Verschiedene Diskussionsansätze zum Thema “Raum” stellt der Band

Raumtheorie: Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, hrsg. von Jörg Dünne und Stephan Günzel

vor.

Die komplexe Bedeutung des Begriffs “Raum” ist Ende der 1980er Jahre mit dem “Spatial Turn” zum Thema der  Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften geworden bzw. als eigenständiger, diskutierbarer Faktor erkannt worden.

“Der Band erfüllt zuvorderst die Aufgabe, den Leser mit den Materialien und Kontexten zu versorgen, mit denen die gegenwärtige Diskussion und Forschung nachvollzogen und nicht zuletzt auch vorangebracht werden kann.” (so die Zielsetzung laut Einleitung)

In 6 Teilen werden je 5 Texte zusammengefasst:

Physik und Metaphysik des Raums / Phänomenologie der Räumlichkeit / Körperliche, Technische und Mediale Räume / Soziale Räume / Politisch-geographische Räume / Ästhetische Räume

Bis auf das erste Kapitel (Physik und Metaphysik…) stammen alle Texte aus dem 20. Jahrhundert.

Jedem Teil ist eine Einleitung vorangestellt, die das Thema umreißt und sich auch als Kurzhinführung zum jeweiligen Teilbereich lesen lässt. Jeder Grundlagentext ist mit einem ausführlichen Fußnotenapparat versehen und wird abgeschlossen von “weiteren Angaben” (Bibliograph. Angaben, Textnachweis, Weitere Texte zum Thema des jew. Autoren, Sekundärliteratur).

Am Ende des Gesamtbandes wird auf mehreren Seiten eine Auswahlbibliographie zur Raumtheorie bereitgestellt.

………………………………………………………………..

Raumtheorie: Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, hrsg. von Jörg Dünne und Stephan Günzel, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006

Mit seinem 1967 gehaltenen Vortrag „Des espaces autres“ (dt.: Andere Räume, 1992) gilt Michel Foucault als Prophet einer Wiederentdeckung des Räumlichen für die Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften, welche im Sinne eines Paradigmenwechsels häufig als „spatial turn“ bezeichnet wird. Er prägt darin zum einen den Begriff der Heterotopie, zum anderen postuliert er in der Einleitung einen Gegensatz zwischen dem 19. Jahrhundert und der Gegenwart, indem er einen Wandel von einer Vorrangstellung der Zeit zu einer des Raumes ausmacht. Mir kommt es nun auf diesen zweiten Punkt an, da ich zwar die Idee prinzipiell für recht plausibel halte, aber seinen Bezug zum 2. Hauptsatz der Thermodynamik nie richtig verstanden habe:

„Die große Obsession des 19. Jahrhunderts ist bekanntlich die Geschichte gewesen: die Entwicklung und der Stillstand, die Krise und der Kreislauf, die Akkumulation der Vergangenheit, die Überlast der Toten, die drohende Erkaltung der Welt. Im Zweiten Grundsatz der Thermodynamik hat das 19. Jahrhundert das Wesentliche seiner mythologischen Ressourcen gefunden. Hingegen wäre die aktuelle Epoche eher die Epoche des Raumes. Wir sind in der Epoche des Simultanen, wir sind in der Epoche der Juxtaposition, in der Epoche des Nahen und des Fernen, des Nebeneinander, des Auseinander. Wir sind, glaube ich, in einem Moment, wo sich die Welt weniger als ein großes sich durch die Zeit entwickelndes Leben erfährt, sondern eher als ein Netz, das seine Punkte verknüpft und sein Gewirr durchkreuzt.“

Der 2. Hauptsatz der Thermodynamik lautet wiederum nach Rudolf Clausius (1850):

„Es gibt keine Zustandsänderung, deren einziges Ergebnis die Übertragung von Wärme von einem Körper niederer auf einen Körper höherer Temperatur ist.“

bzw. in einer Ableitung:

„In einem geschlossenen adiabaten System kann die Entropie nicht abnehmen, sie nimmt in der Regel zu. Nur bei reversiblen Prozessen bleibt sie konstant.“ (Wikipedia)

Für mich als Laien bedeutet es schon einiges an Anstrengung, ungefähr zu verstehen, worum es dabei geht. Und noch schwieriger erschien es mir, einen Zusammenhang zu Foucaults Aussage herzustellen, vor allem auch deswegen, weil diese Gesetze erst Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts formuliert wurden und auch später wohl nur sehr wenige Menschen etwas damit anfangen konnten. Wie kann dann der 2. Hauptsatz zum „Wesentlichen mythologischer Ressourcen“ werden?

Tatsächlich dürfte es aber so sein, dass die Zeit-Obsession des 19. Jahrhunderts durch den Begriff der Entropie versinnbildlicht, in einer Formel auf den Punkt gebracht wird. Foucault – indem er das Faible postmoderner Autoren für Physik und Technik teilt – sieht in der Entropie eine Metapher für Vorstellungen, welche schon lange vor Clausius vorherrschten. So schreibt etwa Hartmut Rosa (Beschleunigung. Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne. 2005):

„Die Geburtsstunde der Moderne, so lässt sich mit einiger Plausibilität argumentieren, war die Emanzipation der Zeit vom Raum“ (61)

und weiter:

„mit Hobbes (und in der modernen Physik) schließlich gewinnt das Prinzip der Bewegung (als Freiheit) Vorrang vor der (aristotelischen) Ruhe.“ (62)

Hier ist nun der Bezug zur modernen Physik (und damit zur Thermodynamik) hergestellt und außerdem Foucaults Paradigmenwechsel von (der fließenden, fortlaufenden) Zeit zum (im historischen Kontext als unverändert geltenden) Raum in die Formel Bewegung vs. Statik übersetzt. In nachfolgenden Zitaten ist dann von der „Liebe zur Bewegung an sich“ (Friedrich Ancillon, 1823) die Rede oder von der bekannten marxschen Formulierung: „Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft“ (1848).

