Mo(NU)mentum
Genetologic Research 06/11/2008 20:18
Maarten Vanden Eynde
Mon(NU)mentum, 2008 AD
Time is a philosophical dimension, a basic substance which we breed in and out constantly. Just like space it is always there. Time experience however seems to be working on many different levels in an ever changing and more personalized speed (sometimes a minute can last forever and your life can fly by in a fraction). Time is not static, it is always on the move. The impossibility to stop time is mirrored by the impossibility to live in the present. Now is an elusive point between the past and the future. Like the gardener on his way to Ispahaan, the present is on his way to an unavoidable destiny: the past. There is no escape. When you read THIS word, it became history already. The future is catching up instantly. What is the force that powers the engine of time? Is the present being pulled towards the future?
The Universal Law of Gravitation has several important features. First, it is an inverse square law, meaning that the strength of the force between two massive objects decreases in proportion to the square of the distance between them as they move farther apart. Second, the direction in which the force acts is always along the line (or vector) connecting the two gravitating objects.
In 1687 Sir Isaac Newton first published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) which was a radical treatment of mechanics, establishing the concepts which were to dominate physics for the next two hundred years. Among the book’s most important new concepts was Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation. Newton managed to take Kepler’s Laws governing the motion of the planets and Galileo’s ideas about kinematics and projectile motion and synthesize them into a law which governed both motion on earth and motion in the heavens. This was an achievement of enormous importance for physics; Newton’s discoveries meant that the universe was a rational place in which the same principles of nature applied to all objects.
Could it also work for Time?
Between two objects, lets say A and B, there is a point where the gravitation of both objects is working with equal force (L1 point, named after Lagrange ). This point is balancing between the two attracting masses. If it is slightly bending towards A or B is will be attracted more by either one of them. It can only move from its frozen position, without loosing its equal balance, if A and B change mass simultaneously. The mass A is loosing, B has to gain. If time would be a linear experience, and A would be the past and B the future, than the point (C) hanging in the middle would be the present.
Presuming the past is getting longer and longer (or bigger and bigger), in order for C to be equally drawn to both A and B, it needs to be moving towards the future. The past is getting bigger and the future is getting smaller. And on top of that the speed of this process seems to be accelerating. With the population growth as exemplary model and driving fuel, evolution takes place at an unprecedented speed. New inventions and discoveries changing the world beyond recognition are constantly coming closer after each other. Just like the birth of matter during the big bang, time was created at the same moment and moves equally with the expanding universe; faster and faster to it’s final destiny.
The installation Mo(NU)mentum is made up of several layers of history, creating a massive pillar. The drill core is like a sample of time, taken from the earth in the future to understand how the world evolved. Starting with a massive block of stone (in which the different geological layers are visible) the drill core contains samples of wood, copper, metal, bricks, concrete, asphalt, tar and plastic. The layers are getting thinner and thinner the closer they get to the present = the plastic layer. So far the materials created a foundation for the next, but the plastic layer is so thin and vulnerable that it is impossible to continue from there. It is a final moment in present evolution.
Mo(NU)mentum is a monument for the future, visualizing the impossibility to continue the current evolution. It is a permanent memory and trace of Generali Groups Executive Forum on Time: Business Opportunity and Strategic Timing. The best Champagne was served in plastic Champagne glasses. The empty glasses were collected and melted on top of the installation, thereby physically contributing the last layer.
Contemporary Cuneiform Script
Genetologic Research 04/11/2008 23:16
Toine Klaassen
Untitled, 2005
This work consists of rusty nails put on the ceiling composing the names of different global corporations like Shell, Pentax, Texaco, BMW….
Visit his TRAVELING LABORATORY FOR CONTEMPORARY ARCHAEOLOGY
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The 196th Law (”an eye for an eye..”) of Hammurabi, King of Babylonia, using graphics, in three different modes of cuneiform script, illustrating the evolution of signs over time. The first is the original Old Babylonian version (around 1750 BC), the second is in Neo-Assyrian signs (around 1000 BC), and the third is in the classic Sumerian signs used about 400 years before Hammurabi’s reign. Below that follow a transliteration into Akkadian and a translation into English.
