kagablog

Let us trigger disquietude.
Let us travel in between sharpness and blurring.
Let us explore what isn´t easy to identify.
Let us sharpen our senses.
Let us give ourselfs over to this border motion, let us take different pathways, sensuous pathways
and keep up the useless focus not blinded by efficiency and functionality. Sich wahrnehmen beim
Wahrnehmen, ohne dass man nicht wahrnimmt, dann ist man Drinnen und Draußen gleichermaßen,
begriffen im Hin und Her dieser Grenzbewegung.
Wie nehmen wir wahr?
Wie vermessen wir?
Wie identifizieren wir?
Wie organisieren wir?
In welchem Verhältnis stehen wir zu uns selbst?
Wie beurteilen wir eine Situation und wie handeln wir?
Was ist mit der ästhetischen Dimension in Bezug auf die Funktionalität von Orten?
Was ist mit dem Einfluss von Peripherem und Unterschwelligem?
Was ist mit dem Gebiet von Zuordenbarem und Unbestimmbarem?
Wie gehen wir mit diffusen Bedingungen um?
Wie soll man im Rauschen navigieren?
Ist das Staub oder dunkle Energie?
Handelt es sich um Rauschen oder haben wir ein Signal geortet?
Sammeln wir Daten oder flüchtige Eindrücke wenn wir Modelle und Strategien entwickeln, um für
die Wirklichkeit eine Behausung zu formen?
Verstehen wir mehr, indem wir mehr und mehr Informationen zusammen tragen?
Sind wir in der Lage die Informationen zu verarbeiten?
Ist es reine Konstruktion?
Wie orten wir all diese Projektionen des Menschen?
Was ist mit unserer Sehnsucht nach Stabilität?
Ist es die Neugier zu wühlen und zu erkunden, die wesentlich und erfüllend ist?

How do we sense?
How do we measure?
How do we identify?
How do we organize?
How do we relate to ourselves?
How do we assess a situation and how do we act?
How about the aesthetic dimension at the functionality of place?
How about the impact of peripheral and underlying information?
What about the area between the assignable and the indeterminable?
How do we handle diffuse conditions?
How to navigate noise?
Is this dust or dark energy?
Is it noise or did we catch a signal?
Are we gathering data or glimpses while we are developing models and strategies to process and
shape a housing for reality?
Are we able to comprehend more by gathering more and more information?
Are we able to process the information?
Is it pure construction?
How to identify all this human projections?
What about our longing for stability?
Is it this curiosity to dig and detect that is essential and fullfilling?
It is essential to be aware of limitations. To ask ourselves how we are handling borders. To be aware
of our mechanisms to structure our surroundings. To be aware of our urgent need to control. To be
aware that we are casting a net of boundaries upon the world, on which we fix our findings. This
knowledge becomes the net´s architecture itself. A system of established theories and interpretations
which needs to be touched, cut and reformed for it doesn´t become a cage.
“Being aware of” is not a constant state of mind, it is unstable. It is a beautiful challenge as it enables
us to transgress the boundaries, to develop and change things. And it is a disquieting anticipation as
it is biting the hand that feeds us.
Can experimental artistic practice function as some kind of laboratory to explore the raw material of
perception, consciousness and subconsciousness?
I believe in the need for these associative experiments. In the need to engage in a long-term research
in the sensory and mental relationship of man and place. In the need for installations as test
arrangements, pseudo-scientific constellations, constellations that produce and question borders of
one´s own perception, constellations that take the observer on a journey through the subtle layers of
one´s own production of reality.
Let us trigger disquietude.
Let us travel in between sharpness and blurring.
Let us explore what isn´t easy to identify.
Let us sharpen our senses.
Let us give ourselfs over to this border motion, take different pathways, sensuous pathways and keep
up the useless focus not blinded by efficiency and functionality.
How do we sense?
How do we measure?
How do we identify?
How do we organize?
How do we relate to ourselves?
How do we assess a situation and how do we act?
How about the aesthetic dimension at the functionality of place?
How about the impact of peripheral and underlying information?
What about the area between the assignable and the indeterminable?
How do we handle diffuse conditions?
How to navigate noise?
Is this dust or dark energy?
Is it noise or did we catch a signal?
Are we gathering data or glimpses while we are developing models and strategies to process and
shape a housing for reality?
Are we able to comprehend more by gathering more and more information?
Are we able to process the information?
Is it pure construction?
How to identify all this human projections?
What about our longing for stability?
Is it this curiosity to dig and detect that is essential and fullfilling?

Bewildered and fascinated by Aryan´s theme and notion Noisewomb and his link to Rilke’s contemplation about his first experience with an experimental setup of a phonograph I rediscovered Rilke’s Ur-Geräusch via the English translation. As point of departure I asked myself how does something look like in difference to how it sounds? An acoustic action and its representations (visual, tactile etc.) are intrinsically tied to each other by their nature. But their meanings reveal to be independent, blueprints for our associations and mental constructions. One question gave birth to the next and for me making a piece for the Noisewomb edition of Netfilmmakers became a constant back-and-forth between questioning, framing a rule, taking an action, cutting and re-cutting.

Some questions

Where does noise come from? How does a certain act sound? How does it look like? How does it feel? What traces are to be observed and will we be able to reconstruct the incident from what is remaining?

Is this noise or a signal, a sign or nothing?
If we are only able to interpret in relation to something else, does everything depend on our constructions?

Is a netfilm a film in the net, a film about the net? Just moving images, a piece of online art or an online piece of art? May this mean it is something the observer is generally facing on the screen of his or her personal computer? Then how does it feel like to watch a piece of art online? Is it an intimate experience? Is it intimate even if available for anybody 24h a day, depending on server and online access?

