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Creative research about the memory of the body

GERMAN | DOWNLOAD PDF

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"To be is to be the value of a variable."

Willard Van Orman Quine, 1939

fogpatch is a creative research project at Furtwangen University about postmedial realities. It is reconstructing a traumatic body experience of the German cybernetician Max Bense described in the text Existenzmitteilung aus San Franzisko published in 1970. The installation seismic body signals as part of the fogpatch research is dealing with the impact of infrasounds on the body of Bense. Seismic signals and recordings from the Golden Gate Bridge are interfering with the thoughts of a cartesian philosopher, who worked in depth on the intersection of art and technology.

"A parabola! A trap! You were never immune over there from the simple-minded German symphonic arc, tonic to dominant, back again to tonic."

STORY

The cybernetician Max Bense (1910-1990) was a passionate representative of the classical modern. His philosophy is an attempt at a synthesis of art and technology and at the same time a contribution to our feedback-loop-controlled world of Pervasive Computing.

At the age of 60 the cybernetician Max Bense experiences the onset of the irrational in his own body. During a four-day stay in San Francisco in August 1969 he misses the bus in Sausalito. As the physicist Bense walks back to the city over the Golden Gate Bridge, he encounters a highly complex system of particles. A fog bank rolling in from the Pacific causes the temperature to fall by 15°C in an instant; the fog envelops the parabola of the steel construction and drives the power of speech out of the word and gesture generator. The shock causes Bense to experience a nasty renal colic and mortal fear the following night. He makes his first attempts at articulation and coming to terms with the experience in the Existence Statement from San Francisco. This contains two contrasting observer roles in alternating methodically varying writing styles. On one side are Bense's subjective feelings, and on the other his sober rationalising of the situation. Switching between concrete and abstract style, between semantic and syntactical techniques, as the author has explained elsewhere - like an observer of first and second order in system theory.

The body state that he longs for here is entirely denerved. At the same time as Jimmy Hendrix’s Feedback orgy in Woodstock, Bense on the swaying bridge only wants "to be like hair, strong and fine, sensitive, wordless and painless" - feedback entirely without a body. As a result of the pain, the Space and I of his Technical Existence* loose their balance.

 * Titles of books by Max Bense from 1934 and 1951

Max Bense on the Golden Gate Bridge, August 1970

RESEARCH

The seismic body signals installation is embedded in the superordinate concept of fogpatch. It poses questions about chance and the probability of existential path decisions without wanting to answer them mathematically; Bense’s existence message asks seismologically about the next Big Bang, meteorologically about the probability of fog formation, somatically about the next colic and situationally about the next bus.

Cybernetic capitalism in the form of Google et al. wants to control chance with the help of modern computer technology and stochastic calculations, and to this end it is conducting an enormous project of simulation modelling. People become particles in the emergent swarm and in the fluid circulation they clock just in time, pseudo-personalised and on-demand. Cybernetic control-loop utopias of the 1950s are once more in high regard, fully in accordance with Norbert Wiener`s promise of "control and communication in the animal and the machine".

Simulation of the ecological system. Bay Model from the U.S. Army in Sausalito, the starting point of the Existence Statement

INFRASOUNDS

The seismic body signals installation concentrates on the phenomenon of infra-sound in the context of Max Bense’s existence message. There is a very high occurrence of such sound waves on the Golden Gate Bridge, like nowhere else on earth. These frequencies that cause anxiety among humans and animals have various causes at the exposed location of the bridge.

The San-Andreas Fault is a transforming disturbance where the Pacific plate is sliding past the north-American plate near the Golden Gate bridge. The friction of the plates constantly produces seismic waves and infrasound in the inaudible region between 2 and 15 Hz. Furthermore, the wind, that is usually very strong, causes oscillations like an aeolian harp in the vertical bridge cables that have a length up to 160 m, as can be made graphically visible with a slit-scan image.

