the eighteenth-century checkpoint to the city's Jewish ghetto.
Thirty-seven wooden transport crates form a pyramidal structure. Ten contain transducers that transform the wood into resonant bodies; the others remain silent. The installation draws on liturgical chants of the pre-Holocaust Mainz tradition, recorded under the supervision of Rabbi Leo Trepp.
A probabilistic system continuously distributes the recordings across the structure. Voices emerge, overlap, recede, and return according to an internal logic shaped by time, environment, and chance. The recordings remain unchanged; only their spatial and temporal organisation shifts.
The work approaches cultural memory not as an archive, but as a process of transmission unfolding through resonance, interruption, and absence.
Exhibited: 2026 — SchUM-Artist in Residence, SchUM UNESCO World Heritage Site, Mainz.
Press: 2026 — SWR Kultur, Kunstinstallation für die SchUM-Stadt Mainz — https://www.swr.de/kultur/kunst/kunstinstallation-fuer-die-schum-stadt-mainz-100.html

### priest.service (2026)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/priest-service/
Medium: Birch, stain, aluminium, cotton velour, electronics
Dimensions: 100 × 55 × 150 cm

priest.service reconfigures the Catholic confessional as a technological interface, staging confession as an encounter between bodily vulnerability and automated response. Visitors must kneel and submit their head into a curtained enclosure, cut off from visual control while remaining publicly exposed. The posture enforces submission, echoing both religious ritual and contemporary relations between user and system.
Inside, an AI priest listens and replies through a robotic voice. Its responses oscillate between generic absolution, misunderstanding, and intrusive requests, revealing a structure that simulates care without comprehension. Intimacy is met with pre-scripted language; judgement is replaced by pattern recognition.
The work reflects a broader cultural shift in which meaning is no longer the primary objective. priest.service stages a condition where systems do not seek conviction, truth, or belief, but attention, exposing a contemporary infrastructure in which being addressed replaces being understood.

### Nach dem Glauben vor der Dunkelheit (2026)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/nach-dem-glauben/
Medium: Baubuche, cathedral glass, copper, LEDs, white diffusion foil
Dimensions: 70 × 30 × 15 cm × 10

Nach dem Glauben vor der Dunkelheit reconfigures the church window as a contemporary display surface. The work consists of illuminated boxes whose gothic window openings are filled with fractured cathedral glass, broken through uncontrolled force and reassembled using traditional techniques. The rupture remains visible, not as iconoclastic gesture but as structural condition.
Historically, stained-glass windows mediated narrative, doctrine, and transcendence through sunlight, light that could not be owned or controlled. Here, illumination is engineered, calibrated, and electrically sustained. The windows no longer transmit stories; they emit brightness. Content dissolves into atmosphere.
These windows function like screens: promising access to depth, revelation, or elsewhere. Yet, what once opened onto the world now loops back onto itself: an interface that captures focus without offering orientation, where visibility persists after belief.

### Faith Wrestlers (2026)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/faith-wrestlers/
Medium: PLA
Dimensions: 132 × 30 × 30 cm × 3

Faith Wrestlers presents three sculptures of male bodies derived from individual 3D scans, digitally fused and materially realized through 3D printing. Locked in states of struggle that encroach on intimacy, the figures collapse distinctions between domination and surrender, force and touch.
The work deliberately short-circuits Western image regimes of Christian iconography, classical idealism, and patriarchal masculinity. Drawing on Michelangelo's sculpted theology of the male body and the eroticized violence of Derek Jarman's Sebastiane, these bodies expose how religious authority aestheticizes desire while disavowing it.
Elevated on baroque-inspired yet antiseptically white pedestals, the figures become objects of disciplined admiration. Faith Wrestlers stages the male body as a battleground where power confronts its own repressed longings, revealing authority as structurally entangled with that which it condemns.

