X Subroutines / Kunsthalle Bern
X Subroutines / Kunsthalle Bern
The exhibition project “X Subroutines” joins together four different works ranging in time from 2002 to 2004: “On Display” (2002), “blindstorey / silencetracks” (2003), “X Characters / RE(hers)AL” (2003/4) up to the newly produced “X NaNa / Subroutine” (2004).
PROGRAMS
In computer science, a subroutine (function, procedure, or subprogram)
is a sequence of code, which performs a specific task as part of a
larger program; such code is sometimes collected into software
libraries. Within the institutional framework of the Kunsthalle
Bern, the exhibition is conceived as a program that joins together
these four works as a library of subroutines, as “subscripts” based on
the syntax of cinema and new media. This program “X Subroutines” is
configured to render a cosmology structured by indexical ornamentation,
auditory spatiality, spatial narratives and performative scripting
processes.
SCRIPTS
Each of the four works represents a different expression of a shared heritage, which particularly draws from the relation between the languages of cinema and new media. Both these languages address either spectators or users and are based on different philosophies. The works in the exhibition introduce these as distinct methodologies and set them within a contemporary artistic practice, in order to utilize the dynamic of difference between. Through this dynamic, the four works operate like distinct scripts to structure a narrative of contemporary desires for unity and completeness embedded in technological transmissions.
In the exhibition, the narratives range from baroque evocations to modernist invocations. They pass through ornamentations as projection devices. They create synesthetic soundtracks to the silent passions inscribed into an architectural interface, which is suspended between heaven and earth. They move further to re-engineer female characters from modernist cinema dwelling in a suspension of time, who transition from scripted symptoms to anti-roles in the performative setting of new media.
CONFIGURATION
The program configuration for “X Subroutines” forms a shell of new media, within which a cinema ontology sets, via the source code of ”figure”, two tropes in a dialog: character and ornament. The method by which those figures are assembled into a montage constitutes the spatiality of the program. Here, a dual character emerges: a synthetic trope whose presence is rendered in the traces contained within different scripts. These scripts belong to the concepts of architectural ornament and cinema character, and together perform the syntax of the exhibition’s operating system. The program configures a cosmology by considering a methodology instead of a sequence of works. It operates through the dynamics of the transgressions and desires embedded in different characters to script out a media-related inverse-passion play of identity.
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| Display / Identity / Performance Subroutine, Kunsthalle Bern, 2004 |
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| Sound Subroutine, Kunsthalle Bern, 2004 |
DISPLAY SUBROUTINE: ON DISPLAY / ORNAMENT
The trope as deviation from the straight line and aversion to the unknown yields the figure of a straight line around which the curved one is entwined like a tendril. In this case, the status of the trope is that of an ornament that envelops what is certain without essentially affecting it. However, it is also conceivable that the trope seizes the straight line as a whole and bends it. Then the trope is not ornament but structure, and there is no firm ground left beneath the feet.
From: Jon Verstegen, Tropisms
In relation to a culture represented by artifacts, the vitrine is a hallmark for the museological condition, whose conventions carry over to the art institutional framework. Vitrines display relations in the moment of ”vitrinisation”, cultural artifacts arranged inside of a timeless vacuum. Here, the vitrine also serves as a ‘source code’ organizing the institutional ”raumplan” of the exhibition ”X Subroutines”. Positioned in the first room of the exhibition parcours, the vitrine displays itself, or rather, a skewed re-scripting of its characteristics into a weave of ornamental configurations, characters, and projections. Its showcase displays interrelations of distinct structures: technology as transmission revealing an invisible ornament as a contemporary entanglement.
The twisting cable connects the clues which appear as feedback loops of desires embedded in contemporary technology. From hidden power sources, flowing signals emerge which feed into a scopic fetish; in the base is embedded a figure - the figure of a leg as character, now a remainder, like the evidence of a case, sealed off, disconnected from any motive. It belongs to the flotsam of culture as isolated object on display: a left-over phantasm of completeness lingering within a narrative telling of desires. Vitrines serve to support projection. Here is framed and fixed by a silhouette derived of the curved figure of leg, as a disconnected clue enabling an observational space suspended in transmission between between dream and projection.
