PLATZGEIST™

OUTOCHTHONOUS

2006-06-09T06:06:00.000-07:00

This mask was found at a sidewalk merchant's setup in Mexico City, circa 1996. The worn-out surface and grundgy patina betray what may very well be the true and colorful tales –as told by the man I bought it from, about the State of Guerrero's own Sierras and magical folklore.

As he recounted, the mask is part of a triptych –which he offered to complete if I were interested. The series of masks were presumably used during a ritual up in the mountains, where only men would perform –naked, in a ritual dance, provking the clouds to produce the needed rainfall for a rich and joyfull harvest season.

I never saw the rest of the masks and I never could get over the stark and frozen gesticulations of the one I ended up with. Like a shocked sucket, or a surprised bedeviled deity, I also could never get over the hillarious expectative expression of this face.

There is nothing serene about it. It definitely awaits more than it thrusts. Its gaze pierces, without insinuation and the perfect circumference of its pucker depicts more than a disfunctional smirk. Heck, it is downright styled and full of intent!

The mask is a toy. A lubricant to social intercourse. An enabler of alternate social personaes.
A tool to make rain come down, on one fertile self.

Perhaps it was a flirt and like a cloud I just flew by.

–Franz Schnaas

"CLOUD REFLECTIONS_1" The photomorphic painting series.

2006-05-18T12:29:00.000-07:00

Thousands of plastic bits in 10 different colors were mixed as an aggregate. Progressively, one color was subtracted from the whole, bit by bit. This painterly process (duration) was photographed at key intervals (moments) reflecting the shifting dominance of each color in respect to the remaining others. This artwork being a series, reflects on Henri Bergson's concept of 'multiplicities' by recording both 'moments' and 'duration' in a continuum. The resulting memory imprints highlight the relation between 'time' –whereas each frame (moment) is qualitatively different (heterogeneous) from the next and 'space,' where as all the bits are basically the same object regardless of color and their transforming arrangement over time.

"Cloud Reflections_1" is the first iteration in this series of studies, each of which focuses on a particular 'modifier' in the process of color bit subtraction. The modifier 'reflection' is particular to this series as it introduces a transparent, yet reflective divider, into the color segmentation while becoming a key element in the composition of each frame.
–Franz Schnaas, 2006

Archival prints on German Hahnemuhle (photo cotton-rag 308) paper, are now available through the SPLACE/LAB online gallery, in two sizes. For more information please visit the link bellow.

BOOK WITHIN A BOOK: "DEAR DIARY"

2006-05-17T18:17:00.000-07:00

"Following four Exhibitions (2001 to 2004) in Cologne's narrowest building, Rendel & Spitz decided to suspend their creativity in 2005. The series of books published to accompany the exhibitions was however to continue. The result being a book with white pages to document an exhibition which did not take place. It was sent out to friends and associates as a token of consolidation. One of the recipients asked whether he should fill the book and send it back. We were delighted to adopt that idea, and asked everyone who received a copy to lend us their book for the next exhibition in January of 2006. The upshot is a possible answer to the simple question of what happens to 100 empty books in the course of a year." –R+S

A BOOK WITHIN A BOOK: During spring 2006 I took part in RENDEL+SPITZ's exhibition at the "narrowest building in Cologne" (Germany), a.k.a. 'the gap' by contributing my personal copy of the 'black' book. The project, "Dear Diary" is an epistolic set-up, whereby 100 of their friends were sent, in 2005, "The Unfilled Gap," a blank (black) book.

Unexpectedly, over the course of a year most made annotations in the book. Thus was spun the 'pink' book in the series, which is a reflection on the palimpsest –or blank slate, with its infinite interpretative space. Dear Diary not only 'fills a gap' in their color-coded book collection, but it introduces one loop of note, a cycle, to the 'unfilled' gap-as-abyss and creative continuum.

PLATGEIST = SPLACE

2006-03-07T22:28:00.000-08:00

The word 'splace' (Platzgeist) came about in 1994 during the development of an experimental user interface at the New Media department at the Art Center college of design in Pasadena, California and presented at the Digitale'96 organized by Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, Germany.

The fluid Nature of the proposed interface, which fundamental concept is to experience data in a non-Cartesian, non-linear mode, highlighted by the interconnectivity and thematic relevance between data nodes. The resulting approach to data sorting and serving proposed a paradigm shift Schnaas referrers to as "topographies of meaning." The implicit spacial reference stemmed from the idea that the computer screen's surface could –or should, be treated as a continuous plane connected seamlessly (or stitched) at all four sides, basically extending and stitching the 'x' and the 'y' axis, rather than the conventional, endless vertical scroll. The resulting dietetic space would then take the form of a 'Taurus' or dough nut shape. This digital mass or body's surface provides the recordable and remember-able topography on which data particles assemble and rearrange themselves (spacial) according to relevance based on meaning in the search process (temporal), effectively pointing at a need to define the notion of being-in-space or what Schnaas referred to as the "sense of place". Sense of place + space = splace.

Time and space are essential to the notion of 'Splace' because in the process of mapping during a search 'meander', the mind accumulates the pathways in a cumulative process H.Bergson refers to as memory.

In "Matter and Memory", H.Bergson proposes to the idea of memory as intuition. Memory is an important element in what Bergson termed 'multiplicities', which he divides into 'qualitative' (heterogeneous) and 'qualitative' (homogeneous). The concept of multiplicities are important for the development of 'splace' because data itself can be clustered in groups or 'clouds' according to meaning. Its hereto- or homogeneous values is determined by the semantic perspective on the data.