What does it mean to sit in front of a screen, watching, reading, listening, typing, editing, programming, designing? What does opposing a screen make with us? Bodily? Mentally? How is this screen like? What kind of surface is it? Is it flat, is it really flat? Is there something beneath it? Is it a surface above an inside? If yes what would this be? Is it the machine? Is it the information? Is it the code, the algorithm or its representation? Is it what we want it to be? Our counterpart? Is it a layer upon a layer upon a layer?… At least for this fly in the dark my TFT screen is cozy, warm and bright, in the moment definitely the best whereabouts.

Some rules

Setup: a digital SLR face to face with white paper above black paper above a cut mat. On the cut map fix a piezoelectric microphone, under the cut map place a table with a cut-out, beneath the…

Task: destroy the paper starting by cutting a) vertically, b) horizontally, c) diagonally, to thin the paper use rubber, to take away the crumbs use your hand and your spit, take as many pictures as possible and record the sound of all actions with a contact microphone.

One aim is nothing shall remain, but the cut mat and I wanted to peep through it as well.

Allow yourself:
to follow the unfolding phenomena
to break the rules
to vary and experiment

Analyze and organize the imagery and sound independently. Find a way to reconnect and spread it out on the screen and the built-in speakers of a personal computer.

The result:

Inner Cuts is an animation
Inner Cuts is about the surface. It is about choosing an action and a direction to delete one surface to reach the next.
Inner Cuts are tactile gestures and their acoustic traces meant to be sensed digitized by crawling back into the personal computers, those engines they have been fed in and cut a second time. Their mouth are the speakers, the screen is their face.

Kerstin Ergenzinger October 2009

first published on http://www.netfilmmakers.dk/netblog/

I am observing a location or situation while drawing the ‚first impression‘ on a blank piece of paper in front of a video camera. I then cut it out piece by piece with a pair of scissors.

The electronic eye of the video records both this process of translating the act of seeing into a 2-dimensional representation and also its deconstruction so that the scene behind is revealed.

Ich beobachte einen Ortes oder eine alltägliche Situation, indem ich vor laufender Videokamera meinen ersten Eindruck auf ein leeres weißes Papier zeichne, das die gesamte Bildfläche einnimmt. Anschließend zerschneide ich die Zeichnung Stück für Stück mit einer Schere.

Das elektronische Auge nimmt sowohl den Bildaufbau auf, den Übersetzungsprozess des Sehaktes in die zweite Dimension, als auch den Bildabbau, bis sich die Szene dahinter offenbart.

In what follows we shall try to think about dwelling and building. This thinking about building does not presume to discover architectural ideas, let alone to give rules for building. This venture in thought does not view building as an art or as a technique of construction; rather it traces building back into that domain to which everything that is belongs. We ask:
1. What is it to dwell?
2. How does building belong to dwelling?

I

We attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by means of building. The latter, building, has the former, dwelling, as its goal. Still, not every building is a dwelling. Bridges and hangars, stadiums and power stations are buildings but not dwellings; railway stations and highways, dams and market halls are built, but they are not dwelling places. Even so, these buildings are in the domain of our dwelling. That domain extends over these buildings and yet is not limited to the dwelling place. The truck driver is at home on the highway, but he does not have his shelter there; the working woman is at home in the spinning mill, but does not have her dwelling place there; the chief engineer is at home in the power station, but he does not dwell there. These buildings house man. He inhabits them and yet does not dwell in them, when to dwell means merely that we take shelter in them. In today’s housing shortage even this much is reassuring and to the good; residential buildings do indeed provide shelter; today’s houses may even be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun, but-do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them? Yet those buildings that are not dwelling places remain in turn determined by dwelling insofar as they serve man’s dwelling. Thus dwelling would in any case be the end that presides over all building. Dwelling and building are related as end and means. However, as long as this is all we have in mind, we take dwelling and building as two separate activities, an idea that has something correct in it. Yet at the same time by the means-end schema we block our view of the essential relations. For building is not merely a means and a way toward dwelling -to build is in itself already to dwell. Who tells us this? Who gives us a standard at all by which we can take the measure of the nature of dwelling and building?

It is language that tells us about the nature of a thing, provided that we respect language’s own nature. In the meantime, to be sure, there rages round the earth an unbridled yet clever talking, writing, and broadcasting of spoken words. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. Perhaps it is before all else man’s subversion of this relation of dominance that drives his nature into alienation. That we retain a concern for care in speaking is all to the good, but it is of no help to us as long as language still serves us even then only as a means of expression. Among all the appeals that we human beings, on our part, can help to be voiced, language is the highest and everywhere the first.

What, then, does Bauen, building, mean? The Old English and High German word for building, buan, means to dwell. This signifies: to remain, to stay in a place. The real meaning of the verb bauen, namely, to dwell, has been lost to us. But a covert trace of it has been preserved in the German word Nachbar, neighbor. The neighbor is in Old English the neahgehur; neah, near, and gebur, dweller. The Nachbar is the Nachgebur, the Nachgebauer, the near-dweller, he who dwells nearby. The verbs buri, büren, beuren, beuron, all signify dwelling, the abode, the place of dwelling. Now to be sure the old word buan not only tells us that bauen, to build, is really to dwell; it also gives us a clue as to how we have to think about the dwelling it signifies. When we speak of dwelling we usually think of an activity that man performs alongside many other activities. We work here and dwell there. We do not merely dwell-that would be virtual inactivity-we practice a profession, we do business, we travel and lodge on the way, now here, now there. Bauen originally means to dwell. Where the word bauen still speaks in its original sense it also says how far the nature of dwelling reaches. That is, bauen, buan. bhu, beo are our word bin in the versions: ich bin, I am, du bist, you are, the imperative form bis, be. What then does ich bin mean? The old word bauen, to which the bin belongs, answers: ich bin, du bist mean: I dwell, you dwell. The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling. To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. it means to dwell. The old word bauen, which says that man is insofar as he dwells, this word barren however also means at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine. Such building only takes care-it tends the growth that ripens into its fruit of its own accord. Building in the sense of preserving and nurturing is not making anything. Shipbuilding and temple-building, on the other hand, do in a certain way make their own works. Here building, in contrast with cultivating, is a constructing. Both modes of building-building as cultivating, Latin colere, cultura, and building as the raising up of edifices, aedificare -are comprised within genuine building, that is, dwelling. Building as dwelling, that is, as being on the earth, however, remains for man’s everyday experience that which is from the outset “habitual”-we inhabit it, as our language says so beautifully: it is the Gewohnte. For this reason it recedes behind the manifold ways in which dwelling is accomplished, the activities of cultivation and construction. These activities later claim the name of bauen, building, and with it the fact of building, exclusively for themselves. The real sense of bauen, namely dwelling, falls into oblivion.