Foucault hat natürlich auch anderes im Sinn und zwar jene Ideale und Mythen der Epoche, welche auf der Vorrangstellung von Zeit und Bewegung gegenüber Raum und Statik beruhten: die rasant wachsende Bedeutung der Geschichte (zur Legitimation von kollektiven Identitäten), das kategorische Schema zivilisiert/barbarisch, den Glauben an den Fortschritt oder den Geschichtstelos des Marxismus. Entropie als irreversible Bewegung stellt für Foucault offenbar die ideale Metapher für den Motor dieser historischen Weltbilder dar.

Soweit meine Erklärung für dieses Zitat, aber über weitere Vorschläge würde ich mich freuen.

Article on the work of Belgian artist Anouk De Clercq.
Published in A Prior magazine February 2008.

“I can’t just be a machine”
On the work of Anouk De Clercq

Black and white images, abstracted and minimalist visuals, precise and thorough soundscapes. Self-contained units that carefully express and confess to a personal universe, that explore tenta-tively and figuratively a world that relates to itself rather than to the world outside. At first glance, the work of Belgian artist Anouk de Clercq (b. 1971) seems contained, relatively easy to describe and capture. However, throughout its various appearances, this work gives evidence of a complex and changing navigation of technological developments. Most obvious is her creative use of tools for recording and processing information: from Super 8 mm film and analogue video through recording and editing software for sampling and remixing found footage to digital de-sign tools for creating and altering image and sound. In experiencing her work, we notice how technology is not only the means towards a goal but often also the subject of her work. Within De Clercq’s practice, this multiple engagement with various technologies allows her to exchange data and ideas, and to collaborate with various people who might be physically distant. More-over, technology is no mere tool for De Clercq; it is an active participant in the network of relations and serendipities that shape the course of her creative process.
Technology should in this case be understood as both the instruments and objects used (video, film, audio, computer technologies) as well as the ‘craft’ or the technique of how these objects and instruments—these technological artifacts are— put to use and how they shape, influence and guide the artist’s process. Although art and technology were once considered to be two opposite and incommensurable domains, artists have always engaged with technological objects and techniques in a decisive way. From the Renaissance guild member who mixed colors or used mirrors in classical painting to the mobile, interconnected and technologically savvy 21st century artist, art and technology meet on levels of conception, collaboration and realization.[1]

Adopting and Adapting Technology
Undeniably, technology has an increasingly important role to play in our personal, professional and public lives. Different strands of scholarly research, from pessimist to utopian, have debated the effects of this increased technologization. Technological determinists would claim that the course of history is determined by technology, by ‘the laws of the machine’ and its steady, inexo-rable progress. Within such a determinist framework, the users of technological artifacts are not bestowed with any agency. As a reaction to determinist thinking, technological voluntarism would stress the agency of users, their free will and choice. Both visions of the impact and role of technology in personal, professional and public lives are, needless to say, crude and imprecise. Trying to hold the middle ground are interdisciplinary scholars who are connected within the framework of science and technology studies (often abbreviated as STS). Scholars like Wiebe Bijker and Bruno Latour, key players in the history of STS, have shown that both human and non-human actors shape and are shaped by technological innovations, that they are, in other words connected in a relationship of mutual creativity and mutual dependency.[2]

Outside of the field of STS, Michel De Certeau has been vital in rethinking the role of the users of technological artifacts, not as passive recipients, but as active agents who can and do use technologies creatively or unexpectedly. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1988) De Certeau traces and identifies practices and tactics of what he calls “making do”.[3] Consumers, television watchers, walkers, readers, cooks are all involved in manipulation, in the composition of an anti-discipline, in appropriation and reappropriation, in poaching, in poiesis (“from the Greek poiein, to create, invent, generate”) and bricolage (used by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to analyze the production of things from leftover materials).[4] These activities are “hidden and scattered over areas defined and occupied by systems of production that leave less and less place for consumers to indicate what they make or do with products of these systems.”[5] Nevertheless, “there are countless ways of ‘making do’” and in making do, consumers are not passive but become “unrecognized producers, poets of their own affairs, trailblazers in the jungle of functionalist rationality.”[6]

De Certeau and STS scholars share the belief that, within technological systems or frames, there is room for the appropriation of technological artifacts. We buy or receive a technological artifact (e.g. the newest cell phone or the newest coffee maker) or it is pressed upon us (e.g. computers in the work sphere) or slowly becomes part of out lives (e.g. cash machines). But what happens once we have this technology or once it is part of our daily routines? Do we obey its rules or do we bend them to fit our own personal needs? In dealing with almost every technology that becomes part of our lives, welcomed or not, we do in fact use tactics of ‘making-do’. Users of technologies will more often than not, in adopting a new artifact, also adapt it, ‘modify, design, reconfigure or resist’ it.[7]