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| Installation View |
Signals and Stories
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| Display Subroutine / Installation view, Kunsthalle Bern 2004 | |
The showcase reflects the space of exchange between subject and
object; along the dynamic line shared between two processes of
conversion that always leave remainders behind. Inside, a cable
carrying electrical currents tentatively traces something no longer
there, but still embedded within: the signal of an inscription charged
with the energy of the symbolic. The showcase is grounded in a world of
room objects deemed to have special value and function within the
conventions of the exhibition space, where even the disembodied
experience of watching a film is transformable into the language of
object commodity. The line of a cable traces a search pattern out
amongst the gaps left between incomplete story lines in the imaginary.
It routes through symbolic objects as means of recuperating the real,
channeling the energy between projection and fetish in a universe of
disassemblage, where a tale of unity is transferred to the mystery of
appearances and firmly grounded on substitute objects.
A showcase operates as a repository of
objects to be contemplated, a look ascribed to values, all focused
through an ideology with an ideal functional unity set between object
and framework. This showcase is an inversion, an event displaying its
principles inside out with rules rewound to a "container Degree Zero",
to provide a blank space that dissolves the necessity of object and
subject, display and frame, into language. If solid outlines
once secured the display of values, now all is folded together
inseparably and new guidelines are drawn out that pass along the
transgressive articulations of an ornament. Its patterns represent
other methodological movements and contemporary narratives. It displays
patterns of information that cue the current spatiality, where
observation is set on trial display, and the privileged gaze is now
left to follow a cable fee into the memory of a camera figuring through
digital space, the clues left of mysterious passages underway by
subjectivities unfolding and transforming.
Container
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| Digital model of table leg | |
The showcase is not a container of objects, but a generator of
vision. An ornamental transmission takes place that orients along the
turns and tangles of an electrical cable to dissolve into the ornament
with which a piece of furniture (a fake Chippendale leg) is adorned. An
actual body appears that is subjected to the economies of the
physiological as well as the psychological, a world half body, half
mind, and based on a tenuous system of circulation and exchange. The
head connects to the body through the twisting and bending of an
electrical cable which then connects to the leg: a fetish recuperating
the real as a unity that has been disassembled, a part of an object
replacing the lost one in vain. While the cable carries electrical
currents, the leg is charged with the energy of the symbolic. It is the
only thing that entirely rests on the ground inside of this spatial
collage, and it grounds that which again generates spaces. The real
thus is communicated through the syntax of a language of objects, and
is condensed into supplementary interfaces (a leg, a case) that is
there not to show and display, but to expose: to make the real visible
through rendering the processes of transmission and communication woven
within.
At the same time, the cable suggests the path of the
virtual camera, as if the movement of this invisible eye had become a
spatial gesture that leaves a trace in the world. In the film, the
camera path is charged with the energy of the visual. In the showcase
as parallel universe to the film - a different form of diegesis - the
cable is charged with electricity. Thus, projection and space become a
synthetic character: a spatial collage consisting of visible and
invisible ornaments, of generative and generated traces. The eye
follows the path of the cable as it follows the path of the camera,
both evolving as ornaments within closed, though distinct diegetic
containers. The emptiness of the case actualizes the space as well as
the real as constructions to always be analysed anew.
Scripts
The showcase is a format,
a set of scripts running that displays a finished image rendered in
hidden line mode. It is presented in a virtual space set to "world",
and it represents a synthetic character generated as a staging of
different links between otherwise separate worlds, (hard) drives,
events, sceneries. Within this operating system, the electrical cable
passes along the unstable outlines of energy forms produced by an array
of calculations and algorithms. It embodies the path of a cursor
guiding through the logic of this "world" setting, where a range of
hybrid logics, structures and links converge as new subjects and
subjectivities.
Along its passage shared between unknown and familiar gestures, the
line becomes an interface, emulating the secure logic of a camera, but
whose principles and operating rules are no longer harnessed to
gravity, but to calculations in a space of rendered proposals. In this
spatial configuration, orientation is sensed like a script unfolding
along the route in the format of establishing shots, "scenic views" of
the traces left by the camera. Routed between real and virtual
characters, subjectivity is always at the verge, a rendered
representation set in between the familiar and the uncanny.
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| Installation view |
Cables
The showcase displays a prolonged instance seized from within the flux
of currents and signals, a tenuous point in time only momentarily
stabilized into a shape that is always in danger of exceeding itself.
Through the case passes the line of a cable, it is shielding a reminder
of the dynamic at work within, as signals pass to transmit onto network
connections: assailable signs always at the verge of short circuit.