At first sight this event looks as though it were no more than a change of meaning of mere terms. In truth, however, something decisive is concealed in it, namely, dwelling is not experienced as man’s being; dwelling is never thought of as the basic character of human being.

That language in a way retracts the real meaning of the word bauen, which is dwelling, is evidence of the primal nature of these meanings; for with the essential words of language, their true meaning easily falls into oblivion in favor of foreground meanings. Man has hardly yet pondered the mystery of this process. Language withdraws from man its simple and high speech. But its primal call does not thereby become incapable of speech; it merely falls silent. Man, though, fails to heed this silence.

But if we listen to what language says in the word bauen we hear three things:
1. Building is really dwelling.
2. Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth.
3. Building as dwelling unfolds into the buildingthat cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings.

If we give thought to this threefold fact, we obtain a clue and note the following: as long as we do not bear in mind that all building is in itself a dwelling, we cannot even adequately ask, let alone properly decide, what the building of buildings might be in its nature. We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers. But in what does the nature of dwelling consist? Let us listen once more to what language says to us. The Old Saxon wuon, the Gothic wunian like the old word bauen, mean to remain, to stay in a place. But the Gothic wunian says more distinctly how this remaining is experienced. Wunian means: to be at peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace. The word for peace, Friede, means the free, das Frye, and fry means: preserved from harm and danger, preserved from something, safeguarded. To free really means to spare. The sparing itself consists not only in the fact that we do not harm the one whom we spare. Real sparing is something positive and takes place when we leave something beforehand in its own nature, when we return it specifically to its being, when we “free” it in the real sense of the word into a preserve of peace. To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving. It pervades dwelling in its whole range. That range reveals itself to us as soon as we reflect that human being consists in dwelling and, indeed, dwelling in the sense of the stay of mortals on the earth.

But “on the earth” already means “under the sky.” Both of these also mean “remaining before the divinities” and include a “belonging to men’s being with one another.” By a primal oneness the four-earth and sky, divinities and mortals-belong together in one.

Earth is the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal. When we say earth, we are already thinking of the other three along with it, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four.

The sky is the vaulting path of the sun, the course of the changing, moon, the wandering glitter of the stars, the year’s seasons and their changes, the light and dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night, the clemency and inclemency of the weather, the drifting clouds and blue depth of the ether. When we say sky, we are already thinking of the other three along with it, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four.

The divinities are the beckoning messengers of the godhead. 0ut of the holy sway of the godhead, the god appears in his presence or withdraws into his concealment. When we speak of the divinities, we are already thinking of the other three along with them, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four.

The mortals are the human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies, and indeed continually, as long as remains on earth, under the sky, before the divinities. When we speak of mortals, we are already thinking of the other three along with them, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four.

This simple oneness of the four we call the fourfold. Mortals are in the fourfold by dwelling. But the basic character of dwelling is to spare, to preserve. Mortals dwell in the way they preserve the fourfold in its essential being, its presencing. Accordingly, the preserving that dwells is fourfold.

Mortals dwell in that they save the earth-taking the word in the old sense still known to Lessing. Saving does not only snatch something from a danger. To save really means to set something free into its own presencing. To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out. Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from spoliation.

Mortals dwell in that they receive the sky as sky. They leave to the sun and the moon their journey, to the stars their courses, to the seasons their blessing and their inclemency; they do not turn night into day nor day into a harassed unrest.

Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities. In hope they hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for. They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs of their absence. They do not make their gods for themselves and do not worship idols. In the very depth of misfortune they wait for the weal that has been withdrawn.

Mortals dwell in that they initiate their own nature-their being capable of death as death-into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may be a good death. To initiate mortals into the nature of death in no way means to make death, as empty Nothing, the goal. Nor does it mean to darken dwelling by blindly staring toward the end.

In saving the earth, in receiving the sky, in awaiting the divinities, in initiating mortals, dwelling occurs as the fourfold preservation of the fourfold. To spare and preserve means: to take under our care, to look after the fourfold in its presencing. What we take under our care must be kept safe. But if dwelling preserves the fourfold, where does it keep the fourfold’s nature? How do mortals make their dwelling such a preserving? Mortals would never be capable of it if dwelling were merely a staying on earth under the sky, before the divinities, among mortals. Rather, dwelling itself is always a staying with things. Dwelling, as preserving, keeps the fourfold in that with which mortals stay: in things.

