Architecture and engineering are concepts for the domination of nature.
Structures are being erected with immense effort to withstand its forces,
instead of excepting and using them to produce what we want.
Wouldn't it be a wonderful utopia, if a single controlled intervention
could cause all the following natural processes to fall into place as
planned, so that eventually and over time, structures emerge in which
people could live in?
*
Do you see the vast landscape in front of
you? Do you see the massive bodies of material being shifted around
effortlessly? Do you see the initiators standing tall? Do you see the
fragile structures emerging timidly, a little bit further away, some
of them are already slowly moving in the wind? Do you see the water of
that stream, flowing viciously endlessly into the plane to the far
right? You and I will long be gone when these processes are completed.
It's the year 3001.
*
A process leads to a result. At least that is the most fashionable idea
amongst humans. The rubbing of a string results in the vibration of a
string and in turn causes the air around it to move, causing changes in
space, the space of substance -Substanzraum. Moving through the air, the
change, which is commonly envisioned as a wave, hits the surface of a
glass bowl, penetrates the material, enters the water, and is perceived by
joe, the goldfish, and he moves, causing changes, which are commonly
envisioned as waves, a change in space, the space of substance -
Substanzraum. The movement raises the temperature of the water, not
detectable by any means of measuring. It also causes the water to dissolve
into the air a tiny fraction faster, compared to the time when joe is just
floating in the glass bowl. An eruption of water vapour, unseen, unheard,
undetectable by any means of measuring.
(tap to play video)
Substanzraum
Spatial intervention
3000 l water
2019
Put some hand cream on your hand. Rub it in. Where did it go? It is inside
of you! It is invasive! Your skin is permeable. It does not differentiate
your body and the world into the inside and the outside. Here at the
transition zone, substances are merging with you, as well as you are
dissolving.
I am emitting material from my body.
Everywhere I stand,
everywhere I go,
everywhere I sit or lay down,
I leave traces of real physical material,
substances,
evidence of me being here.
I am you!
Everywhere you stand,
everywhere you go,
everywhere you sit or lay down,
my material is touching you,
sticking to you,
invading you,
through your skin,
your nose,
your mouth.
You are me!
(tap to play video)
Narrowness
Videocollage
Duration: 0.59min.
Textfragment: Reiner Maria Rilke
Narrator: Mabel Calver Verbruggen
Footage: Project Sedan atomic test
2019
Cold, pointy drizzle is touching your face, drying on your skin,
penetrating your skin, while you are kissing your lover after leaving the
restaurant. You had Argentinean steak and Italian wine. Some vegetables
came from Italy as well, others from The Netherlands and the potatoes were
German, for sure. Several histories combined on one plate. All the waters
which originate from glaciers, rainfalls into lakes and rivers, flushing
the green meadows where the vegetables grow, and the cattle are grazing.
They take in the waters which traveled so far, through the air, through
soils, through rock and even millions of other organisms before,
microscopic as well as macroscopic ones. Slaughtered and harvested,
wrapped and transported, taking in more substances migrating from the
packaging, the immediate environment, and the soft vapour spray of the
cooling systems, to join the concert of vibrating molecules and particles
not to mention the atoms and electrons. All these substances and fractals
of substances. They are mixing, mingling, dissolving freely, without any
borders, now, once again, in your partner's mouth after this amazing kiss,
which made you so happy.
It is it, he is she, she is he, I am you, you are me.
Eventually they went home and they went to
bed.
The next day a new kitchen table has to be built. You never build
something in your life, but you learned how it is done. You take a tape
measure and start to take measurements. And this is the first time you
take measurements. It is the first time of you violating space itself.
I recently heard about an urban myth going around in Seoul, the capital of
South Korea. It is connected to the story of how Japan colonised parts of
Asia. A story from the past. In order to deploy infrastructure, the land
had to be measured and mapped. Wooden poles were stuck into the ground to
mark measure points where later railways, streets, and roads were built.
