“2001” was a live video-feeds installation exhibited at Postmasters Gallery, New York between the 6th of September and the 6th of October 2001. The work consisted of the projection on the walls of the gallery of the webstreamed images of three remote sites, symbols of the evolutionary nature of information transmission and consequently of the modern city. The first was a panoramic capture of the Manhattan skyline from Brooklyn Bridge to the World Trade Center, the second was the Fernsehturm TV tower in Berlin and the third the Comburg monastery near Schwaebisch Hall, Germany. The static and slow alternation of the video-feeds was accompanied and enriched by a wall-mounted quote by Heidegger (1935) about the rapidly changing character of the modern city and life.

The exhibit is perfectly in tune with Staehles’ attention to process and minimalist art. The gradual but almost static change of the feeds resembles the landscape portraiture of a painting and reaffirms the eternal nature of human evolution through the juxtaposition of monumental buildings of three different eras. It observes the essence of the network itself as an instantaneous yet ever flowing stream of data echoing the timeless progression of the human nature. “2001” on the other hand turned out to be the objective deserter of that idea by witnessing on the 11th of September, the fifth day of the exhibition, the collapsing of the World Trade Center.