Staying with things, however, is not merely something attached to this fourfold preserving as a fifth something. On the contrary: staying with things is the only way in which the fourfold stay within the fourfold is accomplished at any time in simple unity. Dwelling preserves the fourfold by bringing the presencing of the fourfold into things. But things themselves secure the fourfold only when they themselves as things are let be in their presencing. How is this done? In this way, that mortals nurse and nurture the things that grow, and specially construct things that do not grow. Cultivating and construction are building in the narrower sense. Dwelling, insofar as it keeps or secures the fourfold in things, is, as this keeping, a building. With this, we are on our way to the second question.

II

In what way does building belong to dwelling?

The answer to this question will clarify for us what building, understood by way of the nature of dwelling, really is. We limit ourselves to building in the sense of constructing things and inquire: what is a built thing? A bridge may serve as an example for our reflections.

The bridge swings over the stream “with case and power. It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. One side is set off against the other by the bridge. Nor do the banks stretch along the stream as indifferent border strips of the dry land. With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream. Thus it guides and attends the stream through the meadows. Resting upright in the stream’s bed, the bridge-piers bear the swing of the arches that leave the stream’s waters to run their course. The waters may wander on quiet and gay, the sky’s floods from storm or thaw may shoot past the piers in torrential waves-the bridge is ready for the sky’s weather and its fickle nature. Even where the bridge covers the stream, it holds its flow up to the sky by taking it for a moment under the vaulted gateway and then setting it free once more.

The bridge lets the stream run its course and at the same time grants their way to mortals so that they may come and go from shore to shore. Bridges lead in many ways. The city bridge leads from the precincts of the castle to the cathedral square; the river bridge near the country town brings wagons and horse teams to the surrounding villages. The old stone bridge’s humble brook crossing gives to the harvest wagon its passage from the fields into the village and carries the lumber cart from the field path to the road. The highway bridge is tied into the network of long-distance traffic, paced as calculated for maximum yield. Always and ever differently the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to and from, so that they may get to other banks and in the end, as mortals, to the other side. Now in a high arch, now in a low, the bridge vaults over glen and stream-whether mortals keep in mind this vaulting of the bridge’s course or forget that they, always themselves on their way to the last bridge, are actually striving to surmount all that is common and unsound in them in order to bring themselves before the haleness of the divinities. The bridge gathers, as a passage that crosses, before the divinities-whether we explicitly think of, and visibly give thanks for, their presence, as in the figure of the saint of the bridge, or whether that divine presence is obstructed or even pushed wholly aside.

The bridge gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals.

Gathering or assembly, by an ancient word of our language, is called “thing.” The bridge is a thing-and, indeed, it is such as the gathering of the fourfold which we have described. To be sure, people think of the bridge as primarily and really merely a bridge; after that, and occasionally, it might possibly express much else besides; and as such an expression it would then become a symbol, for instance ,t symbol of those things we mentioned before. But the bridge, if it is a true bridge, is never first of all a mere bridge and then afterward a symbol. And just as little is the bridge in the first place exclusively a symbol, in the sense that it expresses something that strictly speaking does not belong to it. If we take the bridge strictly as such, it never appears as an expression. The bridge is a thing and only that. Only? As this thing it gathers the fourfold.

Our thinking has of course long been accustomed to understate the nature of the thing. The consequence, in the course of Western thought, has been that the thing is represented as an unknown X to which perceptible properties are attached. From this point of view, everything that already belongs to the gathering nature of this thing does, of course, appear as something that is afterward read into it. Yet the bridge would never be a mere bridge if it were not a thing.

To be sure, the bridge is a thing of its own kind; for it gathers the fourfold in such a way that it allows a site for it. But only something that is itself a location can make space for a site. The location is not already there before the bridge is. Before the bridge stands, there are of course many spots along the stream that can be occupied by something. One of them proves to be a location, and does so because of the bridge. Thus the bridge does not first come to a location to stand in it; rather, a location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge. The bridge is a thing; it gathers the fourfold, but in such a way that it allows a site for the fourfold. By this site are determined the localities and ways by which a space is provided for.

Only things that are locations in this manner allow for spaces. What the word for space, Raum, Rum, designates is said by its ancient meaning. Raum means a place cleared or freed for settlement and lodging. A space is something that has been made room for, something that- namely within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing. That is why the concept is that of horismos, that is, the horizon, the boundary. Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds. That for which room is made is always granted and hence is joined, that is, gathered, by virtue of a location, that is, by such a thing as the bridge. Accordingly, spaces receive their being from locations and not from “space.”

Things which, as locations, allow a site we now in anticipation call buildings. They are so called because they are made by a process of building construction. Of what sort this making-building-must be, however, we find out only after we have first given thought to the nature of those things which of themselves require building as the process by which they are made. These things are locations that allow a site for the fourfold, a site that in each case provides for a space. The relation between location and space lies in the nature of these things qua locations, but so does the relation of the location to the man who lives at that location. Therefore we shall now try to clarify the nature of these things that we call buildings by the following brief consideration.

For one thing, what is the relation between location and space? For another, what is the relation between man and space? The bridge is a location. As such a thing, it allows a space into which earth and heaven, divinities and mortals are admitted. The space allowed by the bridge contains many places variously near or far from the bridge. These places, however, may be treated as mere positions between which there lies a measurable distance; a distance, in Greek stadion, always has room made for it, and indeed by bare positions. The space that is thus made by positions is space of a peculiar sort. As distance or “stadion” it is what the same word, stadion, means in Latin, a spatium, an intervening space or interval. Thus nearness and remoteness between men and things can become mere intervals of intervening space. In a space that is represented purely as spatium, the bridge now appears as a mere something at some position, which can be occupied at any time by something else or replaced by a mere marker. What is more, the mere dimensions of height, breadth, and depth can be abstracted from space as intervals. What is so abstracted we represent as the pure manifold of the three dimensions. Yet the room made by this manifold is also no longer determined by distances; it is no longer a spatium, but now no more than extensio- extension. But from a space as extensio a further abstraction can be made, to analytic-algebraic relations. What these relations make room for is the possibility of the construction of manifolds with an arbitrary number of dimensions. The space provided for in this mathematical manner may be called “space,” the “one” space as such. But in this sense “the” space , “space,” contains no spaces and no places. We never find in it any locations, that is, things of the kind the bridge is. As against that, however, in the spaces provided for by locations there is always space as interval, and in this interval in turn there is space as pure extension. Spatium and extensio afford at any time the possibility of measuring things and what they make room for, according to distances, spans, and directions, and of computing these magnitudes. But the fact that they are universally applicable to everything that has extension can in no case make numerical magnitudes the ground of the nature of space and locations that are measurable with the aid of mathematics. How even modern physics was compelled by the facts themselves to represent the spatial medium of cosmic space as a field-unity determined by body as dynamic center, cannot be discussed here.

