The Pavilion as Factory
A Site of Reproducing Images
by Florian Ebner
The Profaned Temple
Rarely is the latent presence of history more tangible than in the
completely empty German Pavilion in the Giardini in Venice. There are
only a few buildings that call up in the collective (German) artistic
mind so many memories of radical artistic positions as this temple to
the arts, built in 1909 and monumentally extended by the National
Socialists in 1938. There are scarcely any comparable spaces and
locations that put the ‘exhibition value’ of art to the test to such an
extent, and that stage the in situ and the site-specific in the way that
the national pavilions on the lagoon city’s old Biennale grounds do.
Architecturally conditioned, historically charged, and condemned to
the programmatic, to a certain extent they are counterparts to a White
Cube. As in no other artistic context, this particular venue demands
a reaction.
As is generally known, famous artists (and their curators) have
been grappling with the history and the brutally classicistic design
of the German Pavilion since the 1970s: adopting a historical-associative
approach, as in Joseph Beuys’s Straßenbahnhaltestelle (Tram
Stop, 1976); offering a radical critique as in Hans Haacke’s Germania
(1993); mythologically quotidian as in Gregor Schneider’s Totes
Haus u r (Dead House u r, 2001); or with a media-existentialist take, as
in Christoph Schlingensief’s Kirche gegen die Angst in mir (Church
against the Fear in Me, 201 1). If one were to include Rosemarie
Trockel’s video spaces and the installations by Liam Gillick or Isa
Genzken, the history of the German Pavilion could be described, with
few exceptions, as one of the profanation of this stately temple, as
a history of continual attempts to deconstruct the aura of the monumental
architecture — in order to simultaneously use it, in an act of
détournement, of artistic inversion, as a resonance chamber for whatever
state of the art needs to be newly propagandized at that moment.
In this respect, the German contribution to the 56th Biennale
Arte in Venice can be seen in a very contemporary way as an attempt
to transform the German Pavilion into a place of reflection on circulating,
migrating, and volatile images and into a venue for the manifold
signs of disintegration of our age. In many respects, it was oppor-
tune to turn a temple of art into a factory — an imaginary, lost, virtual
factory, a factory of political narratives, a factory of digital light, and
a cognitive image factory. In any event, a factory is expected to yield
up an extremely productive profanation.
The Metamorphosis of Images
Sometimes it is the perplexing spark of uncertainty that sets the process in motion, a sudden flash of an idea that comes to the aid of the curator in the face of an empty pavilion, prompting him or her to put the summoned images of the past, the burden of history, into its place and to create room for the new. This incertitude has to do with the political iconography of the face, a series from the mid-1930s, which on first sight makes many people think of Leni Riefenstahl — voilà le scandale: Leni Riefenstahl in the German Pavilion ! And yet Helmar Lerski’sMetamorphosis through Lightseries, which was created on the flat roof of a modernist house in Tel Aviv, is anything but a nationalist spectre, following instead a modernist radicalism that is still capable of posing relevant questions today, such as: What does the distribution of roles between photographer, medium, and model look like ? This is a constellation that always has to be negotia-ted and is a question that is re-posed in the age of circulating images and which Lerski attempted to answer in around 140 shots of one and the same face, in the changing light of his mirror under the burning sun of the Levant.
What remains of this spark, this catalytic idea with respect to the empty pavilion, is a constellation of places and motifs that contrib-uted towards a definition of the space in terms of contents: on the one hand, thinking about the roof as ‘another place’, a place of freedom and experimentation, a heterotopia; on the other, reflecting on the metamorphosis of our contemporary culture of the image and its polit-ical potential. It was the beginning of a constructive dialogue that started to develop between the architectural potential of the building (its high rooms and exposed roof) and a range of unfinished, barelynascent works.