Let me ‘unpack’ the work of De Clercq by focusing on her use of these various technologies on different levels and for different purposes. Why begin with technology in relation to this specific body of works? After all, De Clercq’s practice does not actively celebrate so-called ‘new technologies’; it is not a test or a feast of what can be achieved when the possibilities of (new) media are combined and tested. Her installations and videos are rudimentary and elementary, presenting the viewer with a black and white, stripped-down world, bereft of evident technical complications. No walls of computer screens that bombard the viewer with images, as could be encountered in the techno-celebration that was the Russian pavilion of the 2007 Venice Biennale, which was optimistically titled Click I Hope; no sense of a future mediated by technology that seems to actualize science fiction as can often be seen on the Ars Electronica festivals.[8] Contrary to many new media enthusiasts, De Clercq is not obsessed with the ‘new’ or the novelty of recent technological innovations. Exactly because she deals with technologies and technological innovations in a way that is more nuanced and subtle than outright criticism or blind celebration, it is interesting to consider the role of technology in relation to her work.

Not only does De Clercq’s work differ from many artistic practices that uncritically cele-brate technological progress in their engagement with new media or digital technologies, her way of dealing with reality equally differs from contemporary art practice and the surrounding dis-course that equate critique to a confrontational engagement with political, social and economical realities. Many contemporary artists no longer ‘make art’ but ‘do projects’ and ‘conduct re-search’.[9] An implicit imperative at work here is the need for artists to engage in a (their) broader social context directly. Think for example of the A-Portable floating abortion clinic by Atelier van Lieshout (2001) or the body of collaborative art by Jeanne van Heeswijk who, in her Face Your World projects, guides children in re-designing aspects of their built environment.[10] This expectation of social engagement is also posited against the old trope of the artist as an egotistic, self-involved individual. The work by Sophie Calle installed in the French Pavilion of the 2007 Venice Biennale has been criticized for taking up so much space, energy and money for a self-centered project of one man rejecting one woman. Or in the words of art critic Katy Siegel “Sophie Calle’s dissection of a breakup e-mail (…) manages to suggest that the most pressing concern we face today is one man’s reluctance to keep fucking Sophie Calle.”[11] In line with the 19th century Realist painters’ criticisms on the l’art pour l’art movement, Siegel criticizes Calle’s work for being decadent and self-obsessed. Although De Clercq’s work is visually not that close to reality, when I interviewed her, she explained that her work does start from reality, from the imprints and indents made by that reality. Reality is understood here as something shared and social that is not solely constructed by and for an individual. But for De Clercq, these imprints of the real serve as catalysts for creating parallel realities that reflect on the reality with which it all started. Her parallel realities are complex and subtle worlds and their reflection upon the everyday is nuanced and open to personal interpretation. While De Clercq’s work is anything but decadent and self-obsessed, it differs from the confrontational strain of contemporary art in that she does not posit a single notion of the social as opposed to the individual; rather she is in-terested in the construction of parallel realities in a rudimentary yet layered fashion that might reflect her views, but remain open.

Remediation
De Clercq has a background in music (she studied notation and piano at the Royal Conservatory of Ghent) and narrative film studies (at the Sint-Lukas art academy in Brussels). As a consequence, both music and moving images are key ingredients of De Clercq’s work. However, during her education at the film academy in Brussels, De Clercq discovered that she was more interested in and had more affinity to the experimental use of various cinematic elements.[12] She felt attracted to poetic, rather than linear, approaches to the world, as manifest in the work of the Austrian video artist Martin Arnold (1959) and the Belgian artist Ana Torfs (1963). While video is still very central to De Clercq’s practice, her work has diversified. While it may have been correct to label De Clercq a video artist based on her work made in the 1990s, since the beginning of 2000 her work has come to include the book Log (2005), web-based projects such as hereisthere(2006) and many site-specific installations, one of which, Tube (2006), contains no music nor moving images but only light.

Although moving images and/or sound have become less visible or audible in De Clercq’s work, they both continue to inform her practice. Perhaps this is because movement seems to be a key organizing principle of De Clercq’s oeuvre. Even in the book Log, movement is present in the sense that, while listening to the accompanying CD with music by Anton Aeki, the reader must engage in De Clercq’s work on a spatio-temporal level. It could be said that the book is traversed as if it were a cinematic landscape. With growing attention to the spatio-temporal in the broader sense, repetition becomes key. At odds with linear constructions, De Clercq’s work un-folds through reiterations and retakes, not only in visual but also in auditory terms. She collabo-rates with musicians for most of her works and many of the resulting soundscapes evolve around repetition. The repetitive and looped movements and soundscapes of her work are reminiscent of certain 19th century forerunners of cinema¾visual devices such as the phenakistoscope that gave the viewer the illusion of movement. The phenakistoscope, introduced by the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau in the 1830s, consists of sequential images of movement (either draw-ings or photographs) pasted on a spherical disk. The viewer looks at the images through slits in a second concentric disk while spinning the first one around. The better-known zoetrope—where images are pasted inside a round basin with slits at regular intervals—is based on the phenakisto-scope. The film pioneer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) famously experimented with the phenakistoscope and other comparable devises to visualize (bodily) movement. For instance, he made a disc for the phenakistoscope on which he drew images of a dancing couple. When this is spun around and looked at through the slits of the second disc, the viewer sees an elegant se-quence of dance steps. Restricted to one disc, there is always forever only one dance to be danced. The movement is perpetually the same and yet its repetition lends the same scene new dimensions.