The spaces through which we go daily are provided for by locations; their nature is grounded in things of the type of buildings. If we pay heed to these relations between locations and spaces, between spaces and space, we get a due to help us in thinking of the relation of man and space.

When we speak of man and space, it sounds as though man stood on one side, space on the other. Yet space is not something that faces man. It is neither an external object nor an inner experience. It is not that there are men, and over and above them space; for when I say “a man,” and in saying this word think of a being who exists in a human manner-that is, who dwells-then by the name “man” I already name the stay within the fourfold among things. Even when we relate ourselves to those things that are not in our immediate reach, we are staying with the things themselves. We do not represent distant things merely in our mind-as the textbooks have it-so that only mental representations of distant things run through our minds and heads as substitutes for the things. If all of us now think, from where we are right here, of the old bridge in Heidelberg, this thinking toward that location is not a mere experience inside the persons present here; rather, it belongs to the nature of our thinking of that bridge that in itself thinking gets through, persists through, the distance to that location. From this spot right here, we are there at the bridge-we are by no means at some representational content in our consciousness. From right here we may even be much nearer to that bridge and to what it makes room for than someone who uses it daily as an indifferent river crossing. Spaces, and with them space as such-”space”-are always provided for already within the stay of mortals. Spaces open up by the fact that they are let into the dwelling of man. To say that mortals are is to say that in dwelling they persist through spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locations. And only because mortals pervade, persist through, spaces by their very nature are they able to go through spaces. But in going through spaces we do not give up our standing in them. Rather, we always go through spaces in such a way that we already experience them by staying constantly with near and remote locations and things. When I go toward the door of the lecture hall, I am already there, and I could not go to it at all if I were not such that I am there. I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the room, and only thus can I go through it.

Even when mortals turn “inward,” taking stock of themselves, they do not leave behind their belonging to the fourfold. When, as we say, we come to our senses and reflect on ourselves, we come back to ourselves from things without ever abandoning our stay among things. Indeed, the loss of rapport with things that occurs in states of depression would be wholly impossible if even such a state were not still what it is as a human state: that is, a staying with things. Only if this stay already characterizes human being can the things among which we are also fail to speak to us, fail to concern us any longer.

Man’s relation to locations, and through locations to spaces, inheres in bis dwelling. The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken.

When we think, in the manner just attempted, about the relation between location and space, but also about the relation of man and space, a light falls on the nature of the things that are locations and that we call buildings.

The bridge is a thing of this sort. The location allows the simple onefold of earth and sky, of divinities and mortals, to enter into a site by arranging the site into spaces. The location makes room for the fourfold in a double sense. The location admits the fourfold and it installs the fourfold. The two making room in the sense of admitting and in the sense of installing-belong together. As a double space-making, the location is a shelter for the fourfold or, by the same token, a house. Things like such locations shelter or house men’s lives. Things of this sort are housings, though not necessarily dwelling-houses in the narrower sense.

The making of such things is building. Its nature consists in this, that it corresponds to the character of these things. They are locations that allow spaces. This is why building, by virtue of constructing locations, is a founding and joining of spaces. Because building produces locations, the joining of the spaces of these locations necessarily brings with it space, as spatium and as extension into the thingly structure of buildings. But building never shapes pure “space” as a single entity. Neither directly nor indirectly. Nevertheless, because it produces things as locations, building is closer to the nature of spaces and to the origin of the nature of “space” than any geometry and mathematics. Building puts up locations that mane space and a site for the fourfold. From the simple oneness in which earth and sky, divinities and mortals belong together, building receives the directive for its erecting of locations. Building takes over from the fourfold the standard for all the traversing and measuring of the spaces that in each case are provided for by the locations that have been founded. The edifices guard the fourfold. They are things that in their own way preserve the fourfold. To preserve the fourfold, to save the earth, to receive the sky, to await the divinities, to escort mortals-this fourfold preserving is the simple nature, the presencing, of dwelling. In this way, then, do genuine buildings give form to dwelling in its presencing and house this presence.

Building thus characterized is a distinctive letting-dwell. Whenever it is such in fact, building already has responded to the summons of the fourfold. All planning remains grounded on this responding, and planning in turn opens up to the designer the precincts suitable for his designs.

As soon as we try to think of the nature of constructive building in terms of a letting-dwell, we come to know more clearly what that process of making consists in by which building is accomplished. Usually we take production to be an activity whose performance has a result, the finished structure, as its consequence. It is possible to conceive of making in that way; we thereby grasp something that is correct, and yet never touch its nature, which is a producing that brings something forth. For building brings the fourfold hither into a thing, the bridge, and brings forth the thing as a location, out into what is already there, room for which is only now made by this location.

