Resources

A selection of resources used for the BITW - project are listed here. Common texts, sounds, videos and images are an important basis for the dialogue between the participants.

More and more my dreams find their settings in the department stores of Tokyo, the subterranean tunnels that extend them and run parallel to the city. A face appears, disappears...a trace is found, is lost. All the folklore of dreams is so much in its place that the next day when i am awake I realize that I continue to seek in the Basement labyrinth the presence concealed the night before. I begin to wonder if these dreams are really mine, or if they are a part of a totality, of a gigantic collective dream of which the entire city may be the projection. "Sans Soleil" by Chris Marker
Which lines on your map matter most? The world spreads out before us. We discover some sort of order within it, we create maps, tools and frameworks to make sense of our world. MAP, MIND, MEMORY is framing issues of landscape, geography, tourism and new technologies. The participating artists pose questions of how we use our senses to navigate and move, how we could handle maps in a new way, examine thoughts and rediscover space in times of rapid technical and cultural-aesthetic change.
diaries is an international, ongoing, collaborative art project. The concept is for each artist to produce one picture every day over a period of time. Format and artistic implementation is individually chosen. Our intention is to share our ongoing creative process while doing one work every day; to show the flux of inspiration; the changes and what touches us over a period of time. To invite artists into a daily working process is something we believe is a counter act in our fragmented, visually overloaded contemporary lifestyle.
Visual artists from Germany and Sweden approach the topic of Liminaliy. Liminal: etymology "limes" (Latin) meaning threshold. The word liminal is used in connection with: (1) a transition period or the initial stage of a process, (2) that something occupies a position, or both sides of a border or threshold.
Cartographic maps have guided our explorations for centuries, allowing us to navigate the world. Science maps have the potential to guide our search for knowledge in the same way, allowing us to visualize scientific results, helping us to organize, understand, and communicate the dynamic and changing structure of science and technology. The participants in “Map, Mind, Memory” ask us to handle maps in a new way, examine thoughts and rediscover space at a time when there is great confusion about what is where, how far is far and where we should go.
John Cage’s 4’33”, the famous composition for the piano consisting of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, was inspired by his visit to a perfectly soundproof space built by physicists. Being in the space, he was surprised by the fact that it was not silent, but he could hear one high and one low sound there. Coming out again, he was told that these were the sounds of his nervous system and blood circulation that one can perceive only in absolute silence. Like Cage found sounds in quiet, we search for a language in speechlessness. That language is what we will explore by artistic means.
Text excerpts
  • Tacit knowledge (as opposed to formal, codified or explicit knowledge) is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing it. Wikipedia
  • "I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell"
    This writes Michael Polanyi in the work "The Tacit Dimesion" (1966) which is still is relevant today. His main theory is that all knowledge at it's core is personal and is built on tacit elements.
  • We can pick a face out of a million without being able to say how we did it. In this way, we are perpetually relying on operations within us which we neither control nor understand. In fact, over-awareness of what we are doing is the notorious cause of many accidents and foul-ups. Most daily actions betray a reliance on what Michael Polanyi calls the “tacit knowledge” of our bodies.
  • Our minds must let go of the readiness to judge, he said, so that our eyes may be inwardly vulnerable to what we are seeing. Japanese champion of craft, Sōetsu Yanagi.
It’s often thought that people don’t see things until they know something about it. But what is this knowing about? The topic of the exhibition is tacit (quiet) knowledge. Michael Polanyi was the man who tried to make sense of how new discoveries, knowledge of yet unknown things, can be made in science. Tacit knowledge was his key to the mystery of discovery. Tacit knowledge implies that one knows all the time much more than one can ever tell. A body of non-discursive knowledge exists, which is something that one’s life has taught over the years, but one has learned it without any awareness of the process of learning. Tacit knowledge includes for example all the physical, intuitive, mythic and experienced knowledge we are bearing. Things we know but are difficult to tell in words.
Text excerpts
  • Tacit knowledge (as opposed to formal, codified or explicit knowledge) is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing it. Wikipedia
  • "I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell"
    This writes Michael Polanyi in the work "The Tacit Dimesion" (1966) which is still is relevant today. His main theory is that all knowledge at it's core is personal and is built on tacit elements.
  • We can pick a face out of a million without being able to say how we did it. In this way, we are perpetually relying on operations within us which we neither control nor understand. In fact, over-awareness of what we are doing is the notorious cause of many accidents and foul-ups. Most daily actions betray a reliance on what Michael Polanyi calls the “tacit knowledge” of our bodies.
  • Our minds must let go of the readiness to judge, he said, so that our eyes may be inwardly vulnerable to what we are seeing. Japanese champion of craft, Sōetsu Yanagi.
The depiction of landscape in art has always tried to give us a particular view of the world. Landscapes tell us about our projections, desires and daydreams which we connect with images of real or imagined places. The exhibition “Exposed Areas” shows extracts of the methodical ways a younger generation of artists presently deals with the notion of landscape.
TotalRecall is an interdisciplinary project where art and philosophy together investigate a condition that stems from an everyday experience of being virtually surrounded by images and texts. By producing and re-flecting aspects of this experience in the ‘slow’ media of painting and writing, the project wishes to explore what can vaguely be called a condition in our times.
Text excerpts
  • "The pollution of time and distance is much more severe, in my opinion than the pollution of material substances."
    Paul Virilio
  • "The field of vision is comparable, for me, to the terrain of an archaeological dig. To see is to be on guard, to wait for what emerges from the background, without any name, without any particular interest: what was silent will speak, what is closed will open and will take on a voice."
    Paul Virilio
  • Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the resultat is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience."
    Susan Sontag, Against interpretation 1964
Pils Design