Vertical slit scan of the cables

The bridge’s two 230 m high steel pylons with hollow interiors act like the resonating body of a gigantic string instrument. The heavy traffic on the Golden Gate bridge also transfers kinetic energy to the structure and this causes oscillations at its resonant frequencies. A further source of infra-sound is the sea waves from the Pacific. In interviews, visitors to the bridge talk about the feelings in their bodies.

Infra-sound recordings at the Golden Gate Bridge, May 2008

INSTALLATION

In the sound and video collage seismic body signals, low-frequency oscillations are transmitted from an earthquake monitoring station in California and control the progress of the sessions, each of 23 minutes, the time it takes to cross the 2.7 km [1.7 miles] length of the bridge. The 3000 separate steps this requires are the clock generator of the installation (2.17/sec).

During a 23-minute walk along the bridge the parabola of the bridge is annotated from left to right with the seismic disturbances

In a set-up in the laboratory a liquid-filled Petri dish is stimulated with the infrasound recordings of the bridge body, the resulting patterns and particle motions filmed with a camera and projected next to videorecordings of the Golden Gate bridge. At the bottom of the Petri dish unstable wave patterns form, that are very similar to the formations on the sea bed of the Bay. The laboratory environment of the installation is a reminder of the attempt by cybernetics to use the feedback principle to gain control over the world and consciousness.

When the signals from California are strong, infrasound recordings of the bridge cables and pylons of the Golden Gate bridge made with a special microphone are introduced. When fog is forming the foghorn can be heard.

Infrasounds from the Bay are a trigger of colic, a painful curvature of the body and word aphasia are the consequence. In the seismic quiet periods there is a uniform rhythm of movement and thought, a dot-matrix printer produces stochastic deconstructions of the existence message. The signal flow gives rise to a musical feedback loop of a closed world of thought that is brought into oscillation by external influences.

EXHIBITION

in the former Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam

Opening July 10

Jury Feedback about the methodology of seismic body singals as creative research

"For us fogpatch shows an alternative method that is worth to consider for us in the future: instead of narrowing down from a general theme, you deepened and broadened from a relatively small incident. Another difference compared to out approach is that you don't seem to explicitly state or ask something. A positive effect is that this leaves space for personal interpretation. Another effect, however, is that it won't have a guaranteed impact. We appreciate the design of the whole installation, and the time and effort you put into this. Moreover we like the real-time communication with California. This work is clearly ready for exhibition."

NEXT STEPS

seismic body signals is intended to be exhibited and performed at the end of 2008 as a performance with a cybernetic object. An exhibition in Stuttgart and San Francisco is planned for the 100th anniversary of Max Bense’s birth in 2010.

The cybernetic object developed together with the technology partner FESTO is a synthesis of the stressed design of the Golden Gate bridge and the bodily stress felt by Max Bense in the pain of colic. It is a somatic creation, a hybrid body of stresses and curvatures that, like the bridge structure, corresponds to the ideal dimensions of information esthetics. The object is implemented as a tensegrity with compression elements and tension elements. This classical-modern form of design goes back to Buckminster Fuller and is optimised for static loads. On the other hand, the hybrid fogpatch body, with pneumatic muscles, becomes a dynamic object with a closed control loop, that can contract like colic.

First prototyp of the hybrid body as cybernetic object, January 2008

In a performance with Georg Hobmeier , the boundaries between object, process and structure disappear. Random seismic signals from the Bay area influence the pneumatic muscles of the cybernetic object and at the same time the muscles of the dancer in the form of pulses of current.

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Bense’s body memory is reactivated through the traumatic experience of the pain of renal colic; emotionality and precision are here no contradiction. Hobmeier alias Bense gives information in the form of a fictitious interview about his journey to San Fransisco. In the style of the TV-discussion between Max Bense, Joseph Beuys, Arnold Gehlen and Max Bill of January 1970, there is an inquiry lasting 23 minutes.