The Greek for “to bring forth or to produce” is tikto. The word techne, technique, belongs to the-verb’s root tec. To the Greeks techne means neither art nor handicraft but rather: to make something appear, within what is present, as this or that, in this way or that way. The Greeks conceive of techne, producing, in terms of letting appear. Techne thus conceived has been concealed in the tectonics of architecture since ancient times. Of late it still remains concealed, and more resolutely, in the technology of power machinery. But the nature of the erecting buildings cannot be understood adequately in terms either of architecture or of engineering construction, nor in terms of a mere combination of the two. The erecting of buildings would not be suitably defined even if we were to think of it in the sense of the original Greek techne as solely a letting-appear, which brings something made, as something present, among the things that are already present.

The nature of building is letting dwell. Building accomplishes its nature in the raising of locations by the joining of their spaces. Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build. Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house. It placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope looking south, among the meadows close to the spring. It gave it the wide overhanging shingle roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and which, reaching deep down, shields the chambers against the storms of the long winter nights. It did not forget the altar corner behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the “tree of the dead”-for that is what they call a coffin there: the Totenbaum-and in this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time. A craft which, itself sprung from dwelling, still uses its tools and frames as things, built the farmhouse.

Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build. Our reference to the Black Forest farm in no way means that we should or could go back to building such houses; rather, it illustrates by a dwelling that has been how it was able to build.

Dwelling, however, is the basic character of Being in keeping with which mortals exist. Perhaps this attempt to think about dwelling and building will bring out somewhat more clearly that building belongs to dwelling and how it receives its nature from dwelling. Enough will have been gained if dwelling and building have become worthy of questioning and thus have remained worthy of thought.

But that thinking itself belongs to dwelling in the same sense as building, although in a different way, may perhaps be attested to by the course of thought here attempted.

Building and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for dwelling. The two, however, are also insufficient for dwelling so long as each busies itself with its own affairs in separation instead of listening to one another. They are able to listen if both-building and thinking-belong to dwelling, if they remain within their limits and realize that the one as much as the other comes from the workshop of long experience and incessant practice.

We are attempting to trace in thought the nature of dwelling. The next step on this path would be the question: what is the state of dwelling in our precarious age? On all sides we hear talk about the housing shortage, and with good reason. Nor is there just talk; there is action too. We try to fill the need by providing houses, by promoting the building of houses, planning the whole architectural enterprise. However hard and bitter, however hampering and threatening the lack of houses remains, the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses. The real plight of dwelling is indeed older than the world wars with their destruction, older also than the increase of the earth’s population and the condition of the industrial workers. The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell. What if man’s homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight? Yet as soon as man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer. Rightly considered and kept well in mind, it is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling.

But how else can mortals answer this summons than by trying on their part, on their own, to bring dwelling to the fullness of its nature? This they accomplish when they build out of dwelling, and think for the sake of dwelling.

from Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper Colophon Books, New York, 1971.

Observations on airports, in waiting halls, on airstrips, sitting inside the airplanes and looking through the airlocks.

names a situation of transition, a permeable passage for the exhibition Tiefe Oberflächen a continous history of doubting built into the space of the tiefparterre, which is geometrically divided by 9 columns.

The installation is a test arrangement to experience a visual borderline in an architectural and optical system which is animated by the lightdrawing machines. Slighly nervous light signs: searching lights, anticipations and links transform the relationship between the built structure and its sorroundings as well as the one between the observer and the space around him. The observers become smugglers within an insecure area which has to be scanned by gazing and moving.

hard- and software design Thomas Laepple
invitation, support and collaboration Katharina Ammann
special support Tobias Grewenig, Thomas Laepple, Martin Nawrath support Richard Tisserand
realization mechanics Ralf Wolf, Johanna Urbanowich
sponsoring and production Kunstraum Kreuzlingen, Heinrich Metzger Stiftung, Thurgauische Kulturstiftung

Schleuse

benennt einen permeablen Durchgang, ein architektonisch-optisches System als Versuchsanordnung zur visuellen Grenzerfahrungen, das von Lichtzeichenmaschinen belebt wird und von Betrachtern mit Schritten und Blicken abgetastet werden muss. Sie werden zu Schmugglern auf unsicherem Terrain.

Zwischen Ruhe und Unruhe, unterschwellig nervös, wird in der ersten Version der Installation “Tiefe Oberflächen a continous history of doubting” wird das tiefparterre des Kunstraum Kreuzlingen über einer mit Scharnieren an die Säulen angebrachte Formation aus Projektions-Wänden und Umlenkspiegel, von den drei Lichtzeichenmaschinen beschrieben.

Lichtzeichen: Suchlichter, Ortungen, Ahnungen und Verweise, die über eine einfache Schatterschablonenmechanik als Verbindungen aus Waagrechten und Senkrechten entstehen, tauchen aus dem Dunkel auf. Gemeinsam mit dem Ort auf den sie treffen, finden und wecheln sie ihre Erscheinung und Bedeutung. Sie transformieren die Beziehungen zwischen der gebauten Konstruktion und der sie umgebenden Architektur.

Entwicklung der Hard- und Software Thomas Laepple
Einladung, Unterstützung und Zusammenarbeit Katharina Ammann
Besondere Unterstützung Tobias Grewenig, Thomas Laepple, Martin Nawrath Unterstützung und Begleitung von Produktion und Ausstellung Richard Tisserand
Umsetzung Mechanik Ralf Wolf, Johanna Urbanowich
Finanzierung Kunstraum Kreuzlingen, Heinrich Mezger-Stiftung, Thurgauische Kulturstiftung

is a boxed space, whose parameters and geographic positions remain indeterminate. Symbols that move around inside the box constantly redefine it.

