Philipp Schaerer

Biography

Philipp Schaerer is a visual artist and architect, specializing in the field of digital image processing. His work is at the intersection of architecture, photography and graphic design. The main focus of his interest lies in the creation of images that try to reflect a built reality. He explores image strategies which can be abstract, model-like and exaggerated, and which are thus able to reformulate the question of the differentiation between the real and the artificial. After graduating from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 2000, Philipp worked from 2000-2006 as an architect and knowledge manager for Herzog & de Meuron in Basel. During this time he created many well-known architectural illustrations for the studio that substantially influenced the visual language of today’s established architectural visualizations. At the Chair for Computer-Aided Architectural Design of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), Philipp was responsible until 2008 for the Postgraduate Studies in CAAD under Prof. Dr. Ludger Hovestadt. Since 2008, Philipp has been a lecturer at several universities and, from 2014-15, a visiting professor in the department of Architecture (Art et Architecture) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). His work has been published and exhibited repeatedly and is represented in several private and public collections – among others in The Museum of Modern Art MoMA in New York, The Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago (MoCP), The Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe (ZKM) and The Fotomuseum in Winterthur. Philipp Schaerer lives and works in Zurich and Steffisburg/CH. www.philippschaerer.ch www.constructingtheview.org

Statement

We live in a visual environment whose aesthetics are increasingly determined by digital media and we keep turning into users of predefined computer and software based processing technologies. The aesthetics created in this way have become more and more interchangeable. A rich variety of visual manifestations is on the verge of withering away. It is time to develop more specific and individual forms of expression with computers and to achieve a more creative approach to computer-based technologies. This means circumventing the program's clearly defined application scenarios and predefined settings and devising one's own and more unrestricted processing chains and aesthetics.