Researchers in the field of visual culture (cf. the essay by Tom Holert)experience the metamorphosis of our images as an, in many ways, paradoxical situation: they see the ubiquity of the images and at the same time their placelessness, their total presence in social networks, where they are ‘shared’ and ‘liked’, and their complete separa-tion from their original and referent. They note the disappearance of any certainty with regard to what will become of the medium of photography in the age of the algorithmic turn.They ask themselves whether the omnipresent digital images —the‘lumpenproletariat’
(Hito Steyerl) of our popular image culture — have not really become,in an extended cultural sense, viralimages, because they question the classical forms of representation. Yet one might counter that these signs of disintegration could also be a chance to conceive of the photographic in a different way, that they could forge a path to rethinknot only our contemporaneity, but also the contemporary (artistic)image. This might imply, among other things, that the photographictoday poses questions not so much about the depiction of reality as about its changeability, placing greater emphasis on the issues of participation, testimony, and representation — and this in a primarily political sense.
At some time during the continual process of shuttling between exhibition location, artistic positions, and definitions of content, one suddenly notices that the concept has long been pervaded by ideas that emanate from specific works. In which, in addition to the universal presence of the roof, factors and ideas such as ‘digital light’ or ‘mi-grating images’ also have significance. This was the moment in which it suddenly became clear what the emerging artistic works that would become part of the German Pavilion had to do with work and economy, the moment in which one realized that the protagonists and the programme of the Pavilion had taken on clear definition: GIRO by Olaf Nicolai, The Citizen by Tobias Zielony, Out on the Street by Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk, and Factory of the Sun by Hito Steyerl. Perhaps it is this interaction between conceptual perspectives and artistic temperaments, this exchange and the collective process, which marks what is special about this Pavilion, providing yet another reason to describe it as a factory.
The term Fabrik (factory) — the title of the exhibition —bundles together the fate of industrial labour, the curse of exploitation and alienation in the nineteenth century, the progressive automation of production and its outsourcing to low-wage countries, the lost promise of work for all, and the transformation of these places into venues for alternative culture; today the word ‘factory’ is at most still only a cause of alarm for neo-liberal minds. In the context of Okwui Enwezor’s concept of the ‘Garden of Disorder’, which he proclaimed as a contextual matrix for the 56th Biennale Arte, the Fabrik wonder-fully finds its place as an echo chamber, for example, to the planned non-stop reading of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital over the course of the Biennale. Yet Fabrik can also be read in a different way, at a media level, as an expression of what is artificial and constructed in images: ‘You do not take a photograph, you make it,’ postulated the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar as a bold statement writ large — and in the con-text of his media criticism, this sentence can only be read politi-cally. One of the lines most frequently quoted in photography theory is taken from Bertolt Brecht’s Der Dreigroschenprozeß: Ein so-ziologisches Experiment (The Threepenny Lawsuit: A Sociological Experiment):
‘The situation has become so complicated because the simple “reproduction of reality” says less than ever about that reality.A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG reveals almost nothing about these institutions. Reality as such has slipped into the domain of the functional. The reification of human relations, the factory, for example, no longer discloses these relations. So there is indeed “some-thing to construct”, something “artificial”, “invented”.’
Since the 1970s, when people started rereading Walter Benjamin’s Kleine Geschichte der Photographie (A Short History of Photogra-phy), in which the quote from Brecht represents an important argu-ment, numerous artists have investigated the meaning of this direc-tive, and have attempted to use photo-text works and mise en scène to etch the ‘artistic’ into their commentary on reality, even as their discursive and media-technical tools have been adapted to the onward march of time.