Through the case passes the line of a cable, it is shielding a
reminder of the dynamic at work within, as signals pass to transmit
onto network connections: assailable signs always at the verge of short
circuit. A showcase offers a reliable space as long as it operates in a
closed world of static objects and fixed meanings. But here, the line
of the cable moves between and along the way. It weaves the fabric of the real as well as it signals a distinct
conversion of worlds: from object to syntax, container to language,
commodification to communication.
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| Ornamental eye / Digital models of details from table leg |
IDENTITY SUBROUTINE: X NANA / SUBROUTINE
The spline can be regarded as the diagram of divergent trajectories, like that of the metropolitan flaneur, or of the words in a text. The baroque stylistic figures used so intensively by Ponge, such as amplification, the hyperbole, variations and repetitions, the use of single and double parentheses, the sudden changes of direction and retractions, can be regarded as the hanging weights that determine the form of the trajectory of the object/concept in interaction with its environment. (… )The spline can refer to the trajectory of an object, but also to the trajectory of that object in space and time.
From: Jon Verstegen, Tropisms ”X NaNa…” is the first of a series of planned character-spinoffs from the feature production ”X Characters / RE(hers)AL”. Its script is developed as a subroutine to the overall ”X Characters…” as program, which drew female characters from a set of existing films from auteur through modernist to Hollywood mainstream to be continued as new characters/voices. The character of NaNa refers to the Godard film Vivre sa vie (F 1962). In this new production, the character NaNa is faced with the dilemma of confronting her heritage – the director Godard who searches for her, and her ‘source code’, the film Vivre sa vie. She attempts to make a legitimate income as sales girl in a record store, to avoid falling back to her former illicit activities as a data-bootleger. With the surprise entrance of a former colleague-in-trade, and his offer of a job ”with her name written all over it”, she finds herself on the verge of being caught within a scenario she vowed never to return to. She decides to undertake actions which produce a technological detour/derive that creates a narrative ellipsis moving in two opposite directions. By refusing the ordained ending she resolves her fate in her own terms, producing a loop which only she is able to break.
Throughout the movie "X NaNa - Subroutine", NaNa carries with her a book that carries her name, its cover imprinted with a classicist ornament, a symbol representing the sun. Adapted from the same motive seen above in the Kunsthalle skylight, it symbolizes light and further, projection. As an architectural element of the glass ceiling, it marks off cosmos and earthly realms, and weaves together interior and exterior thus establishing a seamless architectural continuity. This book that NaNa carries in the film returns to become a new architectural element within the exhibition, here scaled up to a free-standing wall display. One one side, the book jacket frames the actual film presentation. On the other, the language of the shot is framed by the movement of the book through a scene in the film. For this, the vitrine is enlisted, its structure unfolded and turned inside-out to become a layout for a presentational format. The wall unit thus represents a hyphen between the exhibition spaces and the scripts of the different works. It becomes an interface joining architecture and story, vitrine and object of display in a tautological turn.
”X NaNa..:” tells of a character’s movement through the empty cores of the contemporary media world. It recounts the story of her existence as a movement from symptom to trope to Mnemosyne and finally, to a contemporary movie character.
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| Anna Karina as Nana / Annika Kuhl as NaNa |
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| Exhibition poster / installation view of the main space in Kunsthalle Bern |
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| Filmposter |
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| Stills from X NaNa / Subroutine (Annika Kuhl, Gary Wilmes) |
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| Stills from Vivre sa vie (reconfigured) |
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| Ceiling ornament, Kunsthalle, main space |
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| Book cover |
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| Installation views |
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| Installation views / X NaNa / Subroutine (H. Farocki) |
PERFORMANCE SUBROUTINE: X CHARACTES / RE(HERS)AL
Reading women’s travel writing, one notices an absence of the past. Women who leave are not nostalgic. They desire what they have not had, and they look for it in the future. The desire does not take shape as ‘return’ but rather as ‘voyage.’ Nostalgia is substituted by dislocation.
Paola Melchiori, quoted in: Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, 2002
CHARACTER OUTLINE
X Characters: RE(hers)AL releases seven female characters from seven different movies – each an icon from the history of modernist cinema – and joins them together as a gang of fellow travelers stuck in the boarding area of an airport. Detoured and out of their historical routines, the seven characters begin to get their bearings in a situation – a crossroads disguised as a holding pattern. Routes intersect, and new patterns emerge as these sleepwalkers, androids, phantasms, prostitutes, and murder victims start to establish relations and new forms of behavior to connect the gaps in their scripts along the lines of a speculative orientation towards an unknown future.
