CARGO

Six hosts will enact & do 2.0 in the WARUM 2.0 installation arena during the Artefact Festival in Leuven, between 12 and 17 February. Who wants to join and assist them? Interested?

Daniel Demoustier told me that when he was filming the war victims he talked to them and they to him. These conversations however were not recorded. We then, we see the faces, but we don’t hear them speaking to us. So then, why not go back to them? Anybody interested? Support? Suggestions?

Moving image with a comment by cameraman Daniel Demoustier (such will be rarely the case in this blog, in contrast to the daily practice of it on television). Original shooting treated for WARUM 2.0. Obviously, this image is far too layered for a blog… (anyways)

The questioning in the quote here under, by Hans Ulrich Obrist (on page 107, as published by Sternberg New York/Berlin, 2006), can easily be transported from the context of the museum space towards the context of media. This is a stimulating exercise for us of creative reading, maybe also for you.

“How can we actually introduce, reintroduce, or re-inject the notion of smallness into ‘bigger’ conditions? And that leads to the question of complexity, which I would like to address here. After having long discussions about the exterior aspects of museums, which were all about the façade, I think it is also relevant to talk about interior complexity, a new Merzbau condition, which will bring up urgent questions in the next few years about the future of museums. The situation of museums of obviously complex and I think, when we try to work out how to deal with this complexity, it is important not to reduce our reflections to a single model of museum space, but to study several different ones, both historical models and contemporary models, and to take an experimental approach with regard to this complexity.

One of the problems of globalization is the spatial and temporal homogenization of the world of museums, and it is urgent to actually generate a situation which is receptive to a kind of interlocking of spaces, or bridges between the old and new - as exemplified by Rem Koolhaas’s work on the Guggenheim Hermitage in Las Vegas - while also keeping in mind the notions of acceleration and deceleration, moments of speed and moments of slowness, where there should be zones of noise and zones of silence, where there are also negotiations between private and public space”.

PAUL VIRILIO: “We are now moving from the politically correct of the written, writing, the oratorical and the speaker, from the tribune, from politically correct to optically correct for the screen”.

WARUM 2.0 takes the form of a dream, of hallucination even, but without the loss of control normally involved in dreaming and hallucinating. It is not so much based on speed, as it is on suspension. Repetition and suspension that is, of what could have been live, alive, testimony, archive and memory. This space has nothing to do anymore with confusion, neither between fiction and reality, nor between the real and the artifice. It manages and produces illusion.

Warum 2.0, as 2.0, takes the pictures of Daniel Demoustier, the pictures he originally took from war victims, and projects them on transparant screens. The pictures are then repeated, enlarged, doubled and enhanced, until they fill a studio and form a stage, in which hosts and visitors perform as actors. Users and victims, pictures and positions start to double, repeat and mirror each other endlessly through media, until they form a world that becomes real as event, which in turn can be filmed again, even as a newsevent. Of course this event is a pseudo-event. It is an illusion. Like the real in reality tv, it is a non-reality. It is a tv reality, without tv. In the same way the real is no longer where it once was, television does no longer need that kind of real reality. It needs mediareality (no problem, television produces it itself), and it needs ‘us’ in it, to make the event come true.

Reality itself is becoming the medium. An extreme kind of becoming that is, accessible all over the world, as it is being produced on a daily basis by so many news channels on tv, on mobiles and on the Web. Warum 2.0, in fact, adds a demonstration to this becoming. It makes it transparant and explicit. It stages the apparatus itself. It makes visible the instant imaging it produces. And literally, by means of a group of hosts, it enacts and performs the physical actions of the users. Together they will handle the tools on the arena and mimick each others body positions and gestures. As a stage then for  ‘reality as medium’, Warum 2.0 illuminates previous grand fantasies such as the ‘world as theatre’, the ‘book as mirror’, ‘nature as creation’.

HUMAN TETRIS

One of the four stations of entry and enactment to the Warum 2.0 arena is based on a research experiment Stefaan Decostere conducted together with a group of TU Delft/Architecture students. The experiment was called ‘Space out of E-presence’ (the letter ‘E’ stands for ‘extreme’). Starting from a selection of pictures of extreme human body positions, the students were asked to think of specific spaces and environments which could generate exactly these positions.

One of the ideas they came up with was based on a Japanase tv-show, called Human Tetris. On the Warum 2.0 arena floor then, they built a series of tetris models with cutouts of falling and shooting human figures, in which hosts and visitors could be invited to position themselves. Sensors were added to the modules, generating effects of ‘massage’ of shots Daniel Demoustier recorded of American soldies shooting and  jumping in and out a landing helicopter in the Iraq desert.

Thanks to Rene Kroondijk, Aydin Koyuk, Ayhan Aygun and Rik de Ruiter.