Game Face interview 2005 klik here to download (PDF)

Arno Coenen (1972)was born in Deventer, Holland and graduated from
Minerva, Groningen(1997) and got a mfa in computergraphics (Megia GN) (1998).
Arno Coenen belongs to a generation of dutch media-artists who 'grew up' with
digital media. Coenen after all, doesn't limit himself. He has created a
spectaculair number of Artworks which forms a cross-section through a number of
modern and traditional media, techniques and presentations such as Italian Glass
mozaik,3d computer animations, stained glasswindows etc.
From graduation till 2000 he woked as an artist in cooperation with Rene Bosma.
They made some truely spectacular works such as Deus Ex Machina, a pioneering
and awarded computeranimation, currently on show at 30 years of Dutch video art in Russia.
In 1995 they were guests tudent at Pratt institute in Brooklyn New York and in 1999 they went on a residency at the artcenter colege
of design in Paedena LA.
Arno Coenen's work has been shown in festivals and shows in Holland and internationally
(Finland,USA,Korea,Russia,Czech Republic,Serbia,Croatia,Germany,France) ranging
fromsuch divers events as "The American effect" groupshow (2003) at the Whitney
museum in New York till a veejayshow at Thunderdome party in thialf stadium (Holland) and a permanent piece in the
public space of Ekaterinburg Russia.Other large scale comissioned works in public spaces
include "a virtual fairytale" at the Nicolaas school inAmsterdam ,"Ahmet Abi"in Rotterdam.

At the moment 2 public artworks of Arno Coenen are in process of realisation in
Trebesice (Zhech republic) and Middelburg Holland.
last 3 years he worked as a juror for the FBKVB fund in Amsterdam, and was guest
teacher at the eg Sanberg institute, the Frank Mohr institute and the art academy in Breda.
Video works of Arno Coenen have recently been purchased by the Center de Pompidou in Paris and Museum het Domein in Sittard

TXT's by others:

Arno Coenen’s works involve new media, animated films that both humorously criticize and question stereotypical Western iconography and society. Coenen also works in a variety of mediums such as mosaic, ceramics, stained glass, computer generated film and digital video, yet his drive remains the same. He brings various aspects of high cultures, subcultures, and religion together, and leaves them in the same ring to box it out. His film titled The Last Roadtrip is a real and virtual-computer animated view of America by car, shot in a video game meets MTV style, using aspects of the board game Monopoly. Coenen coaxes the viewer to investigate his redefined world where nothing is hidden and the superficial Americana clichÈs of hamburgers, cardboard communities, murder, and “tits-and-ass” are all that remain. Coenen’s work as a whole is spirited by his travels and the interaction of different cultures, a place where multicultural societies, religions, and trends are held up for scrutiny. -

Marisa Prihodova (catalogue txt for exhibition "Stay" @ futura Prague 2003)

The wide variety of materials that Arno Coenen has been probing as an
artist - stained glass, bill-board scale prints, glass mosaics, computer
generated film, ceramics, digital video, live action performance, reflect a
seemingly equally dispersed array of themes and topics: new Dutch folklore
of modern architecture and Gabber youth underground techno dance culture,
the TV test image, a roadtrip through the hyperreal landscape of West-Coast
USA, computer game heroin Lara Croft, oppressive virtual reality
machineries, 100 clichés of net.culture as digital mantra's, impressions of
big-city life at the fringes of urban existence, a kickboxer as popular
heroS¹.
But within this variety Coenen finds a common ground. All of his heroes
exist at the fringes of popular and mass culture. Though they find a large
and devoted following as audience they still operate outside the
main-stream. "I want to make works that deal with phenomena that actually
exist and are deeply meaningful to a large audience, but not necessarily
the audience you would normally find in an art gallery", Coenen claims. "I
want these images to be so clear that they can appeal to the slightly
hidden cultures they derive their subject from, like the Gabber techno
dance scene, the kickboxing community, or the Tomb Raider computer game
addicts. But the execution of the works should be so perfect that they
cannot be denied, neither by the public at large , or even by the art
audience. My subjects are unusual for the art world, maybe even
unwarranted, but because their technical execution is so perfect these
subjects are not denied first hand, and are made negotiable within the
regular art audience, who normally shy away from these topics and cultures".
Coenen: "The computer has been the ideal tool for me. Almost everything I
make is first tested and designed within a digital environment. If I make a
public sculpture I can produce a model and a preview digitally, but as soon
as I have my model in the computer in 3D I can also animate it, transfer it
to film, video, or blow it up into a 4 x4 M outdoor print, or turn it into
a floor mosaic. This way of working gives me a freedom that I could not
achieve in any other medium, but still it is important for me not to be
confined to the computer medium; the final work almost always moves beyond
the screen into some other medium. I carefully choose the medium for each
work and each situation, i.e. the stained glass window for the Test Image
as a public art work in a school, the traditional Dutch Delft Blue Tiles
for the new Dutch Gabber-folklore, or most recently coloured 5 x 5 cm tiles
for a passage way in Amsterdam."

Erik Kluitenberg