Not just in Log, but also in Motion for Stockhausen (2000, b/w, 11’), Conductor (2004, b/w, 2’22’’) and Pang (2005, color, loop), De Clercq alludes to the very early years of film. Motion for Stockhausen was originally created as a background projection for the music/dance performanceChorée by Johanne Saunier and Jim Clayburg. Their piece was titled after ‘Chorée de Huntington’ or Huntington’s disease, a fatal hereditary disease that affects the brain. One of the many symptoms of the disease is jerky, involuntary movement, especially of the shoulders, hips, and face. In Motion for Stockhausen De Clercq uses medical film footage shot in 1904 by the Belgian anatomist, neurologist and pioneer of clinical cinematography Arthur van Gehuchten (1861-1914). Van Gehuchten was instrumental in developing the research on brain diseases and his early movies are still considered of extreme historical importance. De Clercq takes a small fragment from one of these movies and repeats it, turns it around, loops it. We see a man struggling with his body, sitting down and standing up, falling down and getting up again. The jerky movements characteristic to the disease of Huntington are visualized in the work: the video jerks and moves around and is never quite still. The inescapability of neurological decay is made painfully sensible as the remixed and sampled historical film footage is framed in a small rectangular box inside the expanse of a black screen. Even when the viewer does not know the background of the footage or the fact that the man one sees struggling with his body is dying from a brain disease, the helplessness of his body trapped and endlessly struggling inside a rectangular frame is painfully palpable.

In De Clercq’s continual returns to the early experiments with film and animation, she may be seen consciously to remediate or develop a new take on the old within the new.[13] De Clercq considers technology in its larger historical context and will often refer back to and remediate older media. Moreover, she also uses old technologies, such as the Super 8mm camera, to shoot footage. This footage will then be digitalized and reworked with the aid of computer programs. Significantly, her website (www.portapak.be) and foundation are named after the first portable video device introduced in the 1960s. De Clercq considers the impact of this first portable and affordable video recorder on contemporaneous art practices as comparable to the contemporary impact of portable computing on artists’ practices. Both devices circumvent expensive outsourcing procedures; filmed images can be seen instantly because nothing needs to be developed or chemically processed under expensive laboratory conditions first. Because BETA and then VHS tapes were cheap and re-usable, they promoted experimentation—trying things out that might not work smoothly, embracing accidents, incorporating the waste or destruction of the medium. According to De Clercq, the option to undo actions in digital technologies make experimentation radically easier and adds a certain freedom and carefree attitude to the working process.

On the downside, with so many options to experiment, tinker, manipulate and modify, where does one stop? When is something ready and why? De Clercq seems to use historical material, older media and obsolete technologies as a touchstone, a point of reference and a guiding principle to navigate the increasingly complex possibilities of her practice, which involve new media that facilitate so much more than we actually need.

A Spatial Turn
From De Clercq’s early work at the beginning of the 1990s to her current practice, there is a gradual but crucial transformation to be discerned, particularly with regard to her use of space. This ‘spatial turn’ in De Clercq’s work is very much related to changing technological means and her increasing use of digital technologies.[14] During the 1990s, immediately following her foray into film studies, her connection to film and cinema was strongest, when, for example, she co-established the underground, one-screen cinema space ‘Cinema Nova’ in Brussels. At this time, most of her work was shown at film and video festivals. Since 2000, De Clercq’s work may be seen increasingly in galleries, contemporary art biennials and in art museums. She finds her-self now, as she puts it, with one foot in the world of alternative cinema and the other in the art world. It was Brussels-based writer and curator Andrea Wiarda who, in 2001, first suggested to De Clercq that she take her work outside of the cinema projection space and into the world, by inviting De Clercq to present her work in Looking Glass, an experimental project space within a shop window situated on one of Brussels main urban arteries, Rue Antoine Dansaert. With De Clercq’s project in Looking Glass came a growing attention to the spatial context of her work, which led to a move away from the (cinema) screen and toward an engagement with personal, social and public spaces.

For Looking Glass, De Clercq created a 1’30’’ black and white video—entitled Sonar —showing a digital abstraction of the sonar system that searches under water for objects or measures the water’s depth by sending out sound waves. Here, the video was situated in a space that was neither a black box nor a white cube. De Clercq’s transition into public space, where random people might confront her work, has resulted in a practice that is acutely aware of its place. Without the conventions of the gallery or cinema, the artist does not only present a work, the work must carve out a space that is shared with an unknown audience. Here the role of technology as a means of spatial construction becomes paramount as both medium and message.
Sonar was not De Clercq’s first experiment with computer technology, nor was it the first work to be made with the aid of software applications, but it is the first work that consisted solely of computer-generated images. It is as if, to achieve a greater awareness of spatial condi-tions, she needed to strip her ‘language’ bare; to remove narrative and human presence from her images; and to eschew all direct references to the ‘real’. This engagement with the ‘real’ was perhaps most evident in her earlier work in the form of old film footage, narrative structures and human figures. It is as if she needed abstraction and distancing from cinematic conventions in order to be able to relate to the world outside of the cinema space, or in front of and behind the screen. In a simultaneous development—of equal importance to the spatial turn—De Clercq adds computers to film and video, her instrumentarium with which she works, tinkers and collabo-rates. Computer related technologies facilitated a new abstraction and distancing because they allowed De Clercq to develop a different language than the one dominating cinema.