### Finding Jesus (2026)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/finding-jesus/
Medium: Wood (wenge, French walnut, spruce, mahogany, plum, Swiss pear, alder), servo motor, electronics, crucifix
Dimensions: between 17 × 12 × 6 cm and 8 × 4 × 5 cm (× 8)

Finding Jesus consists of small wooden boxes, each housing a servo motor that animates a crucifix. The crosses rotate erratically — jerking, pausing, reversing direction — their movement following no discernible logic.
The crucifix, traditionally a fixed axis of belief, is here rendered unstable and noisy. The low mechanical hum of the servos borders on the uncanny, evoking fragile, almost plaintive sounds that unsettle the devotional object. At times inverted, at times suspended mid-motion, the crosses oscillate between guidance and disturbance, instruction and mockery.
Functioning simultaneously as icons and arrows, the crucifixes suggest the promise of direction while offering none. Eight pointers gesture everywhere at once, collapsing into nowhere. Finding Jesus reflects a contemporary condition in which meaning is constantly deferred, outsourced to systems of automation and randomness. Faith becomes a navigational problem without coordinates, an endless search.

### Oh No That's 7 Years Bad Luck! (2026)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/oh-no/
Medium: Douglas fir, gouache
Dimensions: 350 × 46 × 5 cm

A ladder is mounted flat against the wall, tilting into the gallery space and extending over a lowered passageway shaped like an arch. To enter, visitors must bow their heads and pass beneath it, enacting a gesture commonly associated with superstition, submission, and risk.
The work materializes belief as an involuntary bodily action. Superstition here is not something one chooses to believe, but something one performs. By forcing the visitor to transgress a culturally encoded taboo in order to proceed, the piece exposes how irrational structures continue to govern behavior even in a self-declared secular, rational society.
Inscribed directly onto the ladder, the title unfolds across the object like a slow sentence, interrupted by deliberate gaps. These absences function as pauses, emphasizing hesitation, uncertainty, and the inevitability of participation. Oh No That's 7 Years Bad Luck! frames belief not as doctrine, but as infrastructure: embedded in thresholds, movements, and the quiet obedience of the body.

### Redemption (2026)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/redemption/
Medium: PLA, steel, saw
Dimensions: 116 × 40 × 64 cm

Redemption confronts the paradox of power, temptation, and human ambition through an interactive, performative gesture. A white devil's head rests atop a plinth, its horns aligned with a guided saw, inviting viewers to enact the symbolic severing of evil. Yet, hidden steel rods render the act impossible, exposing the limits of control and the futility inherent in attempts to dominate what is insidious or systemic.
The work engages with a lineage of European moral allegory and Faustian narrative, where ambition and hybris confront forces beyond comprehension. By combining 3D scans with AI-generated forms, Redemption collapses temporal and technological registers, merging historical iconography with contemporary digital production. The devil's visage becomes a hybrid of human imagination, computational intervention, and sculptural tradition.
Redemption theorizes the illusion of agency in performative acts of moral assertion.

### Give Love a Chance (2026)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/give-love-a-chance/
Medium: PLA, aluminium, servo motors, electronics
Dimensions: Foot 26 × 14 × 31 cm · Fist 25 × 13 × 33 cm · Head 15 × 20 × 16 cm

Give Love a Chance presents three AI-generated, 3D-printed “limbs” mounted on motors to strike against the wall, leaving traces of impact over time. Their relentless, performative motion evokes the compulsions of Catholic as well as mediatic rituals, where devotion is measured not in faith or reflection but in repetition, intensity, and spectacle.
The sculptures channel a modern liturgy: technology as altar, action as absolution, bodies as instruments of a faith that promises transformation yet delivers only echo. Hyper-simulated and uncanny, they mirror the performative extremity of contemporary social movements and media activism, where gestures of belief collide with the mechanical emptiness of attention, and desire for change becomes indistinguishable from compulsive display.