The actions performed by the Japanese invaders were necessary for them in
order to achieve their goal of making the lands of their desire accessible
and were in that sense simply of practical nature. From the perspective of
the Korean people whatsoever, these interventions were perceived as of
higher meaning. Their suspicion was that the Japanese were using these
poles to intentionally change the qi of the landscape. For them, it must
have appeared as if an invading force is applying methods of higher powers
to their lands, of which no one knows the consequences.
Whether we believe if the story is true or not, whether we believe
in qi or not, whether we believe in psychology or not, the effectiveness
of a pole penetrating the soft soil of a land is immanent. It is the
ultimate declaration executed by somebody or a group of somebodies to
claim this point in space as to be projected towards a future of human
will.
(tap to play video)
Tidal Oscillation Wave
Performative presentation
Duration: ca. 10:00min.
2020
The violation of space itself through the act of measuring and the
application of any geometrical system based on a purely intellectual and
abstract art of rendering space onto land, in order to map it, can always
have only one purpose: appropriation. Why measuring space, if not to
conquer it? To conquer? Let's think for a moment about this word. What is
there to conquer? We can conquer territory, an enemy but as well a
mountain or our fear. The meaning is not at all clear. Its meaning is
ambiguous and even though it probably origins from the very military
action we despise and connote it with the most easily, it is a word of
great poetic power. Demanded from each one of us every day, used in
various ways in ordinary language and deeply rooted in our very being, one
might even wonder if we are able not to conquer? Any action we perform
with our bodies in space is simultaneously the act of, as well as the
demand for the conquest of that space, received through our bodies,
processed by our minds and again applied onto that space through our
bodies, its conquest is necessity and result at the same time. The three
states of the feedback loop which we call conquest are receiving space,
processing space and applying an action onto space. The latter triggers
the process anew.
You can conquer space in many ways. Whatsoever, you have to measure. Lucky
you, that measuring can be understood and performed in a colourful
variation of possible ways. You can take a ruler or the scales, you can
roll from one side of the room to the other and count the rolls, half
rolls, and quarter rolls. You can measure in jumps, speed of sound, by
cleaning the space, lie down on its floor and sense it. But you can't
avoid that all methods of measuring fulfilling one final purpose: the
appropriation of that very space for a future yet to arrive, imagined by
you. Two stories about experiences with LSD came to my ears. They can be
confirmed easily by many other acid-admirers by browsing the web. It is
the story of experiencing a visual phenomenon that manifests itself as a
homogeneous grid, either made of points or lines, covering everything in
the visual field of the drug user. This experience usually comes together
with the claim for a deep understanding of space by the consumer. I indeed
believe that this visual phenomenon reveals something very real. I mean
not in the sense that reality is structured and supported by a
metaphysical grid, but as a real visual experience of how our mind is
processing space. The drug emphasises the deeply rooted system hidden in
our unconsciousness - the grid. Look around you, look at your kitchen
floor, your bathroom tiles, the windows on the other side of the street,
the pavement of the sidewalk you are walking on, the bricks of the
building's wall next to you. One might start to wonder if the whole world
is on acid.
*
The initiators were buried long ago by the
processes they have triggered. We don't know what they looked like nor
what material they were made of. They are like a dream to us. There is
no way for us to excavate them. We don't have these so-called tools
our ancestors used. It is hard to grasp what people meant when they
refer to technology in ancient texts. We will never know what they
looked like, and we don't have to. We live in a space, slowly
reshaping over decades, according to our will, following the logic of
the planet. We are with it, and it is with us.
It is the year 4002.
I am going to the beach every day. At first, I went without any
obligations and without any idea what to do here. The sun was dancing on
the surface of the water, the clear, but yet hyper continuous transition
between atmosphere and ocean. I am coming here for one week now. I don't
stay long, but I take the beach home with me. My apartment is full of
sand. It is everywhere, in my pockets, on the floor, and in my bed.
