Original title: These amazing pictures are made with packing tape

Original Description: Tape artist, Max Zorn uses brown packing tape and lights to create stunning pictures.

Original Source: https://edition.cnn.com/videos/arts/2015/06/30/amazing-pictures-made-with-packing-tape-style.cnn

 

 

Transcript:

CNN: What is Tape Art?

Max Zorn: I create artworks with ordinary brown packing tape. The initial idea was to work with lights, especially urban nights, which I thought is like kind of an unexplored gallery in our cities. I started with little sketches on plexiglass and one night I put one of these plexiglasses up on a street lamp with a little strip of that brown packing tape and it was the first time I saw how greatly it interacts with light, and that’s kind of like when the idea was born.

As with all mediums, you have certain characteristics you can work along with. For example, tape comes with straight lines, so it’s actually great to compose an image. When you have usually like a brush or so, you really have to have a steady hand to create a straight line.

Inspiration is just a very fragile thing, you know, a little spark, you have a melody in your head and like you find it good enough and then you want to build a song around it. That’s what happens here too.

As a kid I loved reading Steinbeck and Hemingway and Mark Twain and so on, and I just like the way they created characters and settings and it’s kind of like what I want to do too, actually telling myself a story.

To get around creative blocks, I basically carve little windows, because that’s like knitting so I don’t really have to think, I don’t have to really compose. I just basically work on little details.

Stick Together started as a very tiny project where I basically gave friends little street art stickers for them to hang up in cities I thought I’d never visit. Then all of a sudden thousands of people applied and then it was global and it was creating this beautiful secret connectivity between people around the world. We have stickers in Easter Island, in Hawai‘i and Thailand and Siberia—and I mean, we are all parts of cities, and cities shape us in return.

I do like very small additions, usually you can’t even see it or it’s hard to detect on a lamp, but for me it feels like leaving a fingerprint somewhere.

I think street art is as broad as societies are; you have aesthetic street art and you have very political street art. It’s hard to put it all into one barrel, but I think it can show people that we can change our surroundings, that we can comment on social issues, that we can comment on aesthetic issues, and that we can be democratic about it—and I think that’s an exciting part of the art world.

My name is Max Zorn and I’m what you probably can call a tape artist.