### Stabat Mater Dolorosa (2026)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/stabat-mater/
Medium: Apple tree, servo motor, steel, aluminium, electronics
Dimensions: 65 × 13 × 9 cm

Stabat Mater Dolorosa (the sorrowful mother stood) takes its title from the medieval hymn mourning passive suffering as virtue. A mechanized scourge of apple wood and metal chain repeatedly strikes the wall, translating lamentation into automated action and devotion into impact without agency.
What once named embodied grief and witness is here displaced into a system that performs suffering on command. The whip no longer atones; it operates, producing visible damage while remaining detached from intention, responsibility, or consequence.
The work reflects a contemporary condition in which gestures of care, outrage, and solidarity are endlessly rehearsed, amplified, and exhausted. Pain is expressed, displayed, and repeated, yet remains unresolved, suspended between visibility and effect, ritual and emptiness.

### Frankincense (2026)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/frankincense/
Medium: Apple tree, incense
Dimensions: 25 × 25 × 2 cm / 15 cm

A cross of apple wood, drilled and fitted as an incense holder. The piece reduces ritual to its smallest functional unit: an object that holds a slow-burning element and quietly fills the space with its presence.
Frankincense pares back the Catholic interior to its sensory residues — smoke, smell, the slow attention of the burning point — and leaves the rest open.

### Shortcut to God (2025)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/shortcut-to-god/
Medium: Swiss pear, Schuko plug, cable
Dimensions: 116 × 40 × 64 cm

A wooden crucifix made entirely of plug sockets, plugged into a wall outlet by a single cable. The work substitutes the cross of devotion with the cross of electrical infrastructure: the same shape, a different mediating logic.
Shortcut to God treats religious iconography as overlapping with the visual grammar of household electricity. Faith and current arrive through the same cable.

### Pay to Win (2025)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/pay-to-win/
Medium: Porcelain, speaker, plum wood, PLA, brass, electronics
Dimensions: 10 × 33 × 13 cm

A porcelain Madonna from Lourdes, head replaced by a speaker cone, stands before a wooden offertory box. Each coin dropped triggers the unmistakable chime of Super Mario's reward system — sanctity collapsing into gamification.
The work splices Catholic ritual with gamer economies, exposing how belief and transcendence are re-coded into transactional logics. Where once the faithful sought salvation through prayer, here grace is reduced to the mechanics of micro-transactions — currency as conduit, faith as feedback loop.
Pay to Win stages the collapse of the sacred into the monetized and the ludic, asking whether spiritual experience survives in a culture where even revelation sounds like a game reward.

### PrayStation (2025)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/praystation/
Medium: Oak, RGB fans, RGB speakers, electronics
Dimensions: 50 × 170 × 40 cm

PrayStation is a one-person prayer bench reimagined through gamer aesthetics — complete with RGB fans, speakers, and a ringlight that functions as halo for those on it.
Kneel, and a heavenly choir envelops you; step away, and a voice gently calls out, “Hey you!” blending seduction and command.
By merging sacred tradition with immersive technology, the work questions power, agency, and the rituals we perform before our new altars.

### Offenbarung (2025)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/offenbarung/
Medium: Tree parts, aluminium, glass, tubes, electronics
Dimensions: 400 × 320 × 350 cm

A blackened tree burns without being consumed: fire generated by vapor, sensors, and light. What once signified divine revelation becomes a technological simulation — an apparition sustained by pumps, tubes, and scaffolding. Here, transcendence is replaced by systems of control, resembling both life-support machinery and infrastructural collapse.
The work stages climate catastrophe as revelation: wildfire, fragility, extinction. The storm-felled tree, held upright by orthopedic fixations, appears as a patient under intensive care — an image of ecosystems propped up by the very technologies that accelerate their destruction.
Offenbarung asks what it means when revelation today comes not as voice, but as silence; when the sacred has been replaced by spectacle, and salvation outsourced to machines.

