Opening tonight: Reflektor Distortion by our first ever cover star, Carsten Nicolai, at Galerie Eigen+Art, experimenting with hree states of a reflection: mirroring, distortion, and disturbance. Sounds like prime Nicolai to us, and see you there.

Carsten Nicolai: Reflektor Distortion
21 April – 28 May 2016

Galerie Eigen+Art
Auguststraße 26
D – 10117 Berlin

The concept of the “Open Form”, initially formulated by Polish architect Oskar Hansen (1922–2005) at the XI. CIAM congress in Otterlo, NL, became hugely influential as an early example of participatory and indeterminate thinking. Through Hansen’s work as a professor at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, it transgressed the limits of architecture and was further developed by young artists and experimental filmmakers in Poland in the 1970s. On the occasion of the publication Open Form – Space, Interaction, and the Tradition of Oskar Hansen (Sternberg Press), Axel Wieder and Florian Zeyfang will introduce the history of the Open Form and show a selection of films from Hansen’s former students that focus on spatial pedagogies.

Photo: Oskar Hansen at the AICA congress in Wroclaw, 1975, photo: S. Stepniewski, courtesy of Igor Hansen

We have seen consumer drones used for choreographical endeavors and music contextualization from above. Frensh philosopher Grégoire Chamayou inquires in the less creative but more destructive use of military predator drones.

Essentially, by combining modern weaponry in unmanned vehicles with remote video monitoring, military forces have found a way to project power which is entirely risk-free for the attacking combatants. In a more cultural perspective the panoptic surveillance of this technology could be understood as a strategy to repress the anxiety inflicted by terror warfare.

Inside the drone human targets are converted to enemy pixels. In the prelude of his latest book “Drone Theory” Chamayou protocols the monologue of a predator drone in operation:

00:45 GMT (05:15 in Afghanistan)

PILOT: Is that a [expletive] rifle?
SENSOR OPERATOR: Maybe just a warm spot from where he was sitting. Can’t really tell right now, but it does look like an object.
PILOT: I was hoping we could make a rifle out, never mind.
…

01:05

SENSOR OPERATOR: The truck would make a beautiful target. OK, that’s a Chevy Suburban.
PILOT: Yeah.
SENSOR OPERATOR: Yeah.
…

01:07

MISSION INTELLIGENCE COORDINATOR: Screener said at least one child near SUV.
SENSOR OPERATOR: Bull [expletive] … where?
SENSOR OPERATOR: Send me a [expletive] still, I don’t think they have kids out at this hour, I know they are shady but come on.
…

SENSOR OPERATOR: Well, maybe a teenager but I haven’t seen anything that short, granted they’re all grouped up here, but …
MISSION INTELLIGENCE COORDINATOR: They’re reviewing …
PILOT: Yeah, review that [expletive] …why didn’t he say possibl child, why are they so quick to call [expletive] kids but not to call a [expletive] rifle?
MISSION INTELLIGENCE COORDINATOR: Two children were at the rear of the SUV.

Artwork by Marcel Storr

The winner of the contest will receive $500 and their story will be published inMcSweeney’s 51, in August 2015. You can read more here.

HAPPY CREATIVE WRITING!

La Muralla Roja

All images by Taller de Arquitectura

While our previous issue with Brian Eno had been somewhat of a colour explosion on paper, our issue #35 was an exercise in restraint and discipline. Designed by our Israeli friends Nirit Binyamini and Gila Kaplan, who had already penned a few issues for us, we approached the issue the same way as Marina Abramović would approach a performance: give yourself a set of rules, fill with content, give up control. In our case, the rules were a set of different grids, font sizes, and structural decisions for each of the issue’s elements: images, captions, headlines, interview. These were then played out without mercy, no matter if they complimented each other or not, if they led to funny page breaks or odd positionings – all the things any decent designer would normally spend many hours trying to work a way around. Starting on the cover page and working its relentless way to he inside back cover, we just let the system run its course – just like Marina would. Sounds easy, but of course it never is.

A particular pleasure, of course, was the image material – a personal selection by Marina of works that she regards as the most important in her career. With the interview focusing on the recent years of her revival since the MoMA retrospective, the images and projects provided a nice timeline and background to get a better understanding of the present. And it was a little surprising to see that her works of the 1970s are just as shocking today as they must have been back then.

In the tradition of the classic literary magazine, the Berlin Quarterly proposes a series of essays and fiction, on the current state of Serbia, or the state of the publishing industry being dragged into the 21st century with e-books, alongside portfolios of Ernst Haeckel’s legendary Kunstformen der Natur or a photographic series on the radical rebuilding of China’s cities by Sze Tsung Leong. And if these might seem a little haphazard at first sight, then one could argue that they all examine modern life in the throes of change and progress: a state torn between its old nationalistic ways or opening up to the world, another country that is firmly set on erasing its past, an industry that hasn’t changed its business model for decades faced with the challenges of the digital world. And change, we know a thing or two about in Berlin.