"Houses are like stone tapes. They record everything that happens in there. And then ... sometimes, very rarely – but they do: replay. And that’s a ghost ... The idea the ghost being a sentient loop" — (Interview with Guillermo del Toro)
When stone was still a primary medium of living memory, it determined living flesh and bodies, and inscribed their memory. Its survival and its antecedence were precisely what made it so insistent. It served to structure, to convert and to erect whatever anyone happened to imagine or devise, and in fact, had been the basis of such construction measures since time began. Thought is reliant on this stone; and the Stone Age by no means reached its end with the advent of "silicon architecture" in the so-called Information Age. On the contrary, even the earliest days of "enlightenment between databank and processor" owe much to stone. Yet it has not just recently but always had its limitations too. After all, efficiency and productivity can be optimized only through optical factors, which is to say through light. The optical computer and likewise the simulated quantum computer increase storage capacity exponentially. Although the "Iron Age" (of metal strip conductors) has finally reached its end, silicon-tuned light still puts the brakes on our imaginative powers.
The much-vaunted acceleration of enlightenment promises a total, seamless simultaneity that casts no shadow. This serves – whether consciously or not – to dispel the voices and mutterings that can still be heard through the gaps and joints in the old brickwork. If the German word Glück, meaning luck or happiness, derives etymologically from Lücke, meaning gap, (just as the word gap – derived from gappa, the old Nordic word for an aperture in a rampart – can promise good fortune in war), then it is exterminated and exorcised here. That which belongs to the past, to bygone days, should no longer whisper its promise through the joints in a wall; our ears are closed now to the faint murmur, to the virtually inaudible articulation of the Other, (for it does not promise and herald only good things after all, but is also menacing, traumatic, eerie and repulsive), and the fissure should close forever, in a blaze of light. No fade out or attenuation through recording and overwriting (reprocessing), but extermination through oligoptic enlightenment. The shadow of "all departed friends" (E. A. Poe, Shadow) is cast on the wall out of which it crawled.
FRI 27.01. – SUN 19.02. › daily 12 – 19:00 › Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien
THE CRYSTAL WORLD OPEN LABORATORY
A project by Martin Howse (UK), Ryan Jordan (UK), Jonathan Kemp (UK), Ralf Baecker (DE) and participants.
FRI 03.02. › 18:00 › HAU 3
THE STONE TAPE I
Bradley L. Garrett (US), lecture and film "Urban Explorers: Quests for Myth, Mystery and Meaning", (UK, 2009)
SAT 04.02. › 15:00 › HAU 3
THE STONE TAPE II
Julian Wolfreys (UK), Byung-Chul Han (KR/DE), Moderator: Andreas L. Hofbauer (AT)
SUN 05.02. › 16:00 › Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien
THE CRYSTAL WORLD SALON
Presentations and performances by Martin Howse (UK), Ryan Jordan (UK), Jonathan Kemp (UK), Ralf Baecker (DE) and participants.
