staun on Thu, 26 Sep 2002 15:33:19 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> In the riddle of nowhere - a visit to Makrolab |
In the riddle of nowhere Some notes on a visit to Makrolab in Scotland, end of July 2002 by Harald Staun It was already late, when they met: art and life. Art was already a little exhausted and needed a pint, and so it descended from its mountain, and headed to the pub in the next village, or actually it had been driving down, with a Landrover gliding and rocketing the deep path which separated it from the world as much as it connected it to it. Here, in the Scottish Highlands, dawn came late, and so one could still recognize the silhouette of the soft heathland, monochrome images of nature, as tourists prefered calling this result of century-long deforestation. The car followed the riverlette, crossed the country road and had nearly reached at its goal, when the collective inquisitiveness of its passengers brought it to a stop. They had made it their business to detect signals, the participants of the „Makrolab“ project, with the help of satellite dishes and all kind of other sensors, and so they could not simply pass those signs, those huge English flags that suddenly appeared at the roadside. They climbed out of the car and off its roof, which had also carried a part of the group, about a dozen of them, and slowly approached the sound of the music that was blown across the river bank. For a while they were standing there, just watching the scene. There were candelsticks hanging in the trees and smoke rising up from a barbecue grill. The people down at the river actually seemed to be quite peaceful, but how can one be sure: people transforming a street in the heart of Scotland into an alley of St. George’s crosses could absolutely be dangerous. If they would have been better equipped, and living a few hundred years later in the imaginary future of mankind, they probably would have taken out their scanners now, checking the life signs and weapons of the strangers. But, of course, it fortunated possible without any such advanced instruments, that those people were just a bunch of campers who were not less surprised about that nocturnal invasion. And still, the situation bore traits of one of those first encounters, so again the question was: Who are the aliens here, after all? Clunes Beat, Gleann a Chrombaidh, Atholl Estates, Scotland, United Kingdom: Those were the coordinates the artscience project Makrolab had withdrawn itself to, and maybe one should have added „Earth“ to it, just to make sure. That the inhabitants of this long term experiment by Slovenian artist Marko Peljhan called themselves „makronauts“, and sometimes even felt like spacemen, was not only due to the futuristic design of that mobile laboratorium: an octagonal tube, 14 meters long, with a silvery shining mantle and steely stilts, a couple of satellite dishes and a wind turbine for energy supply with an entry hatch that sizzlingly opened through air pressure and with workstation chairs that were designed for motor homes, in which one can hardly move but sit ten hours at a stretch without getting sore bottoms. Four times Peljhan has been installing his lab by now: first, as a part of Documenta X, 1997 on the Lutterberg near Kassel, later in Slovenia and on the Australian Rottnest Island. From May to August this year it stayed in Scotland, on one of those huge private estates of the country. Namibia is considered for the next location. 2007, after 10 years, the Makrolab will be installed in Antarctica. There it is supposed to stay until it breaks apart. Documenta X was something like an artlab itself, the incubator for a new kind of media art, whose productions can be watched in every halfway vivid museum today, as well at the „Ars Electronica Festival“, the yearly branch meeting of media artists in Linz. And even if this years motto, „Unplugged - Art as the Scene of Global Conflicts“ would have been a fitting frame for a presentation of Makrolab (some of its participants actually met again in Linz), Peljhan’s project is more like an antithesis to this in many ways rather traditional form of exhibition. Nevertheless, his „vehicle“, as he likes to call the lab, transports the idea of the „Hybrid Workspace“, the multimedia forum in Kassel, further than any other project. The redefinition of the place of cultural production, from the studio to the open workspace - or laboratory, if you want: this redefinition is a much more significant element of contemporary media art than all those aesthetical dubieties raised occasionally by the output of universal-machine-made art. Even the decision to call this undisciplined occupation with media reality „art“ is only a tool to preserve the freedom of places, whose emptyness is often bemoaned by art critics trained by contents. „It is art when our lawyers advise us so“, was the not merely ironic definition, Peljhan had prepared for the irritated visitors at Documenta X. For five years now, it has been straying around the world, this object you maybe really better call a „structure“, just to avoid the trap seeing only the replika of a space ship in it. The desire for distance from the world expressed in its design, is not only based on the faible for kosmologic aesthetics which one certainly cannot deny Peljhan. More than this, it is an almost old-fashioned idea of contemplative isolation Makrolab wants to accomplish. „An autonomous communication, research and living unit and space, capable of sustaining concentrated work of 4 people in isolation/insulation conditions for up to 120 days“ - that’s how the official decription of the project reads. Telecommunications, weather and migrations are the three central research fields, Peljhan considers as essential for the understanding of global systems. This may sound somewhat holistic, but in fact it is not compatibility he’s up to, e.g when recruiting the crew for the lab, rather generating unpredictable synergies. „My thesis is“ says Peljhan, „that individuals in a restricted, intensive isolation can produce more evolutionary code than large social movements of great geographical and political extent.