Original Old-Babylonian
Neo-Assyrian
Classic Sumerian
Transliteration
umma awlum n mr awlim utappid n u uappadû
English
If a man the eye of a son of man destroys eye his they will destroy.
News SHOT
Genetologic Research 02/11/2008 00:15
Francis Alys
Gun Camera from SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POETIC CAN BECOME POLITICAL AND SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POLITICAL CAN BECOME POETIC , 2005
Weapons of Mass Production
Genetologic Research 22/10/2008 23:55
Nida Sinnokrot
AKh-48, 2008
AK-47 parts, wooden crutch, sling (122cmx30cm)
The Kalashnikov remains the most enduring icon of the 20th century anti-colonial movement. It testifies to heroic resistance from Vietnam to Algeria and beyond, and to indomitable and enduring struggle under arms till the bloody end. The AK 47 is the weapon that the colonized world had waited for. Its become recognized as the great equalizer and as such its status as the maximum icon of decolonization is both representative and true.
AKh-48 reexamines the gun as icon in a Palestinian context. Said has noted that the primacy of armed struggle and the fetishized appropriation of slogans and militant postures from the anti colonial wars of Algeria and Vietnam came at the cost of more important cultural and political aspects of the liberation movement. This has lent an important propaganda advantage exploited successfully by the Israelis whereby Palestinian self-defense and resistance has become terrorism. As a result Palestinians are asked to believe that their tragedy is closed, that they are both victim and architect at once.
The incorporation of the crutch in this work creates a creolized icon that ponders the circularity of Palestinian victim hood with its simultaneous heroism. The persistence of this dialectic existing within the scheme of Palestinian resistance describes reality but pinpoints the frail vulnerabilities of the victim/hero interdependence. Aakh in Arabic is a sound of anguish, incorporated here it maintains this contradiction and ensures that these two impulses, victim hood and heroism, remain in equilibrium.
As such AKh-48 creates a new and twist-proof icon for resistance but its also a brake against the folly of glorifying armed struggle. Keeping in check the victim/hero mentality is a faculty to develop and is something we should “never part” with.
Making and Knowing
Genetologic Research 22/09/2008 12:02
Curdin Tones
final exam | overview sculptures, 2003
Making and Knowing. On the Work of Curdin Tones.
by Janneke Wesseling, Leffond, May 2007
Man is afflicted with a mania to order and structure the world. The garden must be weeded, the land cultivated. Everything around us is manufactured, made. Not only in the city, but also outside of it, in nature or whats left of it. The need to intervene, cultivate, re-arrange, emerges over and over. Like the creation of the foraging landscape and recreation zones in the Lange Bretten, the green belt between Amsterdam West and Halfweg through which Curdin Tones cycles on his way to his studio. The greenery must be organised and contained; asphalt is laid, trees felled, water features laid out. Our environment is in a constant state of flux, constantly altering the benchmarks for our actions. A cycling path is suddenly re-routed, the intersection has become a roundabout. And we change with them.
Tones (Tschlin, Zwitserland, 1976) understands only too well the passion to order, the fervour to impose human will on material. When will and material converge, enormous satisfaction is produced. Which applies equally to a well-shaped knife and a successful sculpture.
As a child, Tones watched a carpenter shape a straight shelf to fit a bowed wall. The carpenter drew the curvature of the wall onto the shelf with a pencil held flush to the wall. At this moment, the difference between straight and crooked was unmasked. The carpenter shaved away the excess wood. The linear had become the curvilinear.
Tones produced his first sculptures (2003) from pinewood packing case wood. He screwed three straight boards, appropriately warped, to one bent one. This resulted in a single volume, a compressed beam. One sees that the beam is hollow from the side. Tones made three such sculptures, as is his wont: he produces variations on an idea, resulting in a series. Two of which are on show at the exhibition in Enschede.
