Collaborative Comments from Space

Squeezed together around a coffee table in the public sphere, we managed to activate some traces of actions and movements in and around the building,
mainly remains of happenings and events in the Space studios,
spread out as they have been, all over the place,
spaces within spaces, temporary spaces, textile spaces, nomadic structures, tents;
memories of a workshop where large pieces of fabric would run through rooms, cutting through spaces,
Martin by a sewing machine, draped in cloth, trying to handle a non-participatory material, a wicked design problem;
other at times, Richard, Peter F, Peter W and who else, deeply exploring an immersive, kill-crush-and-destroy gaming environment, half alive-half virtual, all of them facing a high resolution screen covering the entire wall;
other occasions more relational, embodied; a sunset barbecue on the quay, another garage-like party on the old loading platsform;
serendipity – always attentive to surplus meanings, as to the sound of cooking, at a party, sampling the noise in order to generate a new kind of interactive and abundant music;
not to forget the many late night serenades created when the alarm went on at parties, an image reinforced by the fact that at that time, the security responsible would have fallen asleep in an armchair with salty sticks stuffed into his ears;
and Thomas B managing to wear out a K3 table two years in a row by dancing on top of it, thereby showing off his own embodied move from systems and tools to stages and props;
Eva B generating her own kind of bubbly and abundant blob architecture using washing up liquid instead of powder in the machine, reminding us of the productivity of cultural clashes;
of irrational interjections and somnambular encounters,
borderline experiences,
like the metabolistic transformation of our everyday environment staged by Horst Kiechle,
or the surreal pilgrimages through the building arranged by Hotel Pro Forma in their Jesus Christ appropriation of the building, spatializing narrativity, opening up unknown spaces, like the corridor behind the Black Box, exploring strange means of moving about, crawling along the walls, encapsulating themselves in plastic containers; moving around on wheels;
and the repeated re-enactments,
showing that that the K3 memory is a short one, and that it perhaps should be;
the Human Aquarium in the Aquarium being one innovative example of a Pro Forma attitude, a social experiment with a group of people on display for 24 hours;
and the fact that we have seen two computerized confession chairs over the years, the first one Annette’s beautiful creation, hypnotizing its confessors;
perhaps even Peter Greenaway would have been blown away had he happened to see it upon his visit; Greenaway more engulfed in his own multimedia universe, at the time Flying Over Water, an artistic fantasy not too related to the themes of participation, user-orientation or interactivity;
and yes, this might reflect the fact that the Space studio was always the austere one, the grave and responsible one, wallpapered with post-it labels and ethnographic snapshots from sewage plants and plastic factories,
and that while the Narrativity studio always kept lots of expectant students on tenterhooks at Open House days, the Space studio with its posters of lorries and industrial control rooms never managed to attract more than one or two puzzled souls;
a cultural difference that also embraces food; while the Narrativity studio explored the storytelling dimensions of ethnic and cross-over nutrients, including the mixture of soja milk and coca-cola, the space studio would live up to its Bauhaus heritage, “Essen bei Muttern”, most often going for a decent German carnivorous meal;
yet, despite its squared appearance, the space studio was also at times playfully staging its events,
its public defenses accompanied by adequate space-tunes, like Sinatra’s Fly Me to the Moon, completely transforming the atmosphere;
only to be transformed again by a sixties hit (“Slit och Släng” med Siw Malmqvist) mediating the fun of ready-made media interaction;
and the odd traces of projects, like the memory of Device H - a fascinating project noone ever understood – a device cutting through the building, from one floor to the other;
as embodied as the memory of a gigantic nose on the wall, synthesizing smells just like its relative, the Silver Fox, an aluminum foil result of physical computing, spraying coffee aroma around through a built-in coffee machine;
and the remains of Gigant, a mobile, physical and social game where you interacted in symbiosis with an electronic Ant, parts of its extremities and food supply still emerging from behind desks and bookshelves once in a while;
and also the recollection of conflicts, of design students reminding the faculty of the radical Bauhaus heritage, draping K3 in images of the masters – Mies, Itten, Kandinsky, some of who also gave name to the first K3 servers; remember how we all used to log on to Gropius every morning if not to pay tribute to him only to remind him of his multiple personality and non-characteristic materiality;
perhaps not much of a conflict but still;
neither was the break between K3 and the Institute particularly grave,
only architecturally quite explicitly manifested, as an outdoor luminous sign-board was mounted indoor,
a minor crisis, like so many similar crises, probably a quite productive one…

By the minutes
Maria