#documenta 11

TITLE: Documentation of alpha 3.4

NAME: tsunamii.net

COLLECTION: tsunamii.net (2001-2005)

DATE: c.2002

PUBLISHER: tsunamii.net

TOPICS: tsunamii.net; Net Art; Documenta 11; Internet Infrastructure; Performance

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: digital image documentation of alpha 3.4, sourced through Google search

TITLE: “Documenta 11_Spot: tsunamii.net mit ‘alpha 3.4’”

NAME: Tilman Baumgärtel

COLLECTION: tsunamii.net (2001-2005)

DATE: June 29, 2002

PUBLISHER: taz.de, Germany

TOPICS: tsunamii.net; Net Art; Documenta 11; Internet Infrastructure; Performance; Global Positioning System

TITLE: “tsunamii.net: interview” 

NAMES: Pat Binder; Gerhard Haupt

COLLECTION: tsunamii.net (2001-2005)

DATE: June 7, 2002

PUBLISHER: Universes in Universe

TOPICS: tsunamii.net; Net Art; Documenta 11; Internet Infrastructure

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Online article

Jeff Wall: Artists need material limitations  I have never read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, but I have for a very long time been in love with Jeff Wall’s appropriation of it.    Jeff Wall: After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Preface, (1999-2001) * First shown at Documenta 11, After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Preface, (1999-2001), represents a well-known scene from Ellison’s…

A plan for escape - Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

2002

Standardized Octagonal Units for Imagined and Existing Systems, Renée Green, 2001

Constant, New Babylon (film still Victor Nieuwenhuijs & Maartje Seyferth)

For an exhibition proposal I am researching existing documentation of Constant's New Babylon, a work I first saw in real life at Documenta 11 in Kassel in 2002, in relationship  with the concept of dread (I briefly introduced this fascination a little while ago).

It is an anticipation I have always had that New Babylon isn't only optimistic, and not knowing the work better than having seen many images, descriptions and positive references from urban futurists and spatial optimists, I decided to search for answers.

On the ever excellent BLDGBLOG site I discovered an interview with Mark Wigley, co-founder of Volume magazine with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Bouman, and author of Constant's New Babylon. In this interview, Wigley talks about Constant's criticism of his own work:

So you’re absolutely right to stress the extent to which a supposed society of liberation is actually a control society. But it’s interesting to look at Constant’s own criticism of the project.

He does New Babylon for about twenty years – till he becomes convinced that he’s made a terrible mistake. He realizes that, if you give everybody a playground in which they can unleash their desires, then it won’t be a 60s paradise of love and solidarity and all that – people will actually kill each other, because we’re dark, miserable creatures. He was very affected by the failure of May ’68 in Paris, and by the Vietnam War, and by the death of a child of a close friend of his – so he really started to see people as their own enemy.

He spent the last four years of the project showing the horror of what it would be like to live in New Babylon. He’s the only architect – or let’s say quasi-architect – I’ve ever known that spent not just one image but four years’ worth of images to show how horrible life would be in his own city.

The architect of the utopia came to realise the reality of his ideal city would not live up to the intentions.