In "been be coming" an experimental text and image book published by Schnaas in 1994 during his graduate studies in Switzerland, he created a serial meander through the thesaurus dictionary starting with the word 'PLAY', then arbitrarily selecting a synonym from the related cluster and using that as the next leading word in the following page. The same process was applied to all subsequent words creating a chain of meaning which was then force-looped back to the word 'play', demonstrating in the process, language's own perversity through its relativity of signification. The experiment evoked an allegorical visual not to dissimilar in concept from the current 'Visual Thesaurus" however, the relevant feature of this exploration was the linear trajectory defined by the choices of words, because it represented the experiential trajectory through the mass of data, what Bergson refers to as 'duration'. The difference in the general(absolute) meaning of each word is what Bergson terms as heterogeneous in each part of this qualitative multiplicity, in this case each word. The cluster of synonyms surrounding each word represent the gradual shift of meaning blending into the next word.

Splace presents data in motion, meaning all relevant data to the original point selection gravitates as if magnetically, to the lead data bit in degrees of relevance, effectively clustering or forming a cloud or what he then referred to as a "school of fish", so that, what Bergson steadfastly proposed was not representable, the gradual, the motion in a duration, was in fact the substance in which meaning transformed according to the position in space and the place defined by the meanings formed by each fish school or constellation of data.

Splace data bits (SDBs) are rich in media. Each sprite –or data bit, is in fact a fully characterized node containing an individual sound or 'chirp', an 'icon', and and rich audio-visual content, and is linked to every other relevant bit of data in the Splace cosmos –the Taurus. This systemic approach to viewing data was originally inspired by Deleusian writings on non-linear theory.

The original prototype for this user iinterface was generated in Macromedia director fully coded in 'Lingo' by:

SPLACE = PLATZGEIST

SPLACE = Platzgeist
“The sense of place”
Platzgeist = SPLACE (ambiguity between ‘place’ and ‘space’ –which I detect in the specific use of the word ‘platz’) and ‘geist’ the ‘sense’ of something (spirit, soul, ghost). So the ‘sense of place’ in space is ‘splace’.

www.platzgeist.net
www.splace.net

Auf deutsch:
Platzgeist = SPLACE (Mehrdeutigkeit zwischen ’ Platz ’ und ’ Raum ’ – die ich im spezifischen Gebrauch von dem Wort ’ platz ’ ermittele) und ’ geist ’ die ’ Richtung ’ von etwas (Geist, Seele, Geist). So ist die ’ Richtung des Platzes ’ im Raum ’ splace ‘

relevant diagrams of the morphology of the web as place:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/36521959321@N01/44349798/
http://flickr.com/photos/kosmar/62381076/

relevant discussion on web ‘clouds’ and ‘bubble maps’: (reply with a notation on the term platzgeist)
http://flocksucks.wordpress.com/2005/11/21/web-20-retards-need-to-read-more-tufte/

Good discussion on wed data articulation:
http://nonfiction.ig-gestaltung.de/archives/2005/11/16/order-makes-the-web-go-round-latch/
. Reply with: the sense of place in the web is data driven. Indexical data (or LATCH as referred to in there) gives degrees of relevance, hence the sense of place: platzgeist.

Last year a fellow artist in Canada, Theo Sims, happened upon the word 'splace' as well but gave it a different context of meaning by likening it to 'splice' as in "to edit together" like in a montage:
http://www.recirca.com/reviews/2005/theosims/ts.shtml

The 'i'nstatnt's Scroll

2005-10-19T12:24:00.000-07:00

The 'i'nstatnt's Scroll

“Man is a being of distances, a restless energy, whose poles are the futurity of her project, the freedom of the instant, the world, and other persons.” –Martin Heidegger

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This 9’ scroll was type-set in wood and lead type, and then letterpressed on stark white Japanese cotton-fiber paper, in 1994 as a limited edition of 14 scrolls. The format cellebrates the recent discovery back then, of the original Dead Sea Scrolls near the border of Jordan and Israel, but it also has the spirit and innertia of an ambitious project such as was Jack Kerouack’s own endless piece of paper on which he type-wrote his classic novel “On The Road”.

Scrolls have always been a source of intreague as a format and as the perfect metaphor for chronology or linear narrativity. By way of influences from the 1960’s minimalist and experimental music realms, artists such as: Steve Reich, Meredith Munk, John Cage, et.al., the piece also references a pianola scroll with its seemingly random yet programatic array of punched holes, only this is type.

‘i’ scroll unravels with an acrobatic arrangement of words an letters, the prior commenting on the acts of ‘creating’ and ‘existing’ in-the-world, the former mimic the gutural sounds of Meredith Munk’s noise works and are arranged as a random system, a tip-of-the-hat to John Cage’s ‘chance’ compositions—having been set with all the available lead type of a font’s drawer, a commentary on the finite character of ‘old-school’ typeseting in the wake of the recent integration of the computer as a more dynamic typesetting tool, where actual letters can be typed at infinitum. The chance availability of the lead type dictated the composition.

The horizontal thrust of the piece evokes the chronologic notion implicit in Heidegger’s quote, which runs as a single line along the distance of the scroll (life/existance), the quote is set in Bouer Bodoni type , in contrast with the rest of the piece’s compositional elements (words), which are set in a variety of styles from the original Grothesque family (lead and wood type).

The word ‘Man’ is the very first word in the long composition and one of the only two elements to be printed in red ink. The other red element is one letter ‘i’ which is at the other ‘end’ of the scroll, alone, and laying on it’s side. The color connection closes the connotation that ‘i’ is the ‘ego’ of ‘Man’.

The rest of the composition aludes to a ‘trajectory’ full of quetions and dilemas possed at contrapunctual relations to the creative ‘acts’ or ‘stages’ (‘instants’) in every one of the composition’s (life’s) segments.