read1 of 11
discover
Paul Feigelfeld
People

I understand Paul Feigelfeld to be quite a sensitive man. By this I mean weirdly intimate. He’s apt to find your inner angst and discuss it at length with a true willingness to solve it. He has a rare empathy that sets him part from your average Facebook poster. He’s an expert on ideas that exist in far reaches of unnamed intellectual circles. He wants to dig deeper whether you like it or not.

It might be useful to know that Paul has the apartment of a seventy five year old man in an old building with uncomfortably high ceilings. The place is full of quite new things all slightly out of balance. Like the man himself, you can get yourself into unexpected situations in his company.

Bildschirmfoto 2016-06-13 um 13.21.39

Skytale Skype Skynet

13.06.16
60 min
share
60hertz

This lecture by Paul Feigelfeld – held during the Utopian Union Berlin Summit on June 10, 2016 – examines the defining role of cryptology, control, and centralization in its technological development. From the earliest known coded communications to the massive intelligence campaigns today, what has to be analyzed are the infrastructures, power mechanisms, epistemological and formal foundations of our present reality. What becomes clear is contrary to what many believe: Communication and media have never been more material and less transparent than today. From rare earth minerals and its new technocolonized geopolitics, to the climatic effects and territorial paradoxes of data centers or the metaphor of cloud computing and the advent of true ubiquity and technorganisms, both theory and art have to develop new approaches that the talk wants to give first impacts for.

image2

Das Numen

Julian Charrière
Andreas Greiner
Markus Hoffmann
Felix Kiessling
Paul Feigelfeld
17.05.16
60 min
share
60hertz

This is a field recording of an experimental reading performance which took place on Friday the 13th, 2016  at the Deutsche Architekturzentrum in Berlin. 

The artist group Das Numen – consisting of Andreas Greiner, Markus Hoffmann, Julian Charrière and Felix Kiessling – presented their recently published catalog of their whole body of work. With a background in Olafur Eliasson’s „Institut für Raumexperimente“, Das Numen work at the thresholds of art and science and nature and techology and play with the processes of translation and transformation between different realms, spheres, and disciplines.

The four texts in it were written by Carson Chan, Paul Feigelfeld, Melanie Franke and Otte E. Rössler, and performed in various formats by either the authors themselves or, if impossible, by performers. 

While surrounded by four readers, the audience was participating in another performance, during which the artists of Das Numen prepared special cocktails with transformed and purified water from the river Spree just outside the Deutsche Architekturzentrum. 

The first performance involved the readers reading interlocking paragraphs of the respective texts, creating a folded new text by four authors. The second part of the performance was a phase shifting canon which peaked in all the performers reading all the texts at the same time, time delayed and from different positions of the room.

greenlight

Green Light

Franziska Sophie Wildfoerster
Boris Ondreička
Kerstin Paloma
Paul Feigelfeld
07.03.16
40 min
share
60hertz

Conceived by Olafur Eliasson as a metaphorical green light for refugees and migrants in Austria and beyond, the project testifies to the agency of contemporary art and its potential to initiate processes of civic transformation. Green light consists of an artistic workshop and the learning platform Green light – Shared learning surrounding the making of lamp modules designed by Eliasson. The lamps are assembled on-site from materials and components that are made available at TBA21-Augarten. In addition to Augarten’s regular audience, young refugees, migrants, and university students are invited to take part in this process of collaborative artistic practice and learning, giving rise to a space of exchange and encounter for contributors from a range of linguistic, social, geographic, and educational backgrounds.

The Green light project responds to a situation of great uncertainty, both for refugees, who are often caught up in legal and political limbo, and for the European societies that welcome them. Through its communal fabrication, Green light constitutes a dynamic space that elicits various forms of participation. By collapsing the categories of production and reception, performer and audience, and art and social action, the project aims to open up the contested terrain between art and society, probing the question of what constitutes the “public” and negotiating a field of difference and similarity.

The crystalline Green light lamps are polyhedral units fitted with small, green-tinted light fixtures. Made predominantly from recycled and sustainable materials and designed to be stackable, the modules can function either as single objects or be assembled into a variety of architectural configurations. At TBA21–Augarten, the lamps will form a steadily expanding environment in the exhibition space that carries the narratives of its making. 