Material dictates form. In the book Eigen Grond, that Tones produced on the occasion of his graduation presentation at the Rietveldacademie, he writes: Wood is a material that has grown. The growth of the tree depends on where the tree stands. The growth locus determines the height of the tree, hardness of the wood and number of knots. The wood of one tree may be harder on one side than the other. Wood from the root and crown sections also differ in strength. Sapwood and hardwood serve different functions within the tree, thus having different degrees of hardness. While the wood dries out, these anomalies cause tensions. If a beam is finally allocated one place and one function, knowledge of where the tree grew may be vital. A craftsman who cut and sawed the tree himself knows the wood and its qualities so he can use it to better effect. When fresh wood is used inappropriately it can split, break and resist its assigned function. The awareness that no two lengths of timber are the same is crucial during construction so as to make best use of the planks.
In the sculptures that resulted, fashioned from wood grown on mountainsides, Tones again explored the tension between wood as natural material and worked it according to traditional methods. He sawed various trunks lengthwise into four, planning the sawed edge of the sections smooth. Then he affixed the edging. The long timber sections look vulnerable and organic laid on the ground.
Tones wants to make things, objects that are physically present. He wants to make three dimensional objects, even though most of his pieces are presented lying on the ground. He loves the stubbornness of the material. He searches for ways of heightening the experience of the material.
Sculpture demands a slow concentration, a different way of looking. It is a kind of leisureliness when compared to how we live and navigate the city, accustomed as we are to digital media and lightning-speed, fleeting impressions. Tones is fascinated by the rural landscape of his youth. Life in the country has weight, torpidity; time works differently. Admittedly, things age here, but at another pace.
Curdin Tones
without title, 2004
arolla pine (208 x 13 x 12 cm)
foto: P.Cox
without title, 2004
arolla pine (23 x 409 x 1.8 cm)
foto: P.Cox
Long ago, there was no difference between the artist and the craftsman. The word techne, from which our word technology derives, not only referred to the practice of craftsmanship, but also to art. The cabinet maker and the potter, and the master builder, sculptor or painter were all called technites. This changed with Plato and Aristotle. Philosopher Gerard Visser writes: Aristotle distinguished between man and animal: animals live by experience (empeira), but man lives by technique and reasoning (technekai logismois). Techne is the extraordinary means of poiesis that produces, from what it brings forth, in order to cause (aition). Techne is not production as such, the proficiency grown of experience, but knowing the reason why (dioti). Nowadays we understand this knowledge only in terms of rationality and causality, the seed of which was planted by Aristotle.
In other words, technology was once more than knowing in terms of rationality and causality, it was knowing why. The same Aristotle elsewhere spoke of techne as episteme, a way of knowing or recognising that is not only rational knowing, but a knowledge that produces truth.
This means, however miraculous it might sound to us, that truth can result from making (poiein) something, and that a product can be true, can possess a truth. Technology once was not something rational as in our day. Visser : Anything that transposes something from not-being to being is poiesis. Poiesis underlies the products of all technai. All craftsmen who bring something into being are poietai. Technology, we could say, is thus also poetic. And art is, reversed, a form of technology; not because the artist would also be a craftsman [], but because the work of both is real.
Since Plato, who asserted that a work of art is the embodiment of imitation and illusion and that it has nothing to do with truth or knowledge, and, since Aristotle, art and technology have gradually grown apart. Until they became two completely separate areas. Visser: Art and technology are identified with the mutually exclusive spheres of the illusory and the true, the ideal and real, the emotional and the intellectual, the irrational and the rational. Art became uprooted because its ability to think, to get to know the world and discover truth, was denied.
Since Modernism and the avant-gardes of the last century, artists have been reclaiming the ability to think, whether this is intuitive or rational thought or both simultaneously. In the tradition of the avant-garde, the artist accepts nothing as a given. It is his task to question all suppositions about art and art practice, and his position in society, again and again. Since then, artists have appropriated a critical-theoretical approach that is generally considered as an integral element of their practice. Art itself is increasingly considered a form of research, as an activity direct
Modernistic Tree
Genetologic Research 19/09/2008 19:40
DRAW ME A SHEEP
Square Tree Trunk, 2008
Square Tree Trunk series are a part of NATURE V2.01 project. Round is perfect in nature, but square is perfect for industrial standard. To illustrate, square tree would enable wood industry to lose less material, to cut easier with machines and to store more efficiently.
