Pump it Up! converts physical effort into a public scoreboard. A stationary exercise bike, installed in the basement of Kunsthaus Graz and branded “PUMP IT UP! MATHIAS KESSLER,” is wired directly to the building’s BIX façade — the museum’s iconic dot-matrix skin of fluorescent rings, itself already a piece of media architecture. Visitors log in over WiFi and pedal; a live video feed of the façade plays on a screen facing the bike, and each rotation of the pedals animates a tube-shaped “airdancer” figure — the inflatable, wind-driven figure normally used for roadside advertising — that appears rippling across the façade’s lights.
A second airdancer, driven not by the visitor but by real performance data, represents the effort of Graz’s bicycle couriers: in partnership with the delivery company Velofood (referred to in the English press release as “Velo”), the installation streams live watt-output data from couriers’ custom tracking app, pitting “Team Museum” against “Team Velo” in real time on the façade. The piece was commissioned within the accompanying program for 24/7. Arbeit zwischen Sinnstiftung und Entgrenzung (24/7: Work Between Meaning-Making and the Erosion of Limits), an exhibition on the nature of contemporary labor, and deliberately borrows the aesthetic of 1980s arcade high-score screens to frame a more pointed question: what is the actual energy cost of producing entertainment and advertising, and how does it compare to the literal, physical labor — cycling through traffic in bright uniforms — that a 24/7 consumer economy depends on and mostly renders invisible. The installation culminated on October 19, 2024 with a lecture by ethnologist Konstantin Mack on the role of bike couriers in urban space, followed by a conversation with the artist.
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