CHARACTERS AS SIGNIFIERS
X Characters: RE(hers)AL develops new characters for future productions. It attempts to envision a contemporary discourse through considering correspondences between eras of feminist film theory and practice, and contemporary constructions of female representation populating the screen. It anchors back to differing notions of ”women’s voices” in modernist cinema, and from there develops a performative, character-driven site between cinema, theater, and new media. Its characters are selected from different film scripts, ranging from 1960s auteur to modernist cinema to the borderline of the postmodern 1980s.
The original characters suggest a social and cultural transformation occurring within the modernist paradigm represented in cinematic discourse, where the potential of female characters usually remained safely interred within the conventional modernist canon. The seven characters were chosen as signifiers to enable the shaping of new dialogues and voices, re-scripted along the lines of new media. What is omitted from the original movie scripts – that which is left unsaid – becomes the starting point for X Characters: RE(hers)AL to begin routing through new narratives.
CHARACTER PRODUCTION
Over the course of a year, invited participants met on a regular basis in a chat room where each embodied one character in the framework of an improvisational performance chat group. Discussions and dialogues were developed around moderated subjects and situations. The participants were meant to reconfigure and adapt the characters’ original profiles, thus operating in the gap between their own identities and the characters’ desires. The results obtained within this first performative movement were used as basic outline for a script, which was edited and transformed. This script charts the movement of both the character’s passage and the rites of the story, and was finally realized as a staged performance with seven Berlin-based actresses to be recorded on video. The script and production of X Characters: RE(hers)AL is a process that converts the character templates into projection screens, channels of desire that constitute a switchboard for networking sets of communicative signals and shifting identities.
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| X Characters / RE(hers)AL: Projektionsraum, Poster |
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| Kunsthalle Bern / Projektionsraum / Details |
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| Faye Dunaway, Bibi Andersson, Monica Vitti, Natalya Bondartchuk, Anna Karina, Sean Young |
SOUND SUBROUTINE: BLINDSTOREY / SILENCETRACKS
The philosopher Leibnitz constructed his Baroque vision on the omnipresent bends and folds of the world: the folds in fabrics and clothing, the folds of the skin, the folds of mountain ridges, the ripples of the wind in the sand, of the waves in the sea, the folds in Baroque painting and sculpture, in architectural spaces, and in the fugue that unfolds in endless variations. (…) So the world unfolds under the condition of limited vision, in endless new variations and turns.
From: Jon Verstegen, Tropisms
In the Baroque world, painted ceilings framed by ornamental configurations represented key interfaces between cosmos and secular world. The projection of a trompe l’oeuil frame around an allegorical ceiling painting unfolded as a narrative of synasthesia. This constellation expressed a worldview re-emphasizing the role of desires restrained earlier in the Renaissance order. These desires reappear here formulated inside of new scripts, which delimit and appeal to the senses, while animating the architecture of passions. The baroque fold whose dynamic sets in motion the allegory and painting frame anticipates the moving imagery of cinema, as a dioramic trompe l’oeuil of time, space and narration.
In ”blindstorey”, this ornament-as-interface is newly scripted through the digital, the computer which sutures Baroque and modernist spatial narratives. Acoustic primacy replaces the visual regime, in order to foreground a different kind of sensory experience. It utilizes silences drawn from film soundtracks, as interstitial moments of films that share a common theme: the lack of vision, blindness. From the seemingly absence of sound, ”silence tracks” are developed. Audible ”silences” are brought into play to script out ideas of pleasures, release, containment and sensuality in order to locate a ”self” through the senses.
These silence-tracks develop a new, contemporary trompe l’oeuil interface by serving as a compositional score and script to generate a digital, three-dimensional frame. The rendered imagery provides an architectural doubling of one ceiling onto another in the space of the Kunsthalle. By this it creates an architectural overlap and interfaces a contemporary architectural baroque, a synthetic future space which connects to the computer as well.The absence of sound from movie soundtracks – the ”silences” of a film – is employed to script this trompe l’oeuil interface around an oculus left empty. This perspective once belonging to God, is now a void to allow for a different (human) perspectives and projections upon cosmos and sky.
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| Installationsansichten Kunsthalle Bern |
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| Klosterbibliothek Stift Admont / Deckenfresko von Bartolomeo Altamonte |
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| Wireframes / Digitale Modelle des Fresko-Rahmens |
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| Installationsansichten / Klosterbibliothek Stift Admont |