For four months, I am coming to the same place every day. I take my
measurements always directly at the shoreline. Therefore, my daily measure
point is dictated by the tides of the sea. I collect data. I measure air
humidity, air density, air pressure, air temperature, decibel levels in
the air, light intensity, wind speed, and direction. Chasing data, in a
repetitive exhausting process of collecting and storing, documenting what
I see with my Entdeckungsmaschine, the camera, like I always do during my
explorations, while simultaneously thinking about Substanzraum, up to an
extent which sometimes felt like the soft embrace of madness. I searched
to find access, a trace, a hint, a way to make it tangible, this space of
substance - Substanzraum.
Eventually, I stopped. To collect data wasn't necessary and became more of
a burden than an enjoyable exercise, but enough of a reason to keep going
to the beach every day for a long while. I was actively measuring, but I
didn't notice that on a more subtle level, I measured the space passively,
namely with my body, my senses, by me being here. I incorporated the
sounds, the lights, the feels, the smells, and the tastes, as well as its
formal language and rhythm, the latter started to influence my daily
rhythm, and I felt more and more in sync with the world. Mood swings
seemed suddenly explainable through the hight of the tide or the pressure
in the air. Now since I heightened my awareness, I noticed that even other
people I met were unknowingly affected by the constantly changing states
of Substanzraum. Some more, some less, probably due to the phenomenon
of general individuality and by changes which are happening unseen,
unheard, undetectable by any means of measuring.
It was confronting to meet the beach every day, to ask it about
Substanzraum, to look for an answer without having a concrete question,
chased by winds, waves, and weathers.
Reality challenges us to endure our existence in this space of substance,
which is ultimately indifferent to you and your individual consciousness.
*
I am standing on a mountain. Its sirens have
called me. I am gazing out on a landscape covered in an endless ocean
of nebula. Mountain peaks luring out of the cloudy mass into the new
space, as if they were heads of giants. Soon, I will paint that
scenery, and it will become one of the most renowned paintings in
human history, and they will praise it a great work of romanticism. It
is the year 1818.
*
And the world is still disinterested in us. And we still try to get its
attention like a child from a mother mimicking the strategies of our
fathers. We are trapped in the tragic triangle of the nursery. Trying to
impress the world with what we know, what we can do, what we can build,
what we can manipulate or destroy, driven by the ecstatic enthrallment of
the feverish dream of vanquishing one's own annihilation.
Eventually, Substanzraum is a highly flexible concept, with which I aim to
enable us to imagine those aspects of space that are invisible to our bare
eyes. A concept to enable us to imagine the concrete physicality of space,
with all its ideological and psychological implications which are
completely incompatible with everything we think about and do in space. It
brutally exposes the paradox of human desire to create space, while space
is already reemerging constantly around us. Every intervention in the
space, every attempt to change that space can only result in a
manifestation of human structures of mind imposed on space itself. The
space we live in is not empty but filled with material organic and
nonorganic alike, just liquid enough so we are able to move through it.
We are moving; the substances are moving. The space you dwell in today will be another you dwell in tomorrow and will never be the same again.
Look at the dolphins jumping and spinning, look at the cheetah running. Look!, look at the birds flying and twirling and look at the people constantly walking, swimming, flying from one place to another. It seems to me as if the only thing life can do is to move in space.
The movement, the gesture, the formal expression, pure joy of being
alive. And the world, through its very nature talks to us, calming us:
"You being here, is enough already."
Let us conclude this sugar-coated pamphlet with a quote borrowed from an
architect and architecture theorist. Gottfried Semper lived at a time of
great industrial revolutions.
Revolutions, rolling throughout time and space since the first trains left
the production halls. And like trains out of control, these revolutions
roll unstoppable towards the ends of their lines, which we are desperately
extending at any costs, may it be human or non-human, organic or
non-organic, alive or not; any resource is harvested extensively to
postpone the crash for as long as possible.
Semper, a thinker at the time of the emergence of serious mass production, writes: "It is already evident that inventions no longer are, as they had been in earlier times, means for warding off misery and for enjoyment; instead, misery and enjoyment are the means to market the inventions. The order of things has been reversed."
This is the problem to target most. This is the practice that
violates space itself, Substanzraum.
