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.

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.

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. 

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“.

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.

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.