“ To proof this thesis, he is constantly looking for places that are as difficult accessible as the concept of the project. Atholl Estate e.g. is the sixth largest private property of Scotland, a terrain shaped by hunting, 130,000 acres of land, populated by 8500 deer. Apart from of hunting season in August and September, this is a no man’s land. And still, in the barren land surrounding his lab, Peljhan is always searching for its cultural history, for traces of human presence and social patterns which have written themselves into the landscape like sediments in the strata of rocks. The way this aristocratic monoculture had changed the land could not only be read out of the samples of soil which geologist Anna Jakomulska had collected during her stay there, but also out of tourism researcher Katrin Lund’s interviews with hikers enthralled by walking through this bizarre cultural landscape. Yes, you can really fall in love with this ecologically sterile romance. Nature is just another medium, and yet it works as a hide-out for this high-tech eremitage that tries to recognize the world by removing itself from it; this move is a strategic withdrawal from familiar environment where no consciousness is streaming anymore, only information rushing. It’s an unsafe distance, Peljhan is trying to establish: a distance from the patterns of everyday data debris which is as hard to ignore as to perceive; a distance from habitual reflexes to and reflections on it. „Isolation“ and „insulation“ are the paradox effects of the island position which Makrolab combines, and it may be no untypical consequence of this constellation that one or the other makronaut in this counter-environment becomes subject to social forces he or she has long learnt to elude. It would be wrong to understand this retreat as an inner exile: Makrolab may be autonomous, but it’s not blind. It’s purpose is not to create an illusion of a position outside the „spectacle“, but to produce illuminations at its margins. The equipment of the lab even opens up many more communication channels for its inhabitants than they are usually provided with: Several satellite dishes enable access to internet and allow for receiving more than 600 TV-channels, electromagnetic frequencies and interstellar noise. It is a desired side effect of this technical and categorical extended readiness to receive, that the lab picks up signals as spectacular as during Documenta X, when the crew not only communicated with real cosmonauts aboard the Mir, but also recorded a precarious UN teleconference about the situation in Sierra Leone. But, as insightful the decoding of half-public messages may be, it is above all the relevance of the collected data itself that is put into question by readjusting the scanners. Tearing signals out of their provided coherence or gathering uncategorized samples may well result in distorted images. There is the radioqualia group, for example, who tries to transmit cosmic sound via an internet radio station or to reveal secret service surveillance methods which allow to reconstruct computer data merely by catching up electromagnetic emissions from the screen; there is metereologist Ewan Chardronnet who is developing an artificial weather for living in virtual reality; there is artist Tim Knowles who is documenting the flight of moths by long exposure photography or biologist Helena Johard who is drawing minimalistic protocols of her subconsciousness – and if you put all those works together, they portait the world as fragmentary as space probes. But there’s method in this disorientation, and only the displacements and fractions, disclosed by those tactical decontextualizations, make it evident, that mankind itself resides in a kind of hermitage, separated by blinkers from the knowledge it produces. And no information flood manages to pass over the banks of the channels. >From his early youth on, Peljhan has been interested in radio communication, and what he has learned from it, namely that the signals you receive depend on the frequencies on which you look for them, is the epistemologic basis of the Makrolab. It is, basically, just a giant world receiver. „We approached the sky above the Lutterberg as a one large unmarked library with voices, video and data communication pouring from its shelves“, Makrolab-participant Bran Singer wrote in his notes at Documenta X. „Sky books“ is also the title of a text by Russian avantgarde poet Velimir Khlebnikov, whose futurism decisive inspired Peljhan. In his quite complex theory of language, Khlebnikov has assigned a certain meaning to each letter of the alphabet, and if somebody wants to hear a very long definition for the Makrolab, Peljhan is ready to spell it. Like a decryption machine, the Makrolab tries to emulate the function of this theory, materializing, visualizing and concretising abstract elements of codes. This enlightening moment of the project could be compared in a way to a V-effect, only that in this case the alienation is not built in the transmission but in the reception. The instruments are tuned to finally show what they are not meant to show. Sometimes the messages themselves choose the media that transmit them. „Greetings!.. I am the Silver Surfer ... Sentinel of the Spaceways and former Herald of Galactus“, proclaimed a unnatural high voice out of the mouth of Peljhan one night. Momentarily everybody around deemed the arrival of true aliens. Until, slowly, the helium he had been inhaling out of one of the weather balloons, decreased. / Translated and slightly edited version of an article written for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, published Sept. 8, 2002, nr. 36, p. 24 more data on Makrolab: http://makrolab.ljudmila.org # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net