Pang, created for the Belgian video biennial Contour 2005, introduced several new spatial strategies made possible by the use of digital technology. Pang was created for the Maria-Magdalena chapel in Mechelen and consists of a vertical DVD projection. The video shows us an Ophelia-like woman standing in front of an old and thick tree in an angelic white dress. She has a somewhat cocky stance, with one hand on her hip and her full frame turned away from the viewer. She is dreaming, almost chewing her fingers while thinking of something we, as an audi-ence, have no access to. Geometrical shapes move behind the tree and, ever so often, the image jerks very slightly. Interestingly, one of the more famous depictions of Ophelia is by Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais (Ophelia, 1851-52). His Ophelia is horizontal, dead, floating, on her way out of this world. De Clercq’s Ophelia has been put back on her feet and her dreamy and pondering stance might very well indicate her indecision and wonderment concerning her new representation.

The music for Pang, composed by Stevie Wishart, “betrays the images of the woman in front of the tree,” as De Clercq herself puts it. The soundscape is indeed slightly terrifying and far less serene than the images. We hear breathing and scraping sounds that contrast with the idyllic and romantic visuals. The choice for working with Wishart was based on the fact that he is known to combine old musical instruments with, for example, techno music. A similar sort of confrontation was created with visuals by De Clercq when she introduced digitalized images into a Gothic chapel. If in her earlier work, most notably Another Worldy (1998, b/w, 22’) and Petit Palais (2002, b/w, 15’), De Clercq chose to synchronize images and sound, today, she is busy exploring other solutions. At issue here, is an asynchrony between image and sound that create, together, a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. While she was interested in using the musical score as an aide to the overall trance-like quality of cinema, increasingly, her soundscapes have become complex compositions that create a distinctive push and pull between the viewer and artwork, which might conflict with the images, surprise the viewer or put her or him at ease.

Almost the first thing De Clercq tells me upon meeting her is that she will not be able to show mePang. The vertical projection of the video makes it hard to re-mount. Most beamers and screens are screwed fast and securely in their horizontal positions and turning them 90 degrees would be difficult. The vertical projection, a divergent use of the standard use of the beamer, is illustrative of De Clercq’s move away from cinema and screen-based works. In conventional cinema, turning the beamer or projector sideways and flipping the screen 90 degrees, would be unthinkable. Movies and television shows are horizontal affairs, period. Stories evolve horizon-tally and the visuals take us through the stories from left to right.

Tube (2006), which is being reinstalled in 2008 in an industrial zone of Izegem, Belgium, takes the spatial turn even further. Initially startled by the invitation to create something for this industrial canal zone, De Clercq accepted the commission simply because the prospect seemed so outrageous. Up until then, she had created site-specific installations, but none were meant to last in public space for longer than the duration of an exhibition, biennial or festival. Tube will visualize the invisible traffic between two factories. Standing on either side of a channel, the factories exchange goods and materials by means of tubes that run underneath a bridge crossing this channel. De Clercq will add a semi-transparent white tube to the bridge through which light will travel, visualizing the material communication between the factories.

Creating Tube was no easy feat. De Clercq struggled with the fact that the ‘canvas’ on which to create something was not the relatively ‘empty’ setting of a software application but a space already filled with the actual, real and specific circumstances of the Izegem channel zone. So many elements of this location were not manipulable or easily reversed, as is the case within a digital environment. More generally, De Clercq wondered how she could add to the context of a public space that belongs, in theory, to everyone. She needed a vehicle for adding to the site without disrupting existing processes. It may be said that within her spatial experiments, cinematic elements still play a key role, albeit in an unhinged form. Here, light, as an (if not the most) important element of film, becomes the solution to a spatial problem.

Apart from its situation or context in public space, De Clercq’s work has, again particularly since 2000, taken on space as an overt subject. In this sense, Building (2003, b/w, 12’) is a tribute to the built environment. In this video, light as an isolated element, played the leading role for the first time. This video, inspired by the concert hall in Bruges designed by Belgian architects Robbrecht and Daem, consists of black and white, stripped and elementary, comic book-style graphics of the building. Strips of white and harsh light differentiate shapes and hint at architec-tural structures. Both the videos Portal (2002, b/w, 14’) and Kernwasser Wunderland (2004, b/w, 14’) take space and spatiality as their subject as well but in a different way and with a different outcome as in Building. In both these videos the viewer is taken on a cinematic journey through sloping landscapes that gradually unfold in soft shades of grey. Echo (2008), De Clercq’s works for Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Deurle, Belgium), intends to take the exhibition space as its subject.Echo presents the viewer with recorded images of the very room he or she is standing in. The video exists as a physical echo of the exhibition space. As with the reverberations of sound in the sonic echo effect, the images of the space are twisted to allow the viewer to feel the discrepancy between the actual space and the video space. An attendant soundscape, created by Aeki, with whom De Clercq often collaborates, forms a skewed auditory echo of the exhibition space. Here the folding of the spatial context and content of a work is perhaps most acutely experienced. But despite this integration or folding, what emerges is not cohesion but a destabilization of space.