Source:
Ebner, Florian. The Pavilion as Factory. A Site of Reproducing Images en FABRIK. German Pavillion, 56th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Die Buchhandlung Walther König, 2015. (pp.13-21)
‘This is Not a Game’ A Walk through Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun
by David Riff
It never really gets dark on the holodeck. But you know that this is a beginning when a rhythmic creaking resounds as old as the cosmos itself. It’s the sound of light, courtesy of NASA. The holodeck’s grid doesn’t disappear but extends, and a generic PC rotates into its coordinates like the classical commodity, from design to display. 3D clones of a lightbulb float on a solarized golden lava backdrop, generic ‘instances’ of one overarching object, necessarily ephemeral, always the same, immediately ready to burst like bubbles, or to flatten out on screen. Clearly, we are in idealism mode. Electrification + Soviet power = communism. Call it object-oriented trans-substantiation, faux-physical alchemical experimentation where nature’s regularity is replaced with stochastic law, a not-quite-random walk of effects, sparkling as plasma, governed by some underlying choreographic logic. There is nothing metaphysical about this ghost in the machine, as you hear in the slam poetry voice-over that begins Hito Steyerl’s newest film Factory of the Sun. Our machines are made of pure sunlight, she tells you, electromagnetic frequencies. All photons are created equal, so goes the claim. But the consciously camp overuse of melting, glare, and particle effects pro- vides more than a hint: this is promotional speech, performed under conditions of constant atomization and diffusion. All that is solid melts into air. To see an image on the screen is to revel not in the pure objecthood of representation, but in the objectivity of its spectacularly dissolving light, its sameness with all other photons on some final abstract layer, before and after it ever gained its particular frequency. Repetition brings substitutions. Electromagnetic frequencies go electro-political; neo-liberalism turns illiberal. We bask in the glow of labour’s endless glory, and the mind adapts to the genre, not only hypnotized but reforged. This might even be an indoctrination video for re-education through work in post-Fordist times, perfectly sleek and radically chic, a market-made liturgy for the ‘communism of capital’, an agit-prop clip for the sunshine Gulag of immaterial labour. (And indeed it turns out to be a commercial teaser: for a presumed ‘video game’ that never properly materializes but flickers on and off). ‘All that was work has melted into sunshine.’ It is the same sun that used to shine so objectively onto a pile of dung and a palace of gold, illuminating formlessness and form alike, the only source of objective universal equivalence, and therefore celebrated cross-culturally as the symbol of illuminating ratiocination and enlightenment. It is the same sun over which a group of Russian Futurists — including Kazimir Malevich — famously declared victory in 1913, in a transrational spectacle that ended with an aeroplane crashing into the stage; the captive sun of the Enlightenment brought to the grave in a concrete box, a white-hot shining disk soon to be replaced with its exact op- posite, the black square. In the era of the pixel, we too hold the same sun captive, says Steyerl; it lives in our machines, machines that we ourselves inhabit. Once the property of gods of culture and sun-kings, sunshine is now democratized, its electro-political frequencies delimited as an open source, as a ‘general intellect’ hardcoded into machines and bodies alike. Such is the idealist hope behind so many theories of immaterial labour. But the effect, as Steyerl points out in what seems like an aside, is that of a ‘deadly transparency’. Immaterial labour also has its ideal types, and we see them immediately in Steyerl’s film, as the agit-prop intro-mercial echoes out, and the virtual grid of the holodeck becomes a motion-capture studio. Today’s equivalent of the idealized industrial worker armed with a pneumatic hammer is the dancer, embodying the performativity not only of immaterial labour but also of its material counterparts. Performativity individualizes work, renders it virtuosic, fluid, and affective like a dance, and that initially leads to a crisis in universal value and to a fetishist cult of identity, and then to a search for how to measure the moves, how to determine their settings and their quality. This is why the dancer is wearing a motion-capture suit along with his Che Guevara cap; its LED diodes translate to numbers as the relative position of joint markers to one another and to a motion-capture grid. The joint markers have different shapes and sizes, depending on technology: