Mikkel Carl (b.1976) has a BA. in philosophy, and an MFA in visual art from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Concurrently he works as a writer and freelance curator. Mikkel Carl's basic aim is to expand the notion of ’writing’. In this work he is particularly inspired by those tendencies within modern philosophy thematizing ’the sign’ as a fundamental category. As an artist he tries to discover the extent to which visual and bodily phenomena concerning the viewer may be produced through a kind of visual grammar. The starting point for this endeavour is Mikkel Carl's personal experience designating the sensual presence of the world to some kind of linguistic structure. He therefore creates his works taking advantage of the visual codes that are already in place, thus his method is some sort of repetition: a reprogramming of the original. That this approach can possibly lead to something new is based on a certain perception of time. Instead of simply looking at history as something linear and progressive, Mikkel Carl imagines the past to be a somewhat virtual reality, something that might actually change given a specific actualization in the present. Specifically Mikkel Carl’s works appear to be a deployment and development of most traditional media. He desires the viewer is experiencing the art piece to see himself or herself confronted with a beautiful, re-contextualized matter of fact, phenomenological challenging. And so Mikkel Carl conceptualizes the art object as a relatively simple looking, yet very complex diagram. Individually and through various configurations, his works seek to process those cultural, social, and economic signatures that historically and consistently encode the world as a collocation of signs. Link to artist: Mikkel Carl   "YEAH, IT’S MY BANNER!", Mixed media, Variable dimensions, 2008