The Question of Instability
In general, site-specific and technologically complex artworks confront curators and collectors with issues related to (re-)exhibiting the work, preserving and archiving, selling and buying it. Although video and media art have become part and parcel of the contemporary art exhibition, the pace of technological innovations—making top-notch technologies of today obsolete in the span of a few years—accounts for the reluctance amongst museums and private collectors to buy ‘media art’ or artworks using and requiring complex technologies. Technologically mediated art needs additional machines on which the work has to be played and viewed. Both these devises can get outdated, and might need fixing or replacing. Moreover, the medium containing the work, be it a tape, disk or CD, might get damaged, loose its quality or become obsolete. The VHS tapes containing De Clercq’s work in the archive of Brussels-based Argos, for example, will need to be transferred to a CD-ROM or DVD in time.

The various technological problems related to viewing and storing information hint at a more fundamental and problematic issue related to technologically mediated artworks: the loss of the essentialist, one–to-one relationship between a work of art and its materiality. The result is so-called ‘unstable art’: art that changes between one installation and the next and is never quite the same.[15] For example, the version of Sonar stored in archives shows a single sonar scanning the dark watery depths. The installation of Sonar at Looking Glass in Brussels in 2002 contained a multitude of sonars, as the base image was reflected in the dark shiny sides of an angular funnel, built with its opening directed towards the window which the audience passed. The scanning light beams sometimes found each other and touched. The loneliness of that one sonar, that one blinking dot and that one light beam changed fundamentally when many sonars were projected side by side. Sonar was also installed in a Montreal shop window some 10 months after the installation in Brussels. There, the projection returned to the image of a single sonar and the lonely scanner in the dark. Thus, De Clercq has delved into the instability of the media at her disposal, presenting different installations of a work that might live on a single tape or disk.

Because De Clercq’s works cannot be equated with the devices on which they have to be viewed, nor with those on which they can be played, nor are they in any other sense in any of these devices, the question arises: where is the work and who owns it? De Clercq is very much aware of this problem, she worries about exactly what museums or collectors ‘get’ when they buy her work. Many people, myself included, have copies of De Clercq’s work. We can watch many of her videos on her website and we can save them to our own hard-drives. While we do have De Clercq’s work, we are not the owners of her work in the traditional sense of the word: namely, the sole possessor of a unique object of art. Paradoxically then, even as she is acutely aware of the space within which her works exist, De Clercq works against any stable ‘location’.

Although neither the issue of the instability of art nor of the reproducibility of art are 21st century phenomena, digital technologies have added new layers of complexity to both issues.[16] The pace of technological innovations has increased drastically over the last decennium and many 21st century computer users are very adept at appropriating media content as well as creat-ing their own content. With the so-called Web 2.0 revolution, issues of intellectual property and creative rights have been given a new twist. The relationship and traditional distance between producers and consumers is radically changing in the Web 2.0 era, dominated as it is by a many-to-many model rather than a one-to-many model. Consumers are increasingly ‘prosumers’ in the sense that they produce as well as consume the bulk of online content. With the lines between consumers and producers becoming blurry, it has become all the more difficult to define, demar-cate and pinpoint what is created and owned by whom.

De Clercq consciously participates in the many-to-many culture in her collaborative projects in general and in her web-based projects more specifically. By integrating a blog option on portapak.be, the artist shares her opinions and travels with whomever visits her site and allows whomever feels like it to add a post or comment to her website. As a June 2007 comment by an anonymous and angry visitor illustrates, the interconnectedness facilitated by the Internet can create frictions as well as synergies.[17] Hereisthere is an online, web-based collaborative multi-media work De Clercq created with Aeki and Heide Voet. On the website, pictures, movies, con-nections and suggestions are made both in a blogger format as well as in a more associative, emotive format. On hereisthere.org/sensations, the visitor is not presented with a readily under-stood web format such as a blog, but with a black canvas on which curvy white lines appear. Upon clicking one of these lines, the website is set into motion: lines stretch, dots appear and pictures as well as text pop up unexpectedly.

Web-based art can take the issues of instability and reproducibility to the extreme: the ex-perience of the work depends in part on the browser that visitors use; in time, the work might turn out to be no longer compatible with the browsers used; and by clicking the ‘Source View’ in your average browser, people can view, copy and paste the source code of a web-based artwork and use it as a basis for their own website.

“to the song of the machine”[18]
With the growing importance of digital technologies within De Clercq’s work-process, the need has arisen to question and confront its digitalization. In Whoosh (2001, b/w, 12’) the impact and effects of our culture’s increasing technologization and digitalization is put front and center. Whoosh is a complex video confronting the media with which it is created in four chapters. Cre-ating the video took De Clercq two years because, as she puts it, the creative process was also a personal journey of an “analogue and mechanical artist” into the digital realm.

The first part of Whoosh, entitled Nostalgia for Bodily Movement, shows a man running. The images consist of digitally manipulated historical footage. The afterimages of one sequence remain visible as another is introduced, which makes the man appear blurred and blotched. While he seems to be running from something, he remains stuck in one place, not going any-where. Text scrolls over the screen, feeding us sentences on body-machine dichotomies. Part two, Traffic in Bodyparts, takes us from the body in motion to a bodily fragment—the head—in motion. This time, the images are not sampled and reworked historical footage, but Super 8 mm film shot by De Clercq. A bald man is vigorously shaking his head. Again, the afterimages re-main visible between sequences, making the man’s head appear blurry. He seems to want to shake something off or to get something out of his head, but is forever stuck in an action without climax. Like the running man from Nostalgia for Bodily Movement, this man is getting nowhere. In part three, Typospace, we move from head to hands. We see a blurry pair of hands fiercely typing away on an old typewriter. Again shot on Super 8 mm film and then reworked on the computer, this sequence and the accompanying text tell us about speed, machines, and humans: “In this age of global communication, / I still mumble sad lines to myself. / I’ll send them air mail special / to my body on the moon.” The old typewriter is one of those obsolete technologies that did not survive the demands for global, fast, easy and instantly mutable communication. The hands are frantically trying to write a message for the emphatically missing body. The final part, The Automatic Sublime, shows archival film images of a highway that have been digitally re-worked and stripped from all superfluities. As in the opening and closing scenes of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), the highway rapidly passes by and underneath us. Moving from body to head to hands, in part four we arrive at the feet that are enjoying the machine, communi-cating with it and dictating the speed: “My mind is racing faster than the car I’m driving barefoot in order to get the maximum vibration.”