traditionally they were luminescent Ping-Pong balls sewn onto special suits, but there are also other variations, coloured suits strangely reminiscent of Futurist visions from over a century ago with their oddly medievally garish colour combinations. However speculative such modernist aesthetic associations might be, they lead to a genealogy of photo-biomechanical techniques articulated methodologically in the glory days of industrialization by pioneer motion photographers and ‘light painters’— such as Eadweard Muybridge, or Étienne-Jules Marey and Georges Demeny — and then further developed in the chronocyclegraphs and work simplification studies of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, which already contain the rudiments of today’s sophisticated mo-cap techniques: angle-point lights that create a motion trace in a long photo exposure, with a background grid to precisely plot motion points. In Steyerl’s film, the measurements are undertaken by today’s equivalent of an idealized industrial engineer, a computer game designer called Yulia, as the text-to-speech voice-over informs us. She is the level designer, the one who implements an over-determining structure like a state planner in the micro-fiefdom of the motioncapture studio. She is coding a game. ‘But you will not be able to play this game.’ Instead, you are the third party plug-in, it is you who is being played; you are the responsive biomass that biopolitical semiocapitalism so desperately needs, aside from engineers and performers, the consumer with his or her affect. Whatever they told you in the 1990s about interactivity is untrue. Virtualization, inside, entails a new form of passive contemplation. You are on the holodeck, your responses are being registered, but there is not a thing you can do. This is how you see the video game’s protagonist: not in close thirdperson view, nor in the first person, but partially obscured, from a camera position in hiding. It is a hyper-realistic quote of how embedded journalism looks at combat, in a state of intimidated childlike gratitude of being passed over. You are on the outside looking in, passive but grateful to be safe, while somebody else seems to be dancing for his life. Down to the blurry lens refocusing from cover contours to dancer, the image is loaded with a terrifying naturalism, something we know from many CGI sci-fi or fantasy movies: all that keeps you out of the ‘uncanny valley’ of disbelief at a disengaged machine fantasy is the shaky authenticity of the camera action, the mud on the lens, the filaments of dust in the HD / 3D air and so on. It’s not so much that the monsters or drones and the sci-fi costumes become that much more plausible; instead, the contradiction creates a dialectical vertigo (game theorist Roger Callois might have called it ilinx), a head-spinning sense of disorientation more fundamental than anything you might know from conventional gaming that hits you just as the drone launches its weapon at the dancer, not so much as an insight, but as an illumination: ‘This is not a game. This is reality.’ * * * Factory of the Sun remains tentatively faithful to the structure of the video game in that it begins with an intro more grandiose than any Hollywood blockbuster. Replete with spectacular effects and particlesystem magic otherwise unavailable in gameplay, such an intro makes promises and truth claims that the game itself must keep once it shifts into a more realistic, controllable register, once it becomes reality (as Steyerl already announced). The transition to gameplay is usually made in more narrative cut-scenes and introductory tutorials, in which you effectively learn what it is you are supposed to be doing and how it is you are supposed to do it. In the unplayable game that is Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun, you are told that you start out as a forced labourer in a motioncapture Gulag, where your every move is turned to sunshine. It is from here that four bots escaped, as the fast paced sci-fi story tells you. They were recently killed in global uprisings by Deutsche Bank drones, to be resurrected as X-Men type superheroes: orphans of the enemy, a text floater calls them. A cut-scene newscast explains through denial: Deutsche Bank denies having launched an attack with their corporate drone. In the film, this profession of deniability acts an affirmation, and it also sounds quite plausible today. It is true that both governments and non-governmental agents are already using drones to surveil, and while the monopoly of armed drone strikes lies with only a handful of states, research in other forms of drone delivery is ongoing. Today, it is already the drone eye that surveys the scene of history: the vortex of protesters in an age of atomized political subjectivity, thrust