recharge:green @ Consequential Choices: Version of Atlas Making, Angewandte Innovation Lab Wien, May&June 2015

As posted earlier, I contributed with an installation with performative and audio aspect to the exhibition "Consequential Choices: Version of Atlas Making", which took place at Angewandte Innovation Lab Vienna from 26th of May to 2nd of June. Here is a little documentation on it.

The installation sprung from an artistic research project on recharge green, which I have done as part of the Arts&Science institute of the University for Applied Arts Vienna since autumn 2014. Recharge Green is the biggest EU-funded environmental project within the Alpine Space Region. The first part of my research resulted in an approx. 70 page "novel" consisting of interview-transcripts with different members and stakeholders of the project, photos, graphs, "found objects" from the internet as well as philosophical and prosaic remarks.

In a second stage I transformed the acquired material into the above mentioned exhibition piece, which consisted of three items: 

1) a pile of soil, under which hidden speakers where playing one of the held interviews. This audio track was accompanied by traffic noise, making it impossible to follow the interview and to understand more than single words and what it might be generally about.

2) a little photo hanging on the wall.

3) a performer ("me") in a suit with a button saying "I am here to help" and a headlamp. As soon as somebody approaches him, he turns on the headlamp and gives the person very friendly answers, which lead nowhere and contain no information, while being completely blinded by the light.

 

"'Recharge:Green - A socio-philosophical investigative novel' asks if the contemporary structures of our society are able to function in an environmentally friendly way? That is: is our historically grown political order fit to react to the immense environmental problems humanity faces at the beginning of the 21st century in any effective manner or isn't it? Rather than finding an answer to this question, the novel is trying to portray the vastness and complexity of this question. Instead of finding a guiding light that leads the investigation to a save conclusion, the investigation is more and more losing its sense of orientation and ends up being a part of the confusion it originally wanted to lift. In a second step, it is going even one step further and tries to affirm what it originally considered a lack: it tries to show, that the complexity actually might not be the problem, but that the problem might in fact be our way of dealing with same complexity (in simplifying it to cater to a 'solution'). So it might come to the conclusion, that the solution is actually the problem and the problem the solution. Confusion is sexy."