De Clercq uses digital technologies in her later work without problematizing and questioning these technologies to the same extent as she did in Whoosh. The video works Petit Palais, Portal,Here (2003, b/w, 1’), Building, Horizon (2004, b/w, 3’), ME+ (2004, b/w, 5’) and Kernwasser Wunderland are all made entirely of digitally generated images or digitally remastered images. Some of these works are very abstract, taking her stripped down approach to visual lan-guage to an extreme, while other videos admit features of the physical environment such as de-serts, mountains, landscapes or architectural structures. In ME+, De Clercq attempts to tell a classical Hollywood love story stripped to the bone. According to De Clercq, mainstream Hol-lywood cinema is so overcrowded, stuffed and packed that it leaves barely any room for personal interpretations. Everyone and everything is already there, so there is no room for the viewer. De Clercq confesses that—were it possible—she would rather show nothing at all. Her version of Hollywood love is rudimentary and elementary. At first, we see only one ‘+’ sign in a black ex-panse slowly moving around. The little white ‘+’ is soon joined by a second one. They circle each other, gravitate towards each other and, when they overlap, they disappear. In De Clercq’s work, stripped down images and worlds leave room for interpretation and identification by the viewer. The result of, what may be termed, her ‘peeling-the-onion’ approach towards visuals, sound and story is a world where the personal meets the infinite. After having watched Portal, which takes the viewer on a visual and auditory journey through De Clercq’s “inner landscape”, I felt as if I had been truly away. There was a gap in my perception of time and I kept wondering where I had been that day and why my sense of time and space had gone askew.

In a time over-saturated with information and obsessed with speed, De Clercq appears to use the very technologies of information-overload and velocity to create stripped-down and bare-boned worlds that take their time to unfold and exist. As a consequence, these worlds leave am-ple room and time for the viewer to make sense of the work and to carve out a personal space inside the universe that is delineated by De Clercq.

The artist as bricoleur
De Clercq’s work practice is not only informed by technological innovations, but also by the people (graphic designers, web designers, 3D specialist, musicians, …) with whom she collaborates in the development of her works. She has recently co-established the production platform Auguste Orts with artists Herman Asselberghs, Sven Augustijnen and Manon de Boer.[19] In collaborating with different people, on different levels and at different times during the production process, De Clercq is open to suggestions from these people as well as from the technologies at her disposal. The artist considers and accepts technology as a facilitator of collaboration and an active participant in the development of her practice. Accidentally pushing a wrong button might result, unexpectedly, in a different and maybe better outcome. The computer and software applications one works with, and the specific interface of these software applications, guide and shape one’s working process to a certain extent. De Clercq is a confident ‘tinkerer’ or ‘bricoleur’ who dares to experiment, push boundaries and manipulate the technologies she works with. In Kernwasser Wunderland the abstracted flower growing in the landscape is an appropriated standard palm tree from the image database of the 3D software application 3D Studio Max she was then working with.[20] She turned the palm tree upside down, put its fan-shaped leaves into the ground and made its trunk very thin. The roots of the tree thus became the head of De Clercq’s flower. She uses standard objects like these palm trees and modifies them to fit her needs.[21] A standard-ized software feature thus becomes a basis for creative flourish.

In her work, De Clercq is fascinated by and uses the ‘world’ that lies behind the interface of software programs. For example, the geometrical shapes seen behind the ancient tree in Pangare part of the internal workings of Maya, the 3D software program with which Pang was created.[22] Normally, these shapes are only visible to those using Maya and working with the program. De Clercq shows in Pang ‘part of the machine’, of the instrument she works with. De Clercq’s personal website www.portapak.be, designed by web designer Dominique Callewaert, has been continuously updated and maintained by De Clercq since its launch in 2004. She does this not through the WYSIWYG (short for What You See Is What You Get) interface or ‘design view’, but by working directly in the HTML code or ‘code view’. The WYSIWYG interface is user-friendly because it hides the HTML code behind a visual representation of the website. The code view shows the abstract-looking logical HTML language, such as:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">;
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">;
<link href="portapak.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<style type="text/css">
<!--
.bijschrift {
padding-bottom: 8px;
}
--> [23]