12336101_10207744082383098_877692351_n

Beton Is Beautiful

Paul Feigelfeld
Lukas Feigelfeld
20.01.16
60 min
share
60hertz

Lukas Feigelfeld is currently finishing his final film school project „Hagazussa“, a dark tale about witchcraft, paganism, social exclusion, sexism, and psychological trauma, set in the 15th century Austrian Alps. With his brother Paul, he discussed film making as a technology of fear and analysis. Going back through his studies and career, they explored his dystopian scifi world of his quantum-reality-drama „Interference“, as well as his rogue handheld and POV shot project „Beton/Concrete“, in which Lukas stars himself as a young unemployed Gabber youth of Vienna, whose exploits with his girlfriend into drugs, violence, and crime spiral out of control. Music plays a major role in Lukas’ projects, with the Greek experimental drone string trio Mohammad composing the soundtrack to „Hagazussa“, Roly Porter of Vex’d collaborating on „Interference“ and Lukas himself producing Gabber speedcore tracks for „Beton“.

ecddhbab.

The Future Was Yesterday

18.01.16
60 min
share
60hertz

Christopher Roth, Armen Avanessian, Georg Diez and Paul Feigelfeld talk about Christopher’s upcoming exhibition BLOW OUT (opening at Esther Schipper on January 22, 2016), loops, Theo-Angelo Adornioni, beauty, science fiction, reactors, bunkers, Quentinporary architecture, and more. During the conversation, they wander through the still unopened exhibition, while Armen takes a lot of pictures, before he reads some Adorno to the magical soundtrack of Bobby’s video work.

Julia Zange
People

I first met Julia through her clone, who was stalking me on Facebook. Then she called me an angel. When we first met in person in summer, I was wearing all white and she was drinking alcohol-free beer. I asked her to do 60Hz together, so now we have a radio show every Monday at 7pm on Berlin Community Radio, with Georg and Armen. For a long time, and still today, it is unclear what Julia does not do. She is an actress, she writes novels, she has a female dog named Henry, is an absolute natural in doing the medleys for our radio show, and when we first said goodbye to each other, we invented a word: Sturzbetroffen.

Western and Provinz

16.11.15
60 min
share
60hertz

Sissi Tax is world famous in Styria, particularly in Köflach, where she was born in 1954. At the same time, she claims that wherever she is is a province. In her poems and books she explores those far provinces of language (especially of the umlaut, the society for the preservation of which she founded herself) and the mind, and besides writing numerous books, working as a prolific translator, and being the most „Stamm“ of all guests of Paris Bar ever (half the waiters are her adopted sons), she has been a contributor to 60pages, writing about films. With Julia Zange and Paul Feigelfeld, she discussed some of her older and some of her newer writings, dialects, accents, umlauts, Western movies, and much more.

Gin and Electronics

Paul Feigelfeld about Friedrich Kittler's preference for Tanqueray
21.10.13
3 min
share
Post