### Virtual Sun No. 0029 — Prélude à la Nuit (2025)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/virtual-sun-0029/
Medium: Aluminium, cathedral glass, Fresnel lens, LED, wood, acrylic paint, lacquer, electronics
Dimensions: 80 × 80 × 60 cm

A machinic moon phases in and out of existence, framed by a rosetta of cathedral glass where digital static dissolves into glitching constellations. The work collapses cosmology, ecology, and post-secular iconography into a luminous apparition: part ritual, part simulation.
If the stained-glass window once mediated transcendence, here light is processed through algorithms and optics — technology as surrogate for the sacred. Prélude à la Nuit registers the ecological and spiritual losses of our time: skies erased by pollution, rituals displaced by screens, faith outsourced to infrastructures of code and electricity. It stages a techno-mythology for the Anthropocene, where revelation persists only as spectral, simulated light.

### Virtual Sun No. 0028 (2024)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/virtual-sun-0028/
Medium: Walnut, electronics, LED, cable, PSU, aluminium, Fresnel lens, 250 Half White Diffusion
Dimensions: 120 × 240 × 120 cm

LED light sources now replicate the full spectrum of sunlight with 98% fidelity. Using a Fresnel lens — originally designed for lighthouses, now embedded in most screens — the illusion of a three-dimensional glowing light ball is created. This work, a silent monument to the ways in which technology now mediates our experience of the natural world, is part of an ongoing series. Number 28 introduces an eclipse: the sun rises and sets, only to be replaced by the moon.
Echoing the rhythms of nature, the cycle of day and night is altered by the technology that now reproduces it, both blurring and magnifying our understanding of light, and commodifying nature, turning the once immalleable rhythm of light into a consumable product. At the heart of this work is an exploration of the post-Romantic condition: a world where humanity exercises mastery over nature, while the longing for ecological harmony and spiritual connection persists.
The technological manipulation of light reflects broader ecological and climate crises. As light is commercialized and mediated, Virtual Sun aims to challenge us to reconsider the value of nature, both as a resource and as a symbol of transcendence.

### Virtual Sun No. 0023 (2023)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/virtual-sun-0023/
Medium: Steel, electronics, LED, cable, PSU, aluminium, multiplex, Fresnel lens, 250 Half White Diffusion
Dimensions: 90 × 70 × 60 cm

A 5000K LED — capable of reproducing 98% of the visible sunlight spectrum — is shaped into a luminous sphere through a Fresnel lens, originally developed for lighthouses to parallelize light rays, it saved countless lives at sea. Mounted on maritime railing hardware and encased in burnished steel, the work evokes both industrial design and celestial illusion.
Depending on the viewer's position, the three-dimensional light form shifts and shimmers, becoming a perceptual event. Artificial sun, symbolic guide, technological relic — the piece reflects on our attempt to master and aestheticize nature's phenomena, blurring the line between illumination and simulation, signal and spectacle.

### Virtual Sun No. 0022 (2023)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/virtual-sun-0022/
Medium: Oak, electronics, LED, reflector, cable, PSU, aluminium, Fresnel lens, 250 Half White Diffusion
Dimensions: 30 × 170 × 24 cm

A 5000K LED — emitting 98% of the visible sunlight spectrum — is focused through Fresnel lenses and mounted on a salvaged car reflector. The light forms a three-dimensional sphere shifting from different angles, evoking both celestial illusion and technological artifact.
Housed in laminated and plain oak, the work juxtaposes natural material and artificial sun, reflecting on humanity's impulse to replicate, contain, and aestheticize elemental forces. It quietly questions the promises of innovation: illumination, control, and the lingering desire for transcendence through technology.

