Josef Strau

The Reprints: The tennis ball of the garden Finzi Contin . 2014

+ Vilma Gold

In an quite aimless, objectless trial once Josef Strau sought to follow the very early example by Italo Calvino. As early as in the early seventies, that suggests, although more theoretically than practically, to write a story structurally based on the search capabilities of the computer and that as well makes the search mode the theme of the story.
For him the application of the Calvino model primarily became an attempt to first of all recover the many of his own texts from earlier on, (something he should have done already anyways, but the procedure turned into an impossible one), as lots of the text seemed to have disappeared in old folders partly lost through bad file organization or computer crashes. Following the idea of Calvino Josef Strau made attempts to use very recent search software for recovering words and sentences sometimes instead of documents to reactivate parts of sleeping text recombined for new use.
During the same time period he discovered as well the extreme high resolution capabilities of the latest digital cameras – in particular here the new sensor of the sony rx-1 r – and their capability to read the text of the printed older text posters from far away and to record even the more occult texts in gloomiest light conditions. The “reading” productivity of both tools determined a new way to finally present the almost complete poster text works of the Josef Strau.
Vilma Gold