Mass production is squeezing space into a tight corset. It is obstructing
its respiratory pathways. Like thick mucus, that solidifies and blocks the
free flow of space. Substanzraum changes constantly at any position and
every position needs its particular formal response to it. Mass production
aims for a global space, which is nothing like Substanzraum. Mass
production aims for a global space, which is ideally the same at any
location at any time. Every design fits through any door, and even these
doors, mass products themselves, are counterproductive to the free flow of
space. They disguise the transcendent nature of the borderless and
globally interconnected spaces made of substances.
They slice up our experience of Substanzraum, suggesting that there are
spaces of different value and importance, inside and outside spaces.
Did the dialectics of the inside and the outside have been reversed as well? Do we as humans stand outside, inside our dwellings, watching through our windows into Substanzraum, from which we have alienated ourselves?
It only appears so to us. Let us not conclude too fast. In the reality
of Substanzraum, you can go to your house or your apartment and lock the
door, but you are still breathing the same air. Substances penetrating the
walls and are carried throughout your home while sitting in the sun with
the window widely opened.
In the philosophy of Substanzraum, there is no inside, only ever outside.
Substanzraum doesn't make a difference between these two prepositions.
Inside a forest: outside.
Inside a cave: outside.
Inside a building: outside.
You are ever outside. The alienation described before is exclusively mental, caused by the way we build. In grids, with an emphasised notion of the inside and the outside, slicing up space and manifest territory, to create an abstract feeling of safety.
Sometimes you are sitting in your room, working on something very
concentrated. You are knitting, writing, reading, watching tv, or are
immersed in someone's Instagram account. You are home alone. Suddenly the
door opens, but nobody enters, and a slight shiver runs down your spine.
You are starring at the door, and just as you reminded yourself of the
in-existence of ghosts, the door slams, and again you have the sensation
of a slight horror. There is no evidence for the existence of ghosts. Yet,
it is true that something entered, a mixture of substances capable of
carrying life-threatening viruses, germs, and pathogens. In past ages of
spreading disease and less understanding of these substances and
micro-organisms, the presence of a mystic entity of the hostile realm was
probably the most obvious explanation. Your shivers are evidence of the
deeply rooted myth as well as for the psychological power of the door.
(tap to play video)
I Forgot My Towel, Door With Moist Towel
Video projection
3.40min.
ca. 3 x 5,30 m
2020
It is proven that walking through doors is causing forgetting. Think about
how disconnected we are, even from our earlier histories. Some have no
contact with their grandparents or even their parents. Maybe it is due to
the grid, the appropriation, the claim of land, county, plot and site,
hedges and fences and eventually the door which cuts our worldly spaces
apparat, causing us to forget, causing our brains to un-process space as a
whole and a borderless entity in which substances are mixing and mingling
freely.
Some cave drawings reveal themselves as collective works of art with
additions from individuals living thousands of years apart. Nevertheless,
the drawings are coherent, as if this practice was the most normal thing.
Our ancestors must have had a completely different understanding of time.
Maybe because there were no doors, slicing up their spaces. They did not
dwell in huge forgetting machines, like us, in our modern world with our
rooms, apartments, houses, plots, and sites, districts, cities, counties,
and countries.
However, the practices of mass production, space division, and
rasterisation of space are violating many people, animals, plants, and all
materials living and nonliving. And we, as humans, are pretty much alone
with these practices and our approaches to this Substanzraum, this
globally interconnected spaces, made of substances traveling around our
planet.
We are alone. We are lonely ones amongst lonely billions. We are so lonely
confronted with our intellect caught in language. We are looking for
aliens to get answers. We are so desperately lonely so that a famous
Hollywood movie suggests that there were specimens, even on this planet,
like the velociraptor, to which we could have talked to. We are lonely in
our need for explanation.
But don't worry. It will be a mess, and you will not like it, you will
die, but you will move on.
Mix, mingle, dissolve freely,
without any borders.
•
Substanzraum, A new approach to global space.
Alexander Johannes Heil, Den Haag 2020.
© 2021 Alexander Johannes Heil