project description

be prepared! tiger! is a project by knowbotic research in collaboration with Peter Sandbichler. It was first presented in the harbour of Duisburg in April 2006 during the exhibition "Designing the Truth".
Central to the project is the re-enactment of a stealth boat as depicted in a propaganda video of the Tamil Tigers, the rebel Tamil liberation army. The boat seems to be a formal adaption of the US stealth bomber F117, a myth of invisibility and invincibility. knowbotic research and Sandbichler gathered information inside different networks and through private contacts in order to re-engineer and rebuild the boat. It appears to be unmanned, although it is navigated in the harbour environment by a person hidden inside the boat. With their project, the artists play on the dialectics of visibility and invisibility that leaves its traces in many of our modern technologies, most explicitly perhaps, when the invisible "secret weapon" is sold on an online auction-platform and presented therefore in a very visible way.
 

archive.transmediale.de/site/index.php?id=158 (transmediale website archive)

related text

Stefan Riekeles: withdraw and shine

tiger_stealth is a project by Knowbotic Research in cooperation with Peter Sandbichler. It was first presented in April 2006 in the harbour of Duisburg (Germany) as part of the installation Be prepared! Tiger! during the exhibition "Designing the Truth". The project tiger_stealth takes its point of departure from a video produced by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or for short, the Tamil Tigers, which was published on a website. Two soldiers are manoeuvring their boat along an abundantly overgrown river bank. A steersman and his colleague are boastfully posing for the camera with their rifles. Machine guns are mounted on the boat's bow, underpinning the poses with military force. The shape of the boat is reminiscent of the stealth bombers deployed by the US Air Force. Despite the poor quality of the video footage, one is able to recognize the polygonal design which is typical for crafts that use stealth technology, a passive weapon aimed at reducing a vehicle's visibility to radar. (full text)

Sabine Maria Schmidt: be prepared! tiger!

The power of an army is determined by its ability to deceive. (Sun Tze)

Invisibility is a form of power. It has to become visible in order to assure itself of its existence. Only by revealing its secret can invisibility affirm its authority. It can only unfold its authority over those who know about its secret. The fact that this secret still remains encrypted is part of invisibility's paradoxical existence.

"Dream of a magic hat for invisibility - soon a reality?" was the headline of an Austrian press release in August 2006.2 Again the hope is alive that scientists might have found a way to compete with the mythical ancestors of that dream. Siegfried succeeded over Alberich, the guardian of the hoard of the Nibelungen, by stealing his magic hood. Much earlier, the Cyclops made a perfectly fitting magic helmet for the god Hades that rendered him invisible and allowed him to stand by Zeus in the fight against the Titans. Another magic hood is mentioned with regard to Perseus who received it from the Nymphs on his way to the Gorgon Meduse. Or, to put it more precisely: Perseus stole the information necessary for this theft by means of an aggressive spying technique from the Graias who he had cheated on. (full text)

related links

project site: krcf.org/tiger/material_collect.htm

image credits

[01] knowbotic research: be prepared! tiger!
[02] knowbotic research: be prepared! tiger!
[03] knowbotic research: be prepared! tiger!, exhibition at LABoral Centro de Arte, Gijón
[04] knowbotic research: be prepared! tiger!, exhibition at transmediale.08
[05] knowbotic research: be prepared! tiger!, drawing