Maarten Vanden Eynde
Bonfire: Rite for Almere, 2008
All over the world rites and celebrations form the backbone of a society and function as cornerstones of history. The rite is an event to remember or look forward to. An occasion to create a moment of reflection, an enlarged presence of the present, the ideal opportunity to commemorate once past and plan the future. It is an event of which if you are part of that particular society, you just have to be there. Sometimes the initial history of the rite is lost but still continued because it is part of everybodies life. Since Almere lacks a history (beyond 30 years) I thought of giving it one by initiating a rite. An oak tree from the first generation of planted trees in Almere (about 35 years old) was cut square, like a big beam splitting up in smaller beams, covered with dry pinewood and lit on the 21st of August 2008 at 21.00. The tree will stay for a few years as semi-permanent sculpture and will be relit every year untill it only exists in stories.
Parallel Encyclopedia
Genetologic Research 14/09/2008 20:26
Batia Suter
Parallel Encyclopedia, 2007
The result of a long term investigation, this voluminous encyclopaedia of Batia Suter contains solely images collected from other books, and reads as an exhilarating and extremely rich filmic sequence. Suter’s interest lies not only in the iconographic value of images and the way that the human brain processes visual information, but also the causes by which images become charged with associative values. The book is a collection of possible future histories.
Published by Roma Publications, Amsterdam (Order Here)
Modern Archeology III
Genetologic Research 08/09/2008 14:00
Maarten Vanden Eynde
Plato’s Closet, 2008 A.D.
When the IKEA catalogue became the most printed book in human history (beating the bible for the first time ever) it was clear that a new geological layer was added around the millennium, 2000 A.D., consisting mainy of IKEA products. In the future this period in time would become known as the IKEA-era. It took several centuries before their imperium was going in decay disappearing under the next layer of history. This negative fossil is one of the oldest remains of an IKEA closet, containing traces of a lamp and cup which probably stood on the closet. The left over void functions as a mould enabling to reproduce it forever.
This work was made in the context of the exhibition ‘Hacking IKEA’ at Platform21. Original IKEA products: MALM closet, KVART lamp, LJUVLIG cup
POMPEI, Italy
Plaster moulds of people buried by ash and lava from the erruption of Mt Vesuvius that obliterated Pompei in 79 A.D. (The garden of the fugitives)
Famous Forever
Genetologic Research 28/08/2008 10:11
Zatorski + Zatorski
Away from the Flock, 2008
In Away from the Flock (2008) we peer into a Victorian bell jar and a still-born goat skull smiles back with a wry cheeky grin, its mouth bejeweled with a 22ct gold capped tooth.
Piero Golia
Maybe not even a Nation of Millions can hold us Back, 2003
Complete skeleton with implanted diamond on the exact location where the (still living) artist has one as well.
Damien Hirst
For the love of God, 2007
A 19th century human skull cast in platinum and encrusted with 8601 diamonds (weighing in at over 1100 carats). Price: $100 million
Chinese Cryptozoology
Genetologic Research 17/06/2008 16:16
Shen Shaomin
Unknown Creature - Three Headed Monster, 2002
Shen Shaomin adopts the role of being anthropologist, scientist, and author of his own fabricated mythologies. Constructed from real animal bones, his sculptures collectively create a bestiary of fictional creatures that are wondrous, frightening, and strange. Reminiscent of Borgess Book of Imaginary Beings, Shens absurd assemblages exude an ancient wisdom, authenticating the magic of fable and folklore, while alluding to contemporary issues of genetic modification, consequence of environmental threat, and concepts of the alien and exotic.
In pieces such as Three Headed Monster and Mosquito, the skeletal remains of extinct creatures are presented with the validity of museum display. Their colossal scale reinforces their imagined prehistoric origin as Jurassic curiosities and spiritual totems. Assembled from genuine ossified animal parts, his creatures are simultaneously familiar and perplexing, indicating a warped and uncomfortable process of evolution. Often carving into his surfaces, Shen adorns his creations with scrimshaw, further entwining humanistic reference into his disturbing zoological evidence.
Unknown Creature - Mosquito, 2002