together into new combinations, repulsed and attracted; the scene of the battleground, the brand-new airport gutted by cyborgs, leaving only shattered steel girders and blown-up tanks on the runway; the dried-up radioactive swimming pool, or the amateur drone porn where you see people having sex in a field from very far away. Maybe this is how the drone eye sees the various facets of utopia. Much in the same way, a light speed communications programme is also hardly the stuff of idle fantasy. In fact, the reason for today’s extreme financial liquidity and proliferation of fictitious capital is to be found in the drastic acceleration of software-assisted trading, in which predictive and executive algorithms make decisions to transfer huge sums of money in tenths of seconds. The faster, the better. High-tech trading firms have already installed laser and microwave systems to augment the relatively slow line-of-sight speed of fibre-optic cables, and are now working on hollow cables and, more distantly, neutrino communication capable of moving through objects at light speed. It is already easy to imagine something called ‘relativist arbitrage’, where traders (or trading computers) sit on ships in the middle of the Atlantic to profit from momentary imbalances in prices in Chicago and London. So reality in some ways is stranger than fiction, and Factory of the Sun responds with a bifurcation of sorts when it continues with a first-person shooter tutorial sequence, superimposing a headsup- display overlay of status control onto the digitally altered, colour- corrected, heavily effected footage. Yulia’s voice-over sounds more like a ‘making-of’: she talks about how she started shooting in the gun club at an all girl’s school in Japan, and only then does she introduce you to your weapon — a Sig Sauer, first used by Snake Solid in Metal Solid Gear 1, showing you how to switch on the crosshairs in ‘realism’ mode. Her narrative soon drifts into a Gulag biography told to alleviate second-generation, Cold War post-traumatic stress disorder. The game immerses you in ever-stranger holodeck dreamscapes as Yulia tells you of her mother, a Soviet army lieutenant and expert sniper, who decided to leave for Israel when the Soviet Union dissolved. The Sig Sauer shoots bursts of light, at first logically aimed at Lenin’s lightbulbs, then at golden busts of Stalin, which eventually bob in a sea of financial liquidity. Yulia tells you that her relative grew up in a Gulag children’s home as an ‘orphan of the enemy’, after her grandfather was shot on the spot after an arbitrary border move in the far east of the Soviet Union. Relative arbitrage and first-person Gulag gaming has a bloody genealogy of arbitrary executions, cardinal decisions made at speeds approaching that of light. If this were a participatory video game, you’d be shooting by now, but Steyerl makes good on her promise. She disarms you by shifting down one layer into a more sober making-of video that brings you back to the motion-capture studio, where Yulia is directing her brother. She tells you that it was in Edmonton, Canada, where he started to dance in a golden suit for the webcam in the family basement, succeeding in the YouTube economy of attention, and becoming a viral star. Other costumes and characters followed. The Japanese fans captured his motion data, and anime replicas of his different characters flooded the web, valorizing the original act and transporting it beyond its humble beginnings in the basement. (Apropos of humble beginnings, Yulia provides a further salient detail from her biography— which at the same time is the biography of the thing that is this computer game: before emigrating the family sold their amazing apartment in Moscow, and got only enough money to buy a car. Yulia’s brother dances against such instant devaluations, or at least his anime avatars do… ) As Yulia’s brother and his copies dance, we might remember that he isn’t the only one big in Japan. DIY strategies of disseminating viral content can also fall into the hands of resurgent ‘illiberal’ states. Their enterprising armies of Internet trolls will also invent such ‘authentic’ Internet stardom for their heroes. For example, when Russia annexed Crimea last year, the Kremlin’s masters of spin made a star of local state prosecutor Natalia Poklonskaya, commissioning anime music videos and effectively turning her into a Samurai-sword wielding sex-bot called ‘Nyash-Myash’, an artificial presence with human traits, more authentic and toxic the more it is copied or ‘instantiated’. Such botification is integral to what is being formulated as a doctrine of ‘hybrid war’, a new, potentially total form of conflict initiated in what, at least for now, is being called Cold War 2.0. That is to say, its genealogy lies in gaming both virtual