Working directly with and in the HTML code, De Clercq feels like a stagehand pulling the cords behind the scene and changing the décor of a theater play. This is a general characteristic of her way of working; De Clercq is interested in what is not directly visible, what lies ‘behind the mirror’ so to speak, behind ‘reality’ or in between the visible and the imaginary. Notwithstanding the fact that, in her work, De Clercq uses and visualizes aspects of the software programs she works with, this technological aspect does not hamper the ‘flow’ of experiencing her work.[24] Technological innovations and digital technologies facilitated the spatial turn in De Clercq’s work, her move from the screen into the world. At the same time, these technologies make her work into site-specific, technologically complex and unstable constructs that are hard to preserve and re-install. De Clercq ascertains that technology—however important it may be in and to her work—should not be overtly experienced and felt by the viewer. This is to say that, notwithstanding its technological complexity, the work should feel organic and natural as opposed to overtly mechanical. De Clercq refers to this as a balancing act, operating between analogue and digital media, filmed images and computer-generated images, text and voice, sound and visuals, figurative and abstract images, angular and sloping forms, the old and the new. De Clercq finds this balance in her works by using state of the art technologies, not to create a showcase of possibilities for the latest software, but to sculpt contemplative spaces.[25]

NOTES

fn1. British painter/researcher David Hockney published_ Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters_ on the use of mirrors and lenses (or a combination of the two) by painters such as Ingres, Velázquez and Caravaggio. Published by Studio in 2006.

² See for example: Bijker, W., Hughes, T. & Pinch T., 1987. The Social construction of technological systems: New directions in the sociology and history of technology (Boston: MIT Press) and Latour B. &
Woolgar, S., 1979. Laboratory life: the social construction of scientific facts (London: Sage Publications).

³ Originally published in French as L’invention du quotidien in 1980. Republished in 1990 by Gallimard.

⁴ De Certeau, M. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkley: University of California Press. pp. XII, XIII, XV, 25, 165, 174, 205.

⁵ Idem, p. XII.

⁶ Idem, p. 29, 34.

⁷ Oudshoorn & Pinch, How users matter, p. 1.

⁸ http://www.aec.at/

⁹ See for example the article ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents’ in Artforum, February 2006.

¹⁰ Both ironic ‘engagements’ with social reality as in the work of Atelier van Lieshout and sincere engagements meant to actually improve aspects of people’s built or social environment, as manifested in work of Van Heeswijk or the Ljubljana-based artist and architect Marjetica Potrc, posit engagement as the dominant purpose of art.

¹¹ Artforum, September 2007, p. 390. Needless to say, there is a muddy grey zone between ‘engagement’
and ‘self-obsession’. Social engagement might very well mask a self-aggrandizing strategy. And what might appear to be a self-centered view on the world might very well appeal to a broad audience. Calle’s work at the Venice Biennale could just as easily be framed as an attempt by an artist to open up a personal experience to as many people as possible. With so many different views offered in her installation on what the break-up email signified or communicated, chances are that almost all visitors found something in the installation with which they could connect.

¹² References to De Clercq’s working process are based on an interview conducted with the artist on 9 October 2007 in Brussels. The interview was conducted in Dutch and all passages have been translated into English here by Maaike Lauwaert.

¹³ On ‘remediation’, the refashioning or retaking of ‘old media’ by newer media, see: Bolter, J. D. and
Grusin, R. 2000. Remediation Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Massechussetts: The MIT Press.

¹⁴ The terms or concepts ‘spatial turn’ or ‘cultural turn’ are generally used to indicate the growing sensitivities in the humanities and social sciences, from the late 1980s onwards, to the geographic specificity, the locality of knowledge and knowledge construction. The spatial turn is very much connected to the ‘revival’ of the work of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre and then especially hisThe Production of Space (1974). I use the term here neither as an exact quote nor as a reference to the body of literature dedicated to the spatial turn. Instead, I use it to indicate De Clercq’s growing sensitivity to spatiality: the place of her work within public and social spaces, space as a subject and the possibilities of exploring and representing inner spaces.

¹⁵ In the 1987 Manifesto for the Unstable Media by V2_Organization, media art was framed as unstable art (“characterized by dynamic motion and changeability”) and positioned against traditional art. See: http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/node/text/.xslt/nodenr-124560. Last accessed 9 December 2007. See also the 1992 V2_ publication Book for the Unstable Media by Eric Bolle and Jeffrey Shaw.

¹⁶ For example, Walter Benjamin wrote his famous essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter Seiner Technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) already in 1936. The complete essay is available online at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm. Last accessed on 9 December 2007.

¹⁷ The angry blogger accused an undefined “you”/the art world of ‘incestuous behavior and living off governmental subsidies.’ Posted on portapak.be on 30 June 2007 at 12h28.

¹⁸ Quote taken from Anouk De Clercq’s video Whoosh (2001). The quotation which forms the title of this essay is also taken from this work.

¹⁹ http://www.augusteorts.be/

²⁰ 3D Studio Max modeling, animation and rendering software is developed by Autodesk.

²¹ Lie, M. and Sørensen, K. H. 1996. Making technology our own? Domesticating technology into everyday life. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, pp. 8–10. Lie and Sørensen frame the appropriation of technological artifacts by users as a form of taming or the domestication of technological objects.

²² Maya software for digital image creation, 3D animation, and visual effects is developed by Autodesk.

²³ Excerpt of the source code on www.portapak.be
fn24. On the concept of flow, see Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s body of writing. For example his Csíkszentmihályi, M. 1991 Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper Perennial. First published in 1990.

²⁵ Thanks go to my colleague Vivian van Saaze at the University of Maastricht for her valuable comments
and suggestions on an early draft of this essay, to Anouk De Clercq for talking so openly about her work and work process, to Andrea Wiarda and Monika Szewczyk for their careful reading, commenting and editing of the essay.