Into the ceiling the template of an anglular line is cut, its shape refers to width and length of the architecture. On top of the space a microchip controlled drawing machine defines the position and brightness of seven lamps. By cutting out lightlines it projects dynamic maps into the experimental space. The walkable system is an apparatus with an open structure, all elements can be sensed.

Beeing interested in the feedback between perceiving thinking and acting, I explore the difference between physical perception and ephemeral appearance and the emphasis of process and time, while we are constantly constructing world out of foreign and familiar elements

Programming the drawing sequence I concentrated both on the vertical, the feeling of balance and gravity when we stand inside the drawing, and on the horizontal, the perspectives that turn a 3D space into 2 D and backwards. It is an approx. 11 min loop out of parts working with the floor, parts working with the construction elements of the box and parts working with perpective and horizontal lines that seem to open an inner to an outer space.

..°W/..°O keingradwestundkeingradost

besteht aus einer großen Raumkiste, sowie einer selbstgebauten Lichtzeichenmaschine. Die „geografischen Koordinaten“ des Ortes, seine Parameter, befinden sich im Schwebezustand.

Die Installation ist eine begehbare Apparatur, in deren experimentellen Raum dynamischen Landkarten aus Lichtlinien projiziert werden. Die Koordinaten der Architektur werden mit Licht aufgenommen, übereinander projiziert, verschoben und überschrieben. Eine sich permanent verändernde Umwelt wird simuliert.

Während des etwa 11 min Loops folgen Zeichenabschnitten, die mit der Bodenfläche arbeiten und mit den konstruktiven Elementen der Kiste spielen, auf solche, die Perspektiven und Horizonte konstruieren, um das Innere scheinbar zum Außen werden zu lassen. Form und Verlauf der abgebildeten Linien im Innern entstehen zum Einen durch die wechselnde Position und Lichtintensität der Lichtquellen oberhalb des etwa 3mm breiten winkelförmigen Deckenausschnitts, der sich auf Länge x Breite der Raumkiste bezieht; zum Anderen hängt ihre Erscheinung von der Brechung des Lichteinfalls an den Kanten und Flächen des einheitlich weiß gestrichenen Innenraumes ab. Durch die wechselnde Entfernung der Lampen zum Schlitz changieren Schärfe und Dicke der Linien.

In der Installation wird die Differenz zwischen körperlicher Wahrnehmung und optischer Erscheinung untersucht und versucht den assoziativen Prozess auslösen, in dem wir permanent „Welt“ aus fremden und bekannten Elementen konstruieren.

is an automated reactive installation about the concept of longing, related to the human ideas of nature and landscape – in this case symbolized by a mountain. It is also a kinetic sculpture and pseudo-scientific simulation of landscape, these elements put together makes it a longing-machine.

This piece deals with the idea that interpreting our surroundings, stimuli, data, relationships…, humans only move on seemingly stable ground. Nevertheless our interpretations are deeply influenced by this longing for stability. We are constantly developing and applying technics that expand our ability of absorption, on which we consequentially build up our perception and again develop models and patterns of interpretation to orientate ourselfs in the world.

The sculpture is a complex installation made up by: carbon, actuator wire, polymer foam, a self-built Lehman seismograph, a geophone and custom electronics. The mechanical muscles are three-dimensional lines out of carbon and voltage controlled wire that becomes flexible by changing temperature.

The machine acts like an adaptive sense organ: stimulus damps down its sensitivity. Like eyes to light and ears to noise the system adapts to the changing situation and generates its own stimulus satiation and motion patterns.

Realtime recorded „reality“ and associative simulation, fiction are melting into the continuously changing appearance of the installation. The installation includs both a library of associatively preprogrammed motion fragments and records the micro seismic pulse of the exhibition-space and its surroundings including the ambient noise of the earth. At the same time it is sensitive for the fine shifting of the floor caused by the visitors movements. The seismic data is interpreted comparatively and interacts with the processes inside the system of the machine.

Drawings from mountainscapes while traveling either using different kind of transportation (car, train, airplane) or hiking well equiped with maps, compass and GPS to explore remote areas.

The distinction between „real“ and „culivated“ nature can no longer really be made. We usually perceive landscape in a kind of a remote sensing

By using a light drawing machine and projector a landscape formation created of cardboard and galvanised steel was put in scene. The cuts and tracings on the cardboard originated as drawings of airports, mountains and river landscapes. Two halogen lamps powered with motors were moved on a coordinate system made of two aluminium frames. Two more lamps were positioned outside the frames. Each of the lamps could be turned on and off.

The viewer’s perspective changed from a bird’s eye view, a view over the landscape, to a view from below in the shadow projections. When the machine was at rest, various close-up images of details of the installation, not visible to the viewer, were projected.

Six holograms from eight-second video sequences shot in the basement of the inner courtyard of Building 5, Medipark Cologne are installed as a panoptic construction of glass.

Standing in the middle the viewer controls the course of events. He/she determines the movement of the recording, subjective camera and triggers perceptive moments in which body movements and dislocation of space are temporally superimposed.

The main focus of this work is the connection between this architecture of transparency and optimisation and the bodies which orient themselves in it. In particular I focus on processes which are constantly happening at the periphery of our perception.

The holograms are storing these explorations of the relationship between the body, emptiness and translucent buildings as hidden occurences. They appear not until they are illuminated and reanimated via the observer.

annähern = entfernen

Panoptisch installierte Modellarchitektur aus Glas , in deren Mitte der Betrachter mit seiner Körperbewegung den Ablauf von Videoaufzeichnungen innerhalb des Mediapark Köln steuert.