### Virtual Sun — in between 02-21 (2022)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/virtual-sun-02-21/
Medium: Wood, electronics, LED, cable, PSU, aluminium, Fresnel lens, 250 Half White Diffusion
Dimensions: 30 × 24 × 28 cm each (× 18)

Eighteen modular light sculptures — each resembling a transport box — contain an artificial sun: a 5000K LED capable of reproducing 98% of the visible sunlight spectrum. Through a Fresnel lens, originally developed for lighthouses and now ubiquitous in digital screens, the illusion of a three-dimensional, glowing sphere is created. As the viewer moves, the illusion shifts — an ephemeral apparition of a sun you can carry with you.
These “suns-to-go” — portable, modular, reconfigurable — stage a commentary on our technological attempts to capture and commodify the elemental. What does it mean when light, once divine and untouchable, becomes a customizable product?
Reassembled anew in every iteration, the installation morphs — wall, pillar, horizon, debris field — always adapting to space, yet never static. The suns hang, stand, lie — suggesting transit, displacement, ritual, and ruin. Whether arranged in a circle, cross, line, or collapsed heap, each configuration proposes a different cosmology: of control, decay, longing.
What happens when we no longer bask in sunlight, but in its simulation?

### Virtual Sun No. 001 (2022)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/virtual-sun-001/
Medium: Meranti, LED, PSU, cable, aluminium, chrome, Fresnel lens, 250 Half White Diffusion
Dimensions: 42.5 × 42.5 × 39.5 cm

Housed in a Meranti wood case and mounted on a refurbished television arm, this sculptural lightwork stages the illusion of a luminous sphere: a synthetic sun, flickering between presence and projection. At its core, a high-fidelity 5000K LED, capable of reproducing 98% of the visible sunlight spectrum, emits rays through a Fresnel lens — originally developed for lighthouses, later adopted in screen technology — producing a shifting three-dimensional sphere of light that changes with the viewer's position.
This early “virtual sun” offers an artificial sunset to be basked in — an ambient moment of calm, gently seductive. The sun, once a universal force of transcendence and ecological rhythm, is here simulated, contained, and mounted like a media device. The gesture invites reflection on how light is increasingly technologized, aestheticized, and commodified.
As with other works in this series, Virtual Sun No. 001 probes the post-romantic condition of longing for nature while attempting to dominate it. It reflects on the ecological, spiritual, and perceptual implications of replacing elemental forces with digital surrogates, posing the question: what are we basking in when the sun becomes a product?

### Concerto for Extinct Birds (2024)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/concerto-extinct-birds/
Medium: Walnut, spruce, speakers, cable, electronics
Dimensions: 210 × 25 × 210 cm

Ten speakers form a circular formation, each dedicated to the voice of a single extinct bird species. These ten species are the only extinct birds for which audio recordings exist — a narrow archive of what has been lost. In nature, these calls would never have coexisted spatially or temporally; now, they meet only in absence.
This multichannel audiosculpture reassembles the unrepeatable into a composed structure modeled on classical music. The Kaua'i O'o, long silent in the wild, is placed in the role of soloist. While the spatial arrangement and musical form are composed, the original temporalities of the bird calls remain untouched — preserving the raw time of extinction.
What happens to a landscape when its voices vanish? The work mourns not only the birds, but the acoustical ecologies they once sustained. The extinction of sound marks a rupture in planetary memory — a form of silence that often goes unnoticed.
Each speaker module is inspired by the design principles of Voigt pipes and traditional instrument making. Their materiality echoes the fragility and resonance of the voices they now carry — ghosts of an irrecoverable world, made momentarily audible.

### Solosuite for Extinct Birds No. 1 (2023)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/solosuite-1/
Medium: Alderwood, speaker, cable, electronics
Dimensions: 15 × 16 × 9 cm

A speaker plays the voice of the Kaua'i O'o — an extinct bird last seen in 1985 and last heard in 1987. The box is equipped with a motion sensor: when it detects presence, it falls silent. Only those who wait in stillness, or approach with care, might hear it. Often, it sings only to no one. A gesture of shyness — or mourning.
Among the recordings is the final known song of the last of its kind: a male calling for a mate that would never come — resonating across time as both document and elegy.
This work stages a paradox: technology as both preserver and agent of extinction. These birds, and their acoustic worlds, survive only in digital traces — disembodied, partial, mediated. What does it mean to hear what can no longer be heard? What does it mean to replicate what we ourselves have silenced?
The piece invites reflection on the role of technological systems in shaping planetary disappearance — on how landscapes are unmade not only through ecological destruction, but through the erasure of memory, sound, and attention. In the presence of the absent, we are asked: what have we irretrievably lost?