and actual, some of its key participants at the early stages — such as the eerie, Himmler-like character of Igor Girkin aka Strelkov — are consummate live gamers re-enacting battles from the early twentieth-century Russian Civil War. The entire scene of the bloody conflict in eastern Ukraine is not only painfully familiar to battlefield historians, but to players of Armored Assault, Call of Duty, or similar military shooters, and was being translated into gameplay in the very first days after the war. At the same time, it was clear from the beginning that this too was not a game. Everything you do potentially has deadly consequences. As if to confirm this, Yulia tells you that before they traded in all their money for a car, her family was on a convoy of buses with fellow immigrants when the bus in front of them exploded. She can’t remember it happening, she says, but they were taken to a military installation afterwards. * * * This military installation is the Teufelsberg, Berlin’s highest man-made ‘mountain’ and site of a former NSA listening post, which monitored all signals and telephone traffic from its hostile neighbours during Cold War 1.0. The point was to show that we have you on the grid. You should know we are watching. Now, the site is a ruin, an Atlas Obscura favourite, its electromagnetic domes ragged, its stairwells and balustrades bursting with graffiti. This is a landscape after the quiet apocalypse, a space created by what was, for all intents, a virtual world war fought over and over again as a broadband communications exercise, an ongoing build-up of electro-political energy, with a growing sense of foreboding that the whole thing could go wrong and end in real-life nuclear holocaust (which it still could). The Cold War did not end in an apocalypse. It was unspectacular, no mushroom cloud fireworks or blinding flashes, a more subtle release of energy that draped the planet in velvet for a decade or two after an anti-climactic retreat of heavy weaponry. The voice-over soberly tells you about the location as the drone orbits above. But here, there is another rupture, another break, another level: we go back from Discovery Channel documentary to pure play, where the entire prosumer childishness of the film explodes, with a rehearsal out-take of a blond-haired, blue-eyed, fake expert who jokes around with the director (‘You must be kidding me, Deutsche Bank has broken the speed of light, you want me to say it in Wolfenstein 3D accent: Deutsche Bank — Continuation of the Third Reich ?’). All joking aside: in fact, the Teufelsberg is ‘the rubble of Hitler’s Germania’, heaped up to hide the indestructible half-completed carcass of Albert Speer’s pet project, a huge military-corporate-technocratic branch of the Technical University in Berlin. This example of sunshine Gulag National Socialist architecture was planned as a generous neo-classicist rendering of functionalist Neues Bauen ideas later reintegrated into university campus architecture all over Germany after the war. As the drone orbits this site, Yulia’s voice is back to tell us that we’ve reached a pivotal level; that the entire game has flipped. You are now your own worst enemy and have to extract as much motion energy from yourself as possible. The chorus line of golden suits dances a fluid ballet, as Yulia’s brother teaches his moves to hypnotized students, body-exploration made sexy with gold skin-suits. This is cloning and instantiation in action, the soundtrack mixes fragments of sunshine Gulag agit-prop with pieces of the Teufelsberg voice-over. The motion- capture studio now appears as the quintessential post-fascist space, where the catastrophes of modernity are coded into the stones themselves as yet another gridded mapping. From the bird’s-eye view of the drone, the Teufelsberg becomes a kill-box, a three-dimensional space of carnage where anything goes at remote control. The fake expert returns with a vengeance, a holodeck Moriarty, ad-libbing and speed-talking an infomercial on the merciless progress of science. Light-speed doubled, high-speed trading increased by 400%. He starts talking about the CERN accelerator, and how only a few crucial mistakes were made, putting us here at @utobahn Equity a few miscalculations and a loose fibre-optic cable away from the Endsieg, from final victory. The wacky flatness of this parody is complicated and intensified when Yulia again tells you that it was in the sunshine Gulag of Israel that she and her brother became serious gamers. Mum, dad, and grandfather went off to can apricots in a Kibbutz, as emphasized by the dancer’s more rigid, robot-like moves, reminiscent of breakdance Fordism. Brother and sister kept in the air-conditioned shade. There was nothing else to do, nobody spoke Hebrew. On the ruins of a violent modernity, the