decoreco
Kunsthalle Wien, project space, 2000.
On the basis of my personal experience both as a writer and visual artist dealing with coding and overwriting applications, I invited writers, scientists, composers and artists to present their results or procedures on the theme of decoding:recoding in a 30-minute statement.
This project about "dissolution through sameness in emptiness" was organized in cooperation with the Kunsthalle Wien and carried out as part of the series "project space" in the Kunsthalle Wien from 9/21/2000 to 9/30/2000. It comprised 24 performances by 28 writers, scientists, composers and artists, who during 10 evenings presented a series of very diverse attempts to demonstrate their own ordering of multiplied realities, and their dissolution through sameness in emptiness, where anything is possible.
The diversity of what was presented was practically given with the nature of the theme. It included sound poetry, a reading with a projected internet text installation, space-text/music performances, a transcription of sound patterns, a generative performance with a text machine, a mathematical lecture about a physical experiment on-site, a reading with a blue box videoprojection and various multimedia performances.
It was important for me to chose a location formally consistant with the project, a location which would permit the projection of the dissolution of oneself through sameness in emtpiness, where anything is possible. The "blue box", the metaphor for the application of coding mechanisms on a visual plane, lent itself perfectly to this end, being an absolutely deterritorialized element (a kind of space devoid of place, shadow or identity), where by means of the intense illumination something like the visualisation of coding mechanisms becomes possible.
JUST LIKE THE EMPTY WORD
Palimpsest
"Insofar as one can say anything at all, one can only say, that it is simple, that it is its own self, which gives itself its own identity" ( Ranulp Glanville ) 1
Image and Word a supposedly empty surface is not much emptier than the empty word I can hardly say an empty surface and an empty word are analogous for there is no word without sense in perception, too, there is no empty area what we call empty is in reality something that is there just like the empty word this is not an absolute but rather a relative state is the desert empty but for the ascetic a flower garden so one thinks things are missing in this sense the empty picture is a presence woven out of things that are not there as a place of erasing and expulsion it refers to another place with the help of memory it actualises everything that is no more, does not exist at all and is not there so it actualises its surroundings what stands across from its erased side yesterday still the carrier of the image of the world in which it was and if it nevertheless reminds one of a palimsest to be described merely the product of memory fruit of the ruse of memory or the thankful expectation of the known viewed in its negative aspect of emptiness, the empty picture hardly expresses more than the power of disappointed habit what I am looking for what can become of this apparently empty field with the help of the human imagination today and also in the future as if this picture were nothing were remaining in a kind of waiting pose not out of cowardice if it would decide to be this or that could no longer be what it could have been what it should have been possibly because of a cold haste or highspirited impatience never again become because it wants to be everything is this really true is it right to say that it is nothing does the front have to be this or that in order to be anything at all if it is this or that but now the picture does not want to be it wants to become something something is supposed to happen to it this is exactly what a homogenous emtpiness expresses as it offers itself a place for the projection of the human imagination, it is up to the observer to fill the emptiness with his projection here the artist becomes the strategist and initiator of the virtual perceiving subject's act of perception which happens by means of his action through him and only through him the picture will have the value of the perceiving subject's projection it will never just be the emptiness of the one who is observing it it will be filled with the emptiness of the one who says it is empty 2
1 Ranulp Glanville Objekte (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1988).
2 Cf.Thomas Wulffen: Rémy Zaugg, KUNSTFORUM International, Volume 112, 1991, page 332© 2010 Toni Kleinlercher
