Three options, which can coexist -because structures are for sissy's- to work with, speak to, have an encounter with the material of the archive (or other mild forms of activating the archive material that is not aiming for a complete didactical/informational overview).

3) Repetition; repeating or mimicking opposing points, spatial traversals, contingencies that are already present in the archive in my day to day environment. Includes: studio, storage space. (kind of complex)


(from left to right)
Digital print job-square Enschede 2o07,
A2 glossy paper grey,
A1 copy plan Social Service Enschede 1969,
perforated board,
lab stool,
MDF board grey,
tripod,
window half-opened.

View from my studio window, Hengelo, 2009.

1) The porosity of time.
Following the grid through different topologies/ time: Exhibition '1940-1945' in the basement of the Social Service, Nijmegen, 1969 - Documentation of Steven Willats displays (He still makes use of the same display strategies for his schemes and grids as he did in the 60's.) - The job-square in Enschede where the grid is applied on walls with a decorative function. - The use of the grid in my studio and Artis.


I have thousand of these images, but haven't found a way to work with Picasa albums yet, I would like to put some restriction on their public accessibility.

2) Color coding, possibly material listing (reflection, absorption) and sort of lighting (daylight, artificial), because these conditions affect the colors naturally:

• Social Service 1986 (Leiden): television tube colors; blue, green, red.
• The archive dossiers (Amsterdam); pale- brown, green, pink.
• Depository (Nijmegen): apple green, artificial light: fluorescent daylight and warmlight.
• Job-square (Enschede): orange, others use bright colors like; apple green, magenta, blue
  
• Studio (Hengelo/Maastricht): grey, white, beige (considered neutral colors)

Perhaps this is a good handhold for you (Andreas) to work with?

Sliding from improbability into reality

Oblique Violence

The images you'd posted some while ago titled: Destabilizers, made me think of a discussion that came up during the diagram cluster about the distinction between games and experiments or play and simulation. Clearly the Pendular Destabilizer tends to be more of an experiment or a simulative environment, but for example Theo's wooden block has a playful element to it. With these destabilizers in mind I'm going to think and write towards the destabilizing moment in the works and photographs that accompany this text. The distortion that took place in the reproduction of an archive image is perspectively 'corrected' in the installation with a floating cardboard which serves as a projection surface and is suspended in the same oblique angle as the angle of the camera set up during the moment of reproduction. In this process a trapezium of residual light, that is nevertheless part of the reproduction is cast on the wall/door/door frame/window. This is quite a technical and formal shift, which analyses the moment of reproduction; camera (production) and projector (presentation) can in fact be swapped and with it the original event leaks into the documentation, the original location into a new location. The installment with the floating cardboard suspended with fish wire is quite a different language that speaks of the stance towards the subject (matter). The gesture perhaps opposes the technocratic, 'impersonal' procedure of distortion and correction. It is a nostalgic act, that is elaborated on by the Malevich like shaped leaking projection light on the back wall. Talking about Nostalgia, romanticism and desire are not far off.



Does describing the work get me anywhere?

PARTICIPATION-INTERACTION-ACTIVATION
Actually the destabilizer appears more in this context: openness/passive - aggression/ active. In the dialogue with Ruth before she coined the term passive design in relation to flexible furniture. The slope, obligue angle in this relation destabilises patterns of expectation. Perhaps, if not too abstract, it (they) can destabilise expectations of the past and patterns of the future, or something.



Studying these destabilising environments a bit closer I found that the physical and visual disorientation can take place among others through the disruption of the equilibrium between floor, wall and ceiling. (Floor and dust, wall and frame, window and view.)
Shades, reflections cast on anything without making a distinction between the different dimensions, humans or objects. These shades, reflections also disturbs the density of joints or intersections that often define the transition from one dimension to another, or one space to another. When these densities of intersection are more diffusely spread in space, the space transforms; inverted, turned upside down, at odds with gravity.

Video class

In this introduction video of a documentary from '86, titled: "Local Social Service; Right or Rule, part 1,
a woman's voice explains the content of this documentary that we are about to see. As background music one can hear a synthesizer play a riddle with a repetitive theme.
I imagine this video screened on a box monitor placed in the vicinity of a wall, which reflects the characteristic bright colors inherent to the outdated ('timed') technology of the television tube; yellow, green, green, blue and red.
This setup naturally in relation to the not yet finished video-class, where the gestures are floating or activated in a state of suspension.

Acting quickly, or inappropriately may destabalise but may also give several employment oppurtunities

Destabilizers

Destabilizers

In 1966 the architects Claude Parent and Paul Virilio published nine issues of their magazine “Architecture Principe” in Paris. Their manifestoes on “The Function of the Oblique” reconsidered the idea of human orientation in relation to the inclined plane and the oblique axis, and were meant to destabilize both contemporary modern and postmodern perceptions of space. Starting from the spatial experiences of a human body moving on an inclined plane, Parent and Virilio conceived various experimental installations, among them the French Pavilion in the 1970 Venice Architecture Biennial and Parents own house in Neuilly-sur-Seine. One of their last common projects was a self-experiment in inhabiting the oblique, called the “Instabilisateur Pendulaire“(Pendular Destabilizer). Both Parent and Virilio were planning to inhabit a capsular space hung up in an angle on the campus of the University of Nanterre, monitored by sociologists and medical scientists. Due to the beginning of the student uprisings in Nanterre in 1968, this experiment was never realized.

Why do you think I'm standing closer to you than you are to me?

Interview :T-shirts available to purchase

Limited edition t-shirts are now available to order from us throughout the duration of the exhibition at the Bonnefantenmuseum. Each of the 4 texts is taken from the interview with us conducted by Agata  Jastrzabek that has since been published in the exhbition catalogue. 

T-shirts are €15 each +postage/packaging and are available in white with black text in a variety of sizes. 

Orders can be made up to and including the 25th January 2009 via rachel.koolen@janvaneyck.nl, please allow 20 days for delivery.

Open displays for particular viewership

http://picasaweb.google.de/ndrsmllr/Fotos?authkey=mdecyT0oCgA#

"In the Desert of Modernity", Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
curated by Marion von Osten, Serhat Karakayali, Tom Avermaete, exhbition design by Jesko Fezer, Andreas Müller and Anna Voswinkel

Each 'item' to be included in the exhibition was approached as a surface of display, in that each work had its display formated to its physical presence, This to me seemed a very good way to make a kind of physical confrontation with items which may have had much less resonance if presented in a 'standard' format- in that much of it was source material, posters/models etc. So then they took the standard format of the display (especially if we think of the kind of informative display of the idea of 'visitor centre'  which become part of the langugage of visiting architectural sites -the Schröder Huis will, for example, get a new visitors centre this winter and when I visited Buckminster Fullers dome near Montreal this was sort of all there was, the dome itself was dying ) and specified it. If Andreas said that Rossi was using normative typologies in a kind of unspecific way then this would be opposite, staging an openenss by using a recognizable form and then specifying it by adjusting it to the materiality of the posing item.

And other concrete objects

Sound console

Tripod with over sized light bulb on timer/ 'If I ever filmed this text'

Hoffmann tables/ vitrines

Flexible multifunctional display