post-Fordist mode of production is born in strange combinations of regression to manual labour and indolent boredom, deadly hyper-productive transparency the result. The @utobahn Equity expert interrupts his imitation of Modern Times Fordist labour to wave goodbye to Yulia’s brother. Again, the hero is dancing for his life. The drone from the end of the intro floats into view, its kill-box goes hot. Yulia biomechanically presses a button and executes a command. We don’t see her brother die in the game, only in the studio, over and over again. These repeated deaths — uncanny returns of a childhood routine — are intercut with a fake Deutsche Bank spokesman, equivocating, denying, and justifying all at once: you may have seen him die from your hiding place but this was an illusion, it was he who was hiding behind a drone, and anyway, who cares. ‘This is an extra-juridical space, I open and close my mouth, I talk, you listen, that’s democracy, this is how it works’, he tells you shortly before the screen goes black. Game or no game, you are back in the contrived installation-reality of the holodeck grid, until the respawn counter goes on and flashes you with the explosion of a 3D lightbulb, Samurai manga heroes dancing… * * * It is here, in the afterlife, that you finally meet the game’s different non-playable characters — fugitive bots killed in the global protests of the future, ‘orphans of the enemy’, arbitrary victims. Naked Normal was killed in student protests in London, respawned to master the Lobachevsky hyperbolic to invert light into itself. Even more, he knows how to slow down light into music, to invert its mix of destruction and deep entertainment. If this still sounds too realistic, Bigbosshardfuck follows the hyperbole: though he speaks Russian, he was crushed in the Singapore Uprising of 2028 after squatting a storage space in the freeport to open a cooperative render farm. Liquid Easy describes Deutsche Bank’s killer drones in Spanish. Solid Sunlight was killed in Kobane fighting for the YPJ and respawned as a Mandarin speaking solar energy expert. The manga heroes appear one after another: all of them operating on appropriated motion data, orphans of the enemy assembling for the final battle with the likes of Natalia ‘Nyash-Myash’ Poklonskaya, anime Samurai prosecutor of Crimea. The dancing is overlaid in a polyglot Babel on the retooled 3D PC floating on its solarized holodeck battleground. Killed in the future, these figures tell you that they crowd your games already today. Which manga figure will you be? Never mind your dreams and wishes, it turns out all of the fugitive bots are unplayable, untouchable, while you, the player, have yet to prove your special skill. You find yourself back in the motioncapture studio, where it all started, and it is clear, this is a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a mystery, and you will never leave. Yulia confirms that map three is completely different. It turns out you will never be a hero bot, but that it’s multiplayer, player vs. player, dog eat dog in the Gulag of life. To return to the outdated terms of Roger Callois: agon (the spirit of pure competition)wins out over alea (the principle of chance), again producing ilinx (a sense of vertigo). The backstory falls away and you are left one on one with the Real. ‘This is not a game.’ Yulia returns to tell one last story: it turns out that her brother was already a super-bot of sorts: back in the days of Homeland Security, he was member of a research group investigating the interaction of light and explosive material to detect explosives at airports. You can send out points of light (these translate back into the motion-capture dancing suit’s angle points), measuring the density of material. Plasma. Photonics. This is the same way they detect planets. Gathering strength, the dancing points of light on the motion-capture suit finally reach the right electro-political frequency, and more or less accidentally hit the Deutsche Bank drone, which goes down as a shower of animated sparkle. But you know this won’t be the end, and that you’ll go right back to the beginning: machines may explode into sunlight, but then sunlight turns right back into machines. And here is the machine again, respawned, in an endless loop; the motion-capture studio extends from airport security all the way to the cosmos; its kill-box could be anywhere, its corporate infomercials being produced as we speak, full of boosted reflections, oozing shine — the drones overhead constantly watching…
Lars Willumeit
Factory Tools
Dictionary for the German Pavilion
Source:
Willumeit, Lars. Factory Tools. Dictionary for the German Pavilion on FABRIK. German Pavillion, 56th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Die Buchhandlung Walther König, 2015. (pp. 202-212)