Category Archives: coming-resonances

resonances, echoes, copies, translations, oppositions, differentials, subversions, additions, remembrances…

RECALL

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/Which key-notes would you like to share with all of us?

The most resonating key-notes I took are (in random order):

-Ornament is a verb – the making can release unmentioned unconscious thoughts and trigger reactions from other participants which result in deeper reflections. We make – there/for we are.

-The setting is important as it is part of the ornament – the scenery of Davos, the Kirchner Museum’s spaces and exhibited artworks, and in particular Thorsten made us feel at home. We are where we are.

-Stay Beta – giving the chance of notes instead of presentations, talks instead of panel discussions, sketches and models instead of finished results embraces the spirit of open source. Everything is a contribution.

-Become Craftswomen and Craftsmen (conf. Richard Sennett) – the making hand is part of the (research) body as is the strolling mind. Make to make and reflect.

-Train agility and versatility – future challenges are unforeseeable. Know what you make, take what you have and go for The Road not taken (conf. Robert Frost) where the unknown is already waiting.

-Monday Morning Mystic – plan the pause. Set the alarm to stop what you are doing and go for the being. Human being.

-Theoretical action needs practical action wants poetical action. The brick wants an arch (conf. Louis I. Kahn).

-Ornament is a trace (conf. the picture of my last weekend accident – I forgot the noodle soup on the stove). Let’s search for these patterns and activate the potential of ornament through gesture.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/What is the relevance of WOF in your work? How do its aspects reflect in your current projects and how could you imagine integrating the questions WOF raised in future projects?

The questions and aspects from the WOF I would like to include in future research (projects) are:

-Learn to make and learn to read what is made – “Bildung” is what our students need, and it covers more than disciplinary transfer of knowledge but connecting to the students and connecting them to the sources. “Bildung” is our mission and responsibility.

-Trust the model. It will reveal. Nourish your inner pictures, poetically describe them and share them with others [thanks, Wendelin].

-Set yourself with some irritation. Not too much – but some. And listen to it.

-Go “super” (conf. the Super-Modulor). The magnificent failure (upon its reflection) is more than the hesitating attempt.

-Connectivity – how can the question of ornament and its preliminary answers from the WOF connect to relevant issues?

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RECALL

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/Which key-notes would you like to share with all of us?

The WOF is an experiment towards the ornamental and the engagement of the participants was holding up mirrors to ourselves, of the gestures we make, and their effect. The ornamental in this context as defined in the “call” is about intermedia agency. In the open space all acquires meaning and keeping a discussion constructive demands ethics and interest. The arts are quite well-trained at this.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/What is the relevance of WOF in your work? How do its aspects reflect in your current projects and how could you imagine integrating the questions WOF raised in future projects?

The participation in WOF reminded me of the importance of research CULTURE and that this has to be taken so seriously that it needs to take the timeframe . I was inspired by the participants who engaged positively looking into this open frame. This attitude is enabling. This is to me economy. Not just speaking of economy – as our WEF colleagues do it all the time, while continuing to ruin peoples lives – but to be economic in that we respect and practice exchange of knowledge and seek to leave the secure forms (and the power they might give) in order to truly collaborate and be .. ornamental.

The three impulses I tried to set up referring to model, ornament and gesture (“The museum as a model to recall materiality”, “The changed colours of Kirchner’s ornamental bed cover as a sign of the depth of time” and the “Being inside the collectors impatient gesture”) – were short and immediate, to me a way to understand “enacting” as a starting point for a form of narrative and the brevity of the moment without any auxiliary tools.

RECALL

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/Which key-notes would you like to share with all of us?

Ornament and gesture are remaining fuzzy concepts from my perspective. I ask myself whether it would have been a good idea to define them. The fuzziness itself might be the appropriate (meta-)concept, since from the perspective of modern organization studies we can leave “sharp” management concepts aside. Management world is full of elaborated concepts that guide manager’s behaviors – in the more or less right direction. At least most management concepts lead into a short-term perspective and prefer short-term goal setting instead of sustainable value systems. So what is it that fuzziness enables? I just don’t know yet. On the one hand, the manager has to be clear and un-fuzzy to his employees. Otherwise they would not understand and not perform. And the manager has to be un-fuzzy to the superiors to not lose his job – who would accept a middle manager who is not able to give “clear answers” to “simple questions”? On the other hand, and on a meta level, managers as parasites are the most fuzziest persons ever. By naturally losing contact to the organizational operations themselves over time, managers have to maintain the illusion of productivity even if the organization is corrupt, disrupted or not really productive any more. So, a major note from the WOF for me is, that fuzziness itself is a model for the unproductive productivity.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/What is the relevance of WOF in your work? How do its aspects reflect in your current projects and how could you imagine integrating the questions WOF raised in future projects?

WOF, as my personal think tank, is helping me to identify moments of fuzziness; my personal ornament. And gesture might be the sensation of moments of fuzziness for example in the Fablab, in unusual teaching projects like DiBuDeCo, or uncommon communication settings like Crealab.

RECALL

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/Which key-notes would you like to share with all of us?

It is quite simple to fold past events into the present, but to fold present events into the future and to forget anticipated futures effectively is a difficult task, particularly if there are distinct anticipated futures. The “coming” offers an adequate conceptual space in which such active forgetting of anticipated futures can be achieved through the passage of time.

In addition to stomping and melting as forms of setting and virtuality the expansion-form describes the affective and effective forces of spatial contamination.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/What is the relevance of WOF in your work? How do its aspects reflect in your current projects and how could you imagine integrating the questions WOF raised in future projects?

Thanks to all of you for making the WOF! You may have realized that I have not participated in the building of a model. The reason is that the WOF itself is my model including the question of its making. The WOF is an artistic research project that among other aspects examines spaces of freedom for art’s involvement in academic research contexts. This question is relevant for an ethical redefinition of the artwork and art practice in a globalized market-driven art world dominated by a consumer-friendly curatorial system of transnational large-scale exhibitions. Claiming that the art worlds of the 1970s were just romantic ineffective refuges would mean to disregard their capacity of transforming socio-political issues into artistic material exhibiting real difference. Today, contrarily, the art world seems materialized as consumable material representing the world’s capitalist infrastructure.

Philosophically speaking we could say, for example, that art is the exhibition of the potential of not not being. The wonder of art resides in the sensation of the freedom that it could have been radically otherwise – and that it is not. While everything exhibits itself as it is and thus cannot be otherwise, art exhibits itself as its impossibility of being otherwise and thus constantly reemerges as it is: and makes us wonder. There is an intrinsic connectedness between art and the world in which it is embedded: within the immanence of gesture. But at the same time art’s gestures can only be connected to aims outside the wonder of art. While the gesture of walking leads to a position, the gesture of art leads nowhere, to atopy, to a-position (just) so to speak.

Thus, the WOF is constitutive for my dissertation wall sandwich – The Architectural in Art Practice from Destruction to Non-Construction. The cave and the ‘studiolo’ (an Italian Renaissance intellectual translation of the eremitic cave or the monastic cell into a hybrid architectural typology of a bourgeoise “study” room) are exemplary spaces of the architectural as non-construction: a hole in the ground and virtual space. The cavities left by the footprints of “ornament” and “gesture” as well as the virtual molds of melting or expanding models constituted an experimental framework of non-constructive art practice.

The focal shift in the art world (and beyond) from architecture to the urban and the global (and beyond) finds an institutional parallel in the Swiss context from art & architecture (Kunst & Bau) to art in public spheres (Kunst im öffentlichen Raum). The WOF together with the concept of non-construction point beyond public space towards a virtual artistic infrastructure.