Wolfgang Staehle was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1950, and studied at the Freie Kunstschule Stuttgart. In 1976, he moved to New York and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts.
Life and work
After getting his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, he worked as a video artist, and in 1991, he founded The Thing. The Thing was an Internet forum for new media art. It started out as an independent media project that began as a bulletin board system (BBS) that later became an online forum for artists and cultural theorists to exchange ideas. By the late 1990s, The Thing grew into a successful online community and began hosting artists' websites. It also includes a mailing list and was the first Website devoted to net.art, bbs.thing.net.
In 1996, he started his series of live online video streams. His first series is called Empire 24/7 where he documented the Empire State Building in New York City. He documented it by setting up a digital still camera at The Thing’s office located in New York’s West Chelsea neighborhood. Every four seconds, the camera took a picture of the building and the images were sent and projected in a gallery at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany. This project was a reference to Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire which was a silent, eight-hour-long black-and-white film in which the camera focused on the Empire State Building from dusk until dawn.
Staehle has continued working on his series of live online video streams of other buildings, landscapes and cityscapes such as the Fernsehturm in Berlin, the Comburg Monastery in Germany, and a Yanomami village in the Brazilian rainforest. Staehle currently serves as the Executive Director of The Thing and is represented by the Postmasters Gallery in New York.
"Installations Video," Art & Public, Geneva, Switzerland
2000
Kunstverein Schwaebisch Hall, Germany
2001
Postmasters Gallery, New York City
2004
Postmasters Gallery, New York City
2008
Solvent Space, Richmond, Virginia
2009
Postmasters Gallery, New York City
2012
Givon Art Gallery, Tel Aviv
2014
Dispari & Dispari, Reggio Emilia, Italy
2015
20th Street Project Space, New York City
Chronus Art Center, Shanghai
2016
Postmasters Gallery, New York City.
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
Group exhibitions
2001
"Tele[Visions]"
"Media Connection"
2002
"Unknown Quantity," Foundation Cartier pour L'Art Contemporian, Paris
"Monitor 2," Gagosian Chelsea, New York
"EMPIRE/STATE," Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Study Program Exhibition at the Art Gallery of The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
"Outside the Box, " University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida
"Transmediale.02 <Current Positions in Media Art," Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany
2003
"Yanomami," Foundation Cartier pour L'Art Contemporain, Paris
"Critical Conditions," Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh, PA
"Slowness," Dorsky Curational Projects, Queens, NY
2004
"Times Zones," Tate Modern, London
"Midtown," real-time public video projection, Lumen, Leeds, Great Britain
"The Passage of Mirage," Chelsea Art Museum, New York
2005
"The Forest," Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC
