Visual Artist
Berlin-based visual artist who uses light and code as his primary media.
"Uses light and code as primary media — photography, installation, digital art."
Jurgen Ostarhild is a German artist and photographer based in Berlin.
Kate Moss, London 1993
Essay and photographs by Jurgen Ostarhild, Berlin 2026
km001c-NL. Wet, spiked strands, motocross-like jersey, tribal silver collar and earrings, studded fingerless gloves, zipped thigh boots.
A hinge
Seen from today, the early 1990s in Britain look like a hinge: the moment when post-Cold War capitalism, the electronic dance underground and a new, rawer fashion image began to shape the media culture of the decades that followed.
Biking, snowboarding, skateboarding and surfing were in full focus, and in 1993 Sky magazine commissioned an editorial on the future of protective gear. Jurgen Ostarhild photographed Kate Moss for it in London. The pictures in this essay are outtakes from that shoot, never published before. The stylist summed the idea up in one line: “Safety is my fetish!”
In the same years, a philosopher in the English Midlands was writing about capital as a machine. Nick Land and Kate Moss worked in fields that hardly touched: academic philosophy at the University of Warwick, and fashion photography in London. Read side by side, they can be understood as two symptoms of the same shift, the pressure of accelerating capital and media on the idea of the self: in Land as theory, in Moss as image. This is an interpretation, not a historical connection. The two had no known contact.
km004-NL. Fishnet and wet-look bodysuit, leather wrap skirt with a “TUNE UP” racing panel, JOFA ice-hockey elbow pads, boxer’s stance.
Armour as fashion
Ice-hockey elbow pads with the JOFA logo. A racing panel reading TUNE UP. Studded biker gloves, fishnet, a corset zipped to the hip, thigh-high boots, heavy silver at the neck and wrists. Protection is not hidden under the clothes here. It is the clothes.
Kate Moss had come to wide attention through Corinne Day’s photographs in The Face in July 1990 (“The 3rd Summer of Love”). Her slight, unpolished appearance broke with the glamorous, athletic supermodel ideal of the late 1980s. The press called the new look “waif”; the label “heroin chic” spread only later, around 1996–97. In 1993 Moss reached a global audience with Calvin Klein’s Obsession campaign, photographed by Mario Sorrenti: pale, unadorned, almost bare.
In hindsight the industry often treated her image as a neutral surface onto which brands could project themselves. That is a reading of how the image was used, not a judgement of the person. And the thesis of “pure surface” fits the minimalist Calvin Klein pictures. It does not fit everything Moss was photographed in that year.
km007-NL. White zipped corset bodysuit over fishnet, heavy studded silver cuffs. The most reduced look, in black and white.
The theoretical engine
Nick Land taught continental philosophy at the University of Warwick in Coventry from 1987 until 1998. His early 1990s writing moved from Bataille and nihilism (The Thirst for Annihilation, 1992) towards a cybernetic reading of Deleuze and Guattari in essays such as Machinic Desire (1993) and Meltdown (1994). In the same years Warwick hosted the Virtual Futures conferences (1994–96).
Where the Marxist left wanted to stop capital or redirect it, Land affirmed the dissolving, a position later called accelerationism. He took the cue from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972): not to withdraw from the process, but to “accelerate the process”. In Machinic Desire he described capital as a machine that thinks for itself: “an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.” Its raw material is everything human.
Rave, drugs, networks and markets are read not as subcultures but as machinic feedback loops. The concept of hyperstition, fictions that make themselves real, belongs to the later Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), active at Warwick from around 1995. The CCRU’s enthusiasm for jungle, a sound born in London around 1991–94, is where Land’s theory most directly touches the city.
km008-NL. The face disappears behind a red boxing headguard with a face bar; riveted silver collar, zipped leather boot.
The body rebuilt
These images do not show an empty vessel. They show a body coupled to equipment: pads, racing patches, a boxing guard, studs and zips. Where the face, the centre of every fashion photograph, is replaced entirely by protective gear, the picture comes close to Land’s machinic vocabulary: the human not erased, but rebuilt from parts of the apparatus. The same year produced both images: the bare surface of Obsession and the armour of Sky.
The word “accelerationism” sounds like sport, and here the two meet literally. Biking, snowboarding, skateboarding and surfing are disciplines of speed and acceleration: the body pushed to the edge of control, and armoured so it can go faster. What Land theorised as the acceleration of capital, the Sky shoot dressed for.
Extreme sports seek the very collision they protect against. Speed, impact, friction: the gear exists so the body can go further towards the point of wear. “Safety is my fetish” names that double bind. Protection is desired not instead of risk, but for its sake. Every pad and guard is a surface made to be worn down in place of the body.
As outtakes, these pictures also stand outside the circulation this essay describes: images the magazine machine produced but never used, kept in an archive for more than thirty years, returning now as what remains of a moment that imagined the future as armour.
The early 1990s British environment
Recession and finance. London’s shift from industry to finance had happened in the 1970s and 80s (deregulation, the 1986 “Big Bang”). The early 1990s brought recession, high unemployment and the currency crisis of Black Wednesday (16 September 1992).
Rave as a political field. Ecstasy, club culture and free parties were not simply a retreat from politics. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 targeted gatherings around music “characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”, and provoked mass protest.
Magazines as laboratories. The Face, i-D and Sky mixed street, club and sportswear into fashion, the context in which these photographs were made.
The dissolution of the subject. In Land, the self is something technology and speed burn away. In fashion, the glamorous supermodel personality gave way to two opposite bodies: the armed, styled one and the reduced surface.
Looking back from today
Land’s themes have since moved to the centre: automated markets, autonomous AI, network culture. Moss’s image became a prototype of image circulation, the model as an interchangeable, endlessly reproduced picture. Today’s horizon of algorithmic feeds and synthetic images makes both look less like curiosities of the 1990s than like early readings of the present.
Land supplied a theory of acceleration, and Moss’s image supplied its most widely circulated face. The 1993 Sky outtakes add the missing other half: while fashion stripped the body down to surface, it also rebuilt it as machine.
Sources and dates
Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, Routledge, 1992. Nick Land, “Machinic Desire”, Textual Practice 7:3, 1993; “Meltdown”, 1994; both collected in Fanged Noumena, Urbanomic, 2011. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1972. Benjamin Noys coined the term “accelerationism” in The Persistence of the Negative, Edinburgh University Press, 2010. CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), founded at the University of Warwick c. 1995; Land left Warwick in 1998. Corinne Day, “The 3rd Summer of Love”, The Face, July 1990. Calvin Klein Obsession, photographed by Mario Sorrenti, 1993. “Heroin chic”: term in wide use c. 1996; criticised by US President Bill Clinton in May 1997. Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, section 63. Black Wednesday: 16 September 1992.
Kate Moss, London 1993. Unpublished outtakes from an editorial for Sky magazine. Photographs © Jurgen Ostarhild.