After Eva’s Sunday manifesto, it is admittedly hard to decide what, and how to write. How to continue, and what to decide. Let’s go where it hurts, she wrote. Austerity instead of oysters. She even used exclamation marks! Manifestos always make me sad. There is a distinct melancholy to them, a clandestine consumption, a nostalgia for something that has not yet happened. The true impact of the manifesto is the virtual, oscillating, scintillating moment, present and absent. Even though writing inscribes and stores, can it transmit the unnamable? »In at one ear and incontinent out through the mouth, or the other ear, that’s possible too. No sense in multiplying the occasions of error. Two holes and me in the middle, slightly choked. Or a single one, entrance and exit, where the words swarm and jostle like ants, hasty, indifferent, bringing nothing, taking nothing away, too light to leave a mark.« [Beckett, The Unnamable] »Wer, wenn nicht diejenigen unter Ihnen, die ein schweres Los getroffen hat, könnte besser bezeugen, dass unsere Kraft weiter reicht als unser Unglück, dass man, um vieles beraubt, sich zu erheben weiss, dass man enttäuscht, und das heisst, ohne Täuschung, zu leben vermag. Ich glaube, dass dem Menschen eine Art des Stolzes erlaubt ist – der Stolz dessen, der in der Dunkelheit der Welt nicht aufgibt und nicht aufhört, nach dem Rechten zu sehen.« [Bachmann, Die Wahrheit ist dem Menschen zumutbar] I wasn’t there when Eva, Georg, Sam, and Carson plotted the coming insurrection. I will comply and write about juniper-based highballs: I do not particularly like Gin and Tonic, although it has been ever present in my life for the past ten years, being Friedrich Kittler’s signature drink. Every Tuesday and Thursday, after the first early afternoon classes in the brickstone factory building in Sophienstraße the Chair für Aesthetics and History of Media was located in, we’d head over to Oxymoron, Kittler’s main haunt, where he inexplicably also got a 20% discount. The usual fair during the two hours before evening class – his legendarily smokey “Oberseminar” or the programming course we taught together – comprised of a meticulously mixed Gin and Tonic, and maybe another one, or a bouillabaisse, if he was hungry. You can actually go there and try to order a “Kittler”. If the waiter has been there long enough, he’ll know. It’s not a regular Gin and Tonic. It comes in modular form. 4 cl of Tanqueray Gin, a small bottle of Schweppes Tonic Water, a quartered lime, and a glass of ice cubes, to be mixed yourself to avoid a watering down because of the ice. At his Treptow apartment, the usual was: “Sie wissen ja, wo alles steht, Herr Feigelfeld.” We would then debug C code.

Marcus Steinweg
People

“JA: REILLUMINATION macht SINN, denke ich.” This was the first email Marcus ever sent me, if I remember correctly. I was working on a translation of one of his texts – “Antigone’s Beauty”. In our correspondences, which are usually swift, minimalist and technical, Marcus uses CAPS LOCK to instill rhythm. You can hear his writing, just as you can see his words when he reads or talks publicly. He speaks incessantly, ardently, for his life, and for love. Marcus is about everything and everything is aporetic. What the mathematician Leonhard Euler formulated in his famous Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem – the foundation of graph theory, heuristics, optimization – Marcus does for philosophy, only his bridges are on fire. It’s strange when you are someone’s translator. We have never had a drink together and we only rarely bump into each other on some nights. But there is an intimate connection that establishes itself with real virtuality, with oscillating materiality, when I translate his language, slip into it, walk in his shoes, and for some reason, it works. Marcus is not a theoretician. He is a real philosopher. That someone like him, in our times, can go to the Bronx and give a daily lecture at Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Gramsci Monument” somehow gives me hope. In the tradition of Heidegger’s “Holzwege” (“Off the Beaten Track”), I hope Marcus will some day write a book called “Steinwege” (“Beating the Track”).

Sam Chermayeff
People

“SAM CHERMAYEFF. SPY OR COMMANDO FOR HIRE”, says a business card Sam’s father Ivan designed for him when he was a boy. When I first met Sam (we briefly bumped into each other a couple of days earlier), he was wearing a headscarf and guarding a Pierre Jeanneret chair. By the early morning hours, we had become friends and worn all kinds of things. It was the same night I met Bobby. Sam has done many things, such as living in Tokyo and working for SANAA, curating the Architecture Biennial in Venice with Sejima, or setting up shop in Berlin together with the wonderful Johanna Meyer-Grohbrügge under the name June 14. We are all entangled in many ways. But that’s probably not what is essential about Sam. He builds things as much as he tears them down. I often have a hard time talking to him. He leaves gentle slivering marks on your life. Sometimes, he will give you things, such as an odd little Tiffany ashtray, a spoon by Sejima, or a piece of the material he likes to work with. Sam is silver.

Skytale Skype Skynet

13.06.16
60 min
share

Das Numen

Julian Charrière
Andreas Greiner
Markus Hoffmann
Felix Kiessling
Paul Feigelfeld
17.05.16
60 min
share

Green Light

Franziska Sophie Wildfoerster
Boris Ondreička
Kerstin Paloma
Paul Feigelfeld
07.03.16
40 min
share

Beton Is Beautiful

Paul Feigelfeld
Lukas Feigelfeld
20.01.16
60 min
share

The Future Was Yesterday

18.01.16
60 min
share

Western and Provinz

16.11.15
60 min
share

Gin and Electronics

Paul Feigelfeld about Friedrich Kittler's preference for Tanqueray
21.10.13
3 min
share