verortnet 01
„Stadtplan Wien”

installation (video1 min, prints)
vienna 2002

With this work, I propose a re-construction of a city map of Vienna (the city where I live and inter-act). The order of the map is questioned, not with a destructive claim (everybody needs a map!) but in order to assess the limits of a representative structure.
The procedure of re-construction is carried on in two steps:
I first cut a map of the city of Vienna along its grids and built up a video clip in which the single patches of the previous map constitute the unities of an evolving shape, constructed by implementation of a mathematical model derived from chaos theory (Tsuda1996). Here the information (or entropy) contained in a system is described as continuous growth.
I subsequently reconstructed a pattern using 32 sheets of paper whose dimensions were proportional to those of the patches previously cut out. The reconstitution was also nearly proportional to the initial map.
In each of these sheets a configuration derived by „extracting” details of the video clip was shown. The sheets were put on a table without being stuck down: the pattern which is shown is just a possibility, it disclaims any connotation of „objectivity”. Furthermore, by the horizontal disposition, there is no central focal point where the viewer could grasp the map as a homogeneous whole.

The city is viewed from a dynamic point of view, not as a fixed „given” space - as the construction of a map implies - but as a web where an infinite number of processes take place. A space in which various circulations arise, and are subsequently disentangled or reshaped, circulations that cannot find a place within an aprioristically defined system, the „striate space” of a bi-dimensional Cartesian representation. Circulations that account for the construction of a space organized by forces of various intensities, more than by forms, shapes or configurations (crf. Deleuze Guattari, 1997, 658-674.) Circulations by which miscellaneous areas of the city may form temporary attractions. (associations between city areas might be due to an analogous evolution, but also due to time – space connections drawn by the citizens themselves, by their way of living, their habits and reference places).
The space proposed is ruled by distances and relationships more than unity of measure. A space which, „like time, is emergence and eruption, oriented not to the ordered the controlled, the static, but to the event, the movement, the action” (Grosz 2001, 256). A space in which the mechanisms of linearisation, (f. e. the rasterization of the map), lose their function of classification and control.

Deleuze G., Guattari F., Tausend Plateaus, Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie, aus dem Franz von G. Ricke und R. Voullié, Berlin 1997
Grosz E., The future of Space: Toward an Architecture of Invention, in Olafur Eliasson, Surroundings, Surrounded, Essays on Space and Science, ed. by P. Weibel, Karlsruhe 2001
Tsuda, I., A new type of self-organization associated with chaotic dynamics in neural networks, Int. Journ. Neur. Syst. 7(4) 1996:451-459