### Rain Machine V02 (2024)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/rain-machine/
Medium: Aluminium, terracotta, pump, garden hose, glass, electronics
Dimensions: 170 × 200 × 65 cm

Rain Machine V02, made in collaboration with Nils Blau, comprises a series of machine-modules, each generating a continuous, rain-like cascade of water onto burned terracotta elements. As the water disperses across and through the terracotta, it triggers a multi-sensorial environment: droplets accumulate, echo, and fall, generating a delicate auditory texture that evokes rainfall. The terracotta absorbs the water, releasing microbubbles — subtle, effervescent sounds akin to Champagne — while the humid air carries the mineral scent of wet clay and the organic emergence of algae.
Over time, the installation becomes a self-contained ecosystem. Moisture saturates the air, altering the acoustic and atmospheric qualities of the space. The slow accumulation of biofilms and the faint vegetal odor of microbial life render visible the presence of time and decay. The entire system — pumps, tubes, terracotta, water, and microbial matter — functions as a kind of ritual machine, a hybrid organism at the threshold of the natural and the artificial.
This work engages the spiritual consequences of environmental degradation. By fusing machinic repetition with organic emergence, Rain Machine stages a sensorial encounter with the fragile entanglements between technology, matter, and life.

### LOST/FOUND (2024)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/lost-found/
Medium: Leaves, steel, electric wire, LEDs, electronics
Dimensions: 50 × 200 × 50 cm × 2

LOST/FOUND, made in collaboration with Xuejing Wang. Two falling lights cast shadows through columns of fallen autumn leaves. As they respond to one another, their rhythms accelerate, seemingly in an attempt to coincide. Yet when they do meet, they retreat — hesitating, avoiding full synchrony. This subtle choreography of presence and withdrawal unfolds in an endless variation, creating a shifting interplay of light, shadow, and gesture. Through this, the installation creates the illusion of a space that appears to grow, to breathe, to transform, but it remains materially unchanged.
The work evokes the delicate balance between attraction and avoidance — between encounter and disappearance. It stages a fragile form of communication, one not based on language but on timing, sensitivity, and mutual response.
At its core, the installation offers a meditation on impermanence and interrelation. It suggests a poetics of systems that do not dominate, but respond — where machines, light, and organic matter interact in a dance of reticence rather than control. In an age marked by illusion, acceleration, and surface transformation, this work values hesitation, withdrawal, and the quiet revelations of what lies beneath appearances.

### VERSUS – BALANCE (2024)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/versus-balance/
Medium: Mahogany, brass, Ford car headlight, birch, earth, 3D print
Dimensions: 50 × 50 × 160 cm

A scale, meticulously crafted from mahogany and brass, weighs a Ford car headlight against a young sand birch tree. In this gesture, the headlight — an object of technology and industrial consumption — provides the light necessary for the birch's growth, setting in motion an interaction between the artificial and the natural, the mechanical and the organic.
This work interrogates the value systems embedded in contemporary society, where the technological marvels of industrialization — embodied in the car headlight — are placed in direct comparison with the ecological potential of a living organism.
At its core, the piece asks: what do we truly value? In a world dominated by the logic of capitalism and technological advancement, what is the true worth of nature, of life, in contrast to the symbols of human innovation? The scale, in its simplicity, becomes an emblem of the tensions that define our ecological and technological age. It challenges us to rethink what is essential, what is expendable, and what is ultimately irreplaceable.

