Resume

Wolfgang Staehle was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1950. He attended the Freie Kunstschule, in Stuttgart, and in 1976 he moved to New York to attend the School of Visual Arts, New York (BFA) where he studied with Joseph Kosuth (Conceptual Art), Marshall Blonsky (Semiotics), Robert Mangold (Painting), Jackie Winsor (Sculpture), Richard Van Buren (Sculpture), Storm De Hirsch (Experimental Film), Todd Watts (Photography), Ed Bowes (Video), Anina Nosei (Art History), and Jeanne Siegel (Art History).

After a successful career in various New York in European galleries in the 1980s, Staehle decided to work collectively, and in 1991 he founded The Thing, an innovative online forum for artists and cultural workers.

In 1996, Staehle began to produce an ongoing series of live online video streams. The first of these works was Empire 24/7, a continuous recording of the top one-third of the Empire State Building that is broadcast live over the Internet.

Wolfgang Staehle is represented by Postmasters Gallery, New York.

The Thing

The Thing
http://www.thing.de/
http://www.thing.net/

The Thing emerged in the end of 1991 at the New York’s telephone net as a kind of art platform. It was the first project that combined the conceptual art scene with an interactive network.
In the first year The Thing was just used as a simple bulletin board or mailbox system. In the following years The Thing went online in more cities around the world until it got a new user interface in 1995 for the World Wide Web appearance.   

Empire 24/7

Empire 24/7
1999 – 2004
Video stills
Dimensions variable
Webcam installation

Empire 24/7 is an homage to Andy Warhol’s film Empire (1964), which was an eight hour long film that shows the Empire State Building from dusk till dawn. Staehle installed a camera in his office (The Thing Office) in New York and focused the camera right to the Empire State Building. The cam had broadcasted every few seconds a picture to the exhibition net_condition in Karlsruhe (Germany). The title 24/7 exemplified the consumption 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.    

Untitled

Untitled
2001
Video stills
10 feet x 25 feet (variable dimensions)
Video: http://www.newarttv.com/Wolfgang+Staehle

Dual channel real time video
installation (archive).
Postmasters Gallery NYC, September 6 – October 6, 2001.

Wolfgang Staehle installed 2001 a Live-Webcam-Installation in the Postmaster Gallery New York. The installation showed via video projection three different places in the world. A monastery near Stuttgart in Germany, the TV Tower on Alexanderplatz in Berlin (Germany) and at last the skyline of New York.
Every webcam broadcasted every five seconds a new picture to the exhibition in New York which lasts from 09/06/2001 to 10/06/2001.
At 09/11/2001 the exhibition become inadvertently a documentation of the hardest terror assaults in the world.