Installation: The Great ArchiveWith support from Kunstfonds e.V., Bonn in 1992-93, I created the installation ""T": Files out of the Great and Small Archives" ("T: Akten aus den großen und kleinen Archiven") in the Ozwei Gallery in Berlin which focused many of my recurring interests and included many of the materials which I had been gathering during the preceding years under "one roof". I had long been interested in moving beyond the proscenium space of the "hypertext opera" performance project and this indicated a new direction in installation as well as in performance. This installation contained original historical archive documents, "text-objects" and video and has formed the conceptual basis for a number of installation/performance projects since. Influenced by use of the Data/Text projections in the Opera performance, I proposed to limit the installation to the display of texts in rooms. The installation would include no images, but would show related texts and documentation about Memory, History and Biography functioning as images, as objects and as information. Memory is not only a question of time, but that of a "space" for remembrance and archival storage. My interest in the connection between memory and the archive, which has since become more and more important in my work has derived from my years of experience in navigating through biographical and historical fragments within a computer architecture. One begins to perceive of information as spatial. It is interesting that the so-called "Art of Memory" as practiced in its neo-platonic form in the Renaissance (14), at a moment when oral and written culture coexisted, represents the joining of image and memory in spatial terms as "loci". As we recollect, we tend to "locate" our imaging of moments from the past in specific "memory" places. When we reconstruct a Memory from isolated moments, separating foreground from background, our remembering takes on spatial aspects. As Memory no longer sustains our identities, we use terminology like "dislocation", "displacement" and "dislodging" to indicate our state of alienation and "hidden" and "buried" to describe the location of meaningful and often unobtainable knowledge. In 1993 I built an object for this exhibition which I
called the "Great Archive" (Das Große Archiv),
in which I attempted to objectify "hypertext"
as a three-dimensional image. A black box approximately
1.5m. high, .4m. wide and 1.2m. long and painted black,
is divided by four lateral sheets of Plexiglas
sandwiching clear plastic sheets inscribed from edge to
edge with layers of finely printed texts. (The uppermost
text layer being the top of the box). The layers of texts
are illuminated from below. The texts were constructed
from the tens of thousands of biographical fragments
which I have renovated from the "Who's Who in
Central & East Europe" As one peers into this
"sea of information", it is as if one stares
into a bottomless well filled with layers of floating
texts in depth. One focuses with one's eyes on any given
text fragment on a given level, as the other text levels
defocus and blur. One's attention might wander to a
deeper or nearer fragment, the eyes continually
refocusing as one isolates and "links" a
related or unrelated name or phrase. It was my intention
here to realize, in three dimensions, a
"hypertext" as a metaphorical space which
contains in compressed form a database of all mankind. In comparison to the collection of hundreds of
individual stories upon which "Who's Who in Central
& East Europe 1933" is based; the improbable but
real life of "T" seems to include a collection
of lifelines and events within one individual. I have
collected over 3,000 pages of original documents from
State Archives in Europe and North America. These
"original" archive documents were digitized and
"faked" by specially developed printing
techniques applied to the reverse side of Postwar East
German archival pages, posing question about the
"identity" of both the subject's personality
and the documents themselves. Continue: From Book to Book, A Journey in the Text |