A Sculpture (also known as the Tardis)

The space is dominated by a sculpture that was originally conceived as a kind of exhibition architecture to create planes and surfaces to project and hang works. It was intended to be “detached from its environment where different ideas could intersect in an attempt to create its own time-space dimension” (Domenik Gebhardt). The sculpture is completely present in the room but also hints at movement to outside of the space. It is both a surface of projection and a work in its own right. Helping thoughts and ideas to dematerialize at one point and rematerialize at another, it is a spacecraft and time-machine, a Tardis: Time And Relative Dimension In Space.

Summer Semester 2020: Cultural Intercom and Expanded Cinema

Throughout the semester, we have been using a modern form of Stan VanDerBeek’s cultural intercom and expanded cinema. We spent the semester teaching, learning, speaking and living together in private kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, attics and Rumpelkammer seen through the eye of our laptop and cell-phone cameras, heard with built-in microphones with this information travelling back and forth between different places at the speed of light (an incredible technological accomplishment…that at times could also be rather irritating).

We followed along lines more or less traced out by Stan VanDerBeek in 1966 in “Culture: Intercom and Expanded Cinema: A Proposal and Manifesto”: “It is imperative that we research immediately existing audio-visual devices, to combine these devices into an educational tool, that I shall call an ‘experience machine’ or a ‘culture-intercom’ … The establishment of audio-visual research centers … preferably on an international scale … These centers to explore the existing audio-visual hardware. The development of new image-making devices … (the storage and transfer of image materials, motion pictures, television, computers, video-tape, etc. …)” (First published in Film Culture 40 (Spring 1966), pp 15–18.)