Last weekend at the ADK (Akademie der Künste) Berlin, the exhibition “notation: Calculus and Form in the Arts” closed its doors after a couple of months. The show took you through a “short” tough very intense travel over a wide spectrum of work processes by not-so-unknown people from the last century. Scores interpreted visually by Boris Bilinski opened the first room and from there you bounced from wonderful photographic documentation of Marey’s experiments, to Leger’s “Ballet Mecanique” and Hand drawings by Walter Benjamin. The connections from scientifical correctness and methodical consideration to artistic creation turned into a thin, almost invisible smoke string like those from Marey’s photo series.

smoke curtains

Very much on the ZKM style, the compilation includes all kinds of media, including video, sound, installation and sculpture, but charmingly, everything was turning around paper pieces, old notebooks and some graphite. This makes emphasis on the very basics of human creativeness and plays with the power of signs to re-code reality and materialize the transition from concept to structure, from structure to existence. As in Eco’s book, playing with the sacred letters arises your own creature and renders it real, sometimes even more “true” than yourself.

One of the more notorious achievements of the exhibit in my spectator mind, was the sense of proximity and understanding with works that weren’t even there. In many cases, the traces of labour resulted more evocative sometimes than the actual pieces, like in Oskar Fischinger’s animations, where you could stare for hours at the kind of abstract story boards that hanged on the wall, but the videos where presented on a small screen at floor’s level, perhaps with the intention of reducing their relevance, and also making them hard to watch. I wondered if that was bad, but I didn’t care much since my mind was eager for more drawings and notes.

A flaw could be the excessive ammount of museistic strategies like glass, panels, frames with Paspartue and white, but in essence, the materiality of the documents has to be protected, so that’s not really a point of critique. More important is, that the mere content of all this rediscovered “pieces of art”, goes way beyond contemplation and offer an attractive source of information to go back to. Would be a hard job to get hands on a Digital archive of the exhibition, but I wouldn’t be amazed if ZKM has already some well fed database…The work would be then, to craft some tools to access it, but well, then they come, the rights issues, owner’s permissions -since most of this paper sketches are possesed art objects-, profitability, and then you forget about the idea. In this sense I’ll simply point out how this blogging practice resembles, for some, a way of notation, where page after page we find incomplete thoughts, sketches and online planning / process exhibition practices. We might go thinking that a curatorial proposal around blog-sketchbooks is interesting. Any hints?

Some personal highlights of the exhibition were, Etienne Jules Marey and his locomotion studies a la Muybridge but a bit more “detailed” -also Hollis Frampton did something like that-, the work of Anthony McCall and the notes and plans for the Lecorbusier-Xenakkis Phillips pavillion in brussels, 1958.

An old Project that’s worth to be presented here: it was developed at the ZKM in Karlsruhe (Germany), where I did an Internship in the mindframes exhibition. The main objective was to give viewers an active role as researchers at the exhibition spaces, by offering them tools to learn about and play with the content of the exhibition in different fashions. For this purpose, a curatorial team designed and built several interfaces for the museum space, but particullarly for the so called “labs”, spaces where users could explore the works of each of the eight artists as well as complementary information.

I designed and developed an application for touchscreen for dynamic playing of videos and also a web site for local consulting of the OASIS database. An overview of the result in this video (in german – better if you rightclick and open in new window).

The experience wih the OASIS archive, which is an EU funded project aiming to compile a digital research and conservation center for the digital arts, motivated the now personal question about this subject. In the exhibition, each of the artists had one dedicated OASIS station where the public could take a deep exploration of their work in form of written documentation and work analysis. This allowed people not just to see the exhibition but to approach the artist’s works with an improved understanding of their context, even going as deep as to explore interactively the tools and techniques used for their production.

This could be done similarly within a media-art-research perspective, where information is rather chaotic and disperse, concentrating around communities or artists themselves. One of the purposes to start this site, is partially to develop a small-scale project that offers sufficient information about projects that interest me or the public in general and set a more or less complete database that allow other creators to learn from the given research.