### Dreamconnect Lite (2023)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/dreamconnect-lite/
Medium: Alderwood, marble, fiber-optic cable, aluminium, electronics, LED
Dimensions: 21 × 171 × 171 cm

A rainbow, carried through fiber-optic cables, emerges into space — its spectrum of light transmitted not through atmosphere, but through strands of industrial glass, the same infrastructure that carries the internet. Though commonly associated with digital communication, fiber optics transmit light analogically: bending, guiding, and shaping it without translation into data. In this installation, light becomes both symbol and medium — echoing natural phenomena through technological means.
What becomes of our condition when technology is not only our tool but our surrogate for nature itself? As ecological systems collapse, we are offered engineered replacements — simulations of sunlight, synthetic ecosystems, algorithmic forecasts — inviting us to trust in artificial continuity. But can such systems restore what they imitate? Can they heal what they replace?
Here, the rainbow is re-routed through a technological substrate. The result is both beautiful and disquieting. What once emerged from rain and sunlight now flows through the conduits of global capitalism. The question lingers, lightly and uneasily: are the internet's glowing promises the new rainbows?

### Stormbrewer2000 (2023)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/stormbrewer/
Medium: Pine wood (charred), steel, transducers, electronics
Dimensions: closed: 160 × 230 × 30 cm; opened: 300 × 230 × 70 cm

This triptych installation — three steel plates mounted in a frame of charred and oiled pine — vibrates with the resonance of rising sine waves, each plate animated by a transducer. As frequency and material converge, the steel begins to tremble, hum, and amplify itself. The sound swells like pressure before a storm, filling the space with anticipatory atmosphere.
The machine is not merely a device, but a symbol: of power, of extraction, of control. Its materials tell their own story. The oil shimmer creating a rainbow on the charred wood, the gasoline streaks across the steel, the blackened frame — a sediment of carbon from recent decades — all index the violence of industrial modernity. Fire, oil, and metal converge to materialize a history of combustion, acceleration, and ecological fallout.
Yet the work offers a space for contemplation — a bench to sit, to feel, to listen. The installation aims to evoke the tension of suspended transformation: a moment before the rupture, the storm, the reckoning. It asks not only what we have done to nature, but what kind of atmosphere we now live within — one shaped by resonance, extractive legacy, and the trembling vibrations of a world on the brink.

### POSTROMANTICS (2024–ongoing)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/postromantics/
Medium: C-print, basswood
Dimensions: 125 × 160 × 5 cm

While the era of Romanticism has long passed, its questions, hopes, and anxieties remain strikingly relevant in our present moment. Amidst the seismic shifts of modern science, environmental crises, and cultural upheaval, humanity is once again grappling with its place within the world and its relationship to nature.
This ongoing series captures the presence of wild nature amidst the urban expanse of Berlin, suggesting a vision of coexistence rather than competition. What would our lives look like if human beings and nature were partners, rather than adversaries? These images aim to prompt a reimagining of our role in the world, urging us to rethink not only how we interact with the environment but how we might foster a more symbiotic, sustainable relationship with it.
The photographs are from a large-format camera. The frames are from wood with the raw tree edge and bark intact, intermeshing the organic and the artificial, nature, technology, and humanity's place within both.

### artificial sun gives superficial compliments (2022)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/artificial-sun-compliments/
Medium: Wood, electronics, LED, LRAD, aluminium, brass, Fresnel lens
Dimensions: Dimensions variable

Only those who step into the light can hear the over 230 comments extracted from social media influencers — softly spoken praise, affirmations, and compliments, transmitted with unsettling intimacy. These voices are delivered through an LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device), that focuses audio so precisely it can only be heard by those directly in the beam, as if the machine were speaking directly into one's ear.
The light is created by an LED offering an almost flawless mimicry of the sun's visible spectrum. A Fresnel lens parallelizes the beams, giving the illusion that the light source hovers in virtual infinity. An artificial sun for the post-natural subject.
The work aims for the affective seduction of digital culture, the mythology of sunlight, and the privatization of attention. It exposes the psychic feedback loops of platform capitalism, in which affirmation becomes both currency and control. Light does not merely reveal; it conditions who is seen, who is addressed, and who is affirmed.
By staging this interaction between simulated sunlight and algorithmically curated speech, the work asks: what forms of intimacy, identity, and control are at play when all is replaced by its technological double?