Jeweils acht Sekunden lange Sequenzen sind als 200 Einzelbilder in jedem Hologram gespeichert. Die Kamera am Körper filmt eine Person ihre gespiegelten Doppelgänger, während sie sich entlang der Fassade bewegt und das Gebäude untersucht. Der Betrachter bekommt die Rolle der aufzeichnenden, subjektiven Kamerabewegung und löst Wahrnehmungsmomente und Entdeckungen aus, in denen Körperbewegung und Verschiebung von Räumlichkeit sich zeitlich dicht überlagern.

In den Holografien sind diese Untersuchungen der Beziehung von Körper, Leere und transluzenten Bauten als verborgene Erscheinung gespeichert, die erst ausgeleuchtet und durch Betrachter animiert wieder sichtbar werden

Hallway out of two walls standing opposite eachother. Each wall is made out of 3 aluminium frames with hinges in between. The frames are alternately covered with back-projection-foil and acrylic mirrors, so that the space inside the structure opens and branches out like in a mirror maze.

The walls are changing and moving through the rhythm of back projections: they breath, puls, vibrate and flicker refering to diffuse sensations our mind constantly needs to organize. The final cut of the 3 syncronized 2.11 min long animations happens not until projected inside the installation space. As soon as an observer steps into the space he or she will be part of the architectural-optical process.

The basic raw material of the projections are paper cut-outs that echo drawings of empty rooms inside big office buildings out of glas, steal and concrete. Focus are the the diffuse sensations that shape the peripherie of the perception inside this places. It`s not possible to avoid oneselfs reflection and mulitfication. The exchangebility of this gathering of modern architectural set phrase makes it difficult to distinguish the places. The feeling of loosing control and orientation is near.

The piece tries to open parts of this perceptions for the observer. It tries to reproduce them in time and space. For the projections I mainly chose the beginnings and endings of this prozess, the moments when structures develop out of nothing or decay into nothing, when the fragments of this signs decay into crumbs and emptiness.

raumschnitt

Begehbarer Korridor, zusammengesetzt aus zwei dreiteligen Wandelemente, die abwechselnd mit Spiegelflächen und Rückprojektionsfolien bezogen wurden, so dass sich der Raum im Innern verzweigt und virtuell öffnet.

Durch den Rhythmus der Projektionen befinden sich die Wände in ständiger Bewegung: vibrieren, flimmern, flackern pulsieren. Sie verweisen auf grundsätzlich diffuse Sinneseindrücke, mit welchen wir permanent umgehen müssen, indem wir sie ordnen und interpretieren. Der Endschnitt findet erst im Zusammenspiel der jeweils zwei Minuten langen Animationen und der Projektionsarchitektur statt. Sobald ein Betrachter die Installation betritt oder einen Beamerstrahl kreuzt, wird er über die Spiegel hineinprojiziert und Teil des architektonisch-optischen Prozesses.

Vorlage der bewegten Bilder sind Zeichnungen, die als Papierschnitte wiederholt und animiert wurden. Ihre Motive sind leere Räume innerhalb großer Bürogebäudekomplexe aus Glas, Stahl und Beton. Fokussiert wird das Diffuse dieser Orte, das an der Peripherie die Wahrnehmung ausschlagebend prägt. Es ist unmöglich, sich der eigenen Vervielfachung und Verzerrung zu entziehen, die Anhäufung moderner Architekturfloskeln macht es schwer, die einzelnen Orte voneinander zu unterscheiden, das Gefühl die Orientierung zu verlieren, liegt nahe.

Die Arbeit versucht Teile dieses Wahrnehmungsvorgangs für den Betrachter zugänglich zu machen, die in den Zeichnungen gespeicherte Wahrnehmung wieder zu verzeitlichen und zu verräumlichen. Ausgewählt wurden vor allem Anfangs- und Endmomente, in denen sich Strukturen aus dem Nichts entwickeln oder die Raumkonstruktionen wieder zerfallen, sich Zeichenfragmente in Krümeln und Leere verliere

These drawings are part of a series of work which deals with perceived space in modern building complexes. Basing my investigations on the Mediapark in Cologne I examine the conditions and processes inside business parks constructed of glass and steel at the level of sensory perception.

I am interested in the shaded side of transparency, the unpenetrableness and emptiness which both visually and acoustically generate diffuse surroundings. The drawings are marking and mapping emptiness, the network of relationships of motives and neighbouring architectural forms. Boundaries of buildings and connections appear diffuse, the various transparent surfaces visually overlap inventing another space.

comparitive city survey: comparable operative/functional areas in London’s business districts Bank, Canary Wharf and Southwark/More London were photographed through templates based on the drawings of typical modern architecture found in Cologne’s Mediapark.

The paper cut-outs act as displays which explore issues of the selective processes of perception – patterns with which to organise the world. It is necessary to regularly update such templates.

The narrow view into the distance hones the faculty of differentiated thought and action. Many urban locations are discerned primarily for their function. The aesthetic dimensions and structural connections are not paid appropriate attention, although an intensive interaction between society and spatial perception exists and an ideological inscription occurs in the physical spaces of our urban everyday realities.

durch Schablonen sehen

vergleichende Stadtuntersuchung: durch Schablonen aus Zeichungen typischer moderner Bauformen innerhalb des Mediaparks Köln wurden vergleichbare Funktionsbereiche der Geschäftsviertel Bank, Canary Wharf und Southwalk/More London fotografiert.

Die Scherenschntte sind Displays, die den selektven Prozeß der Wahrnehmung thematsieren. Man hat immer Schemata, um die Welt zu ordnen.

Ein Update, ein Verücken, solcher Schablonen ist notwendig. Der kleine Blick ins Weite schärft die Sensibilität und Fähigkeit zum differenzierten Sehen.

Viele Orte der Stadt werden vor allem in ihrer Funktion gesehen. Ihre ästhetische Dimension und ihr struktureller Zusammenhang werden nicht entsprechend bewusst wahrgenommen.