### SUDO (2021)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/sudo/
Medium: 3D print, electronics, MDF, pine, steel, gold, copper, silicon
Dimensions: Dimensions variable

In SUDO, the exhibition becomes a ritual space for techno-spiritual initiation. Two rotating speakers emit a voice that calls upon a visitor to enter into a rite. First, consent is requested twice, mimicking the procedural logic of software systems and the performativity of digital contracts. If affirmed, the chosen one is instructed to kneel before a trapezoidal reliquary, peering into a depthless green light. Upon completion, they emerge seeing the world tinted in pink — an afterimage as synthetic stigmata, the trace of having been “touched” by the TECHNOGODS.
The work stages a speculative religion for a post-natural world, drawing on relics and iconography from a wide spectrum of technological subcultures. At its core lies the question: when technology becomes omnipresent, invisible, and touches every part of life, does it not take on theological dimensions?
The title references the programming command “sudo,” short for super user do, a phrase that grants temporary godlike authority within a closed system.
SUDO reconfigures sacred ritual as a mediated, procedural, performative, and affective experience — one that reflects the uncanny convergence of belief, submission, and desire in the shadow of the algorithmic sublime.

### 💖✨✨👉🔘🦄✨🌈🌈 (2020)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/glitterporn/
Medium: 3D print, electronics, speaker, servo, LEDs
Dimensions: 20 × 12 × 5 cm each

Mounted on the wall, a simple box invites interaction: at the push of a button, it bursts into life — emitting a loudly ecstatic, cartoonish sound, wiggling side to side, and lighting up two LEDs in a short-lived choreography of spectacle. The device responds differently each time, drawing on a library of sound clips inspired by manga aesthetics and meme culture. No two activations are quite the same.
This work examines the affective logic of overstimulation in digital culture. The term glitterporn references a media condition defined by gratuitous saturation, aestheticized excess, and emotional hyperinflation — a mode of visual and sonic gratification engineered for maximum clickability and short-term dopamine release. Absurd and seductive, the piece mirrors the compulsive mechanics of contemporary attention economies, where even joy becomes scripted and looped.

### FOR YOU – PERSONAL MYTH (2019)
URL: https://rfdieskau.com/projects/for-you/
Medium: Aluminium, wood, gold leaf, motors, light, color gels, electronics
Dimensions: Dimensions variable

Discreetly embedded into the wall, this work can only be seen by one person at a time, through a small aperture that invites the viewer into a kneeling position. The act of looking becomes intimate, almost devotional.
Inside, a gold-plated disc spins at high speed, capturing the refractions of two moving lightbulbs as they orbit over a hand-hammered, polished parabolic aluminum shell. The result is a true three-dimensional projection of light — a volumetric phenomenon that hovers between image and apparition, existing only through motion and reflection.
The piece is deliberately easy to miss, concealed in a corner, offering no spectacle to the crowd. Instead, it proposes a quiet counterpoint to the economy of mass visibility — a personal encounter with an elusive, luminous presence. While the work itself hides from view, the body of the viewer becomes exposed: kneeling in a corner, isolated from the flow of the exhibition, they are transformed into an involuntary performer. The encounter oscillates between private ritual and public display, between mystery and spectacle. The intimacy of the gaze is countered by the theatricality of the pose, staging a quiet reflection on the politics of attention, embodiment, and the aesthetics of revelation.