Agnieszka KurantTime Code, 2007 - 20112 panels, 80 x 100 inches (203.2 cm x 254 cm)Dimensions Variable

Agnieszka KurantTime Code, 2007 - 20112 panels, 80 x 100 inches (203.2 cm x 254 cm)Dimensions variable

LANGUAGE  IS  A  VIRUS  FROM  OUTER  SPACE,  2007  

LANGUAGE IS A VIRUS FROM OUTER SPACE referes to the limits and solipsism of logic of human science. 'Wow signal' - the only message ever received on Earth from outer space by a radio telescope 'Big Ear' in Ohio in 1978 was engraved on a crystal plate. This signal has been examined for past 30 years an innumerous number of times by many scientists, who do not either confirm or deny that the signal was sent by some other civilization. All accidental sources of the signal have been excluded. There are only two possible sources of the signal - either it comes from another civilisation or the message was sent from Earth, then encountered some planet or object and was reflected returning to Earth, distorted to such an extent that we no longer recognise it. Since science considers only repeated acts as phenomenons, this single signal is useless from the point of view of logic of science. It is also a code we cannot break or decipher. When the signal was received the scientist working in the laboratory wrote 'Wow‘ on the paper print-out of the telescope. This ‘wow’ became part of the message’s content and is the only part of it we now understand.

Phantom  Library,  2011  

books  as  real  sculptural  objects  for  which  I  bought  ISBN  numbers  and  acquired  barcodes  to  give  them  status  in  the  material  economic  world.  Behind  each  book  there  is  a  complex,  elaborate  and  costly  economy  of  its  produc@on  process  designed  to  normally  manufacture  hundreds  or  thousands  of  copies.  This  complex  economy  serves  in  this  case  to  produce  just  one  single  copy  of  each  book.  An  imagined  sci-­‐fi  hybrid  produc@on  process  betweet  singularity  and  mass  produc@on.  Three  chosen  fonts  were  altered  and  distorted  by  different  algorithms  and  viruses  to  produce  endless  quan@ty  of  fonts  ranging  from  pure  abstrac@ons  to  readable  formal  ones.  On  the  back  cover  of  each  book  there  is  the  descrip@on  of  the  source  of  its  origin  (the  book  in  which  it  was  men@oned  and  its  author)  as  well  as  any  addi@onal  informa@on  or  the  plot  summary  that  is  included  about  a  given  fic@onal  book  in  the  book  describing  it.  Some  of  the  books  within  the  installa@on  were  produced  with  empty  pages,  some  with  recycled  content  of  other  books,  some  are  printed  with  disappearing  inks  that  appear  only  in  the  sun  light  and  disappear  in  the  shadow,  or  appear  only  in  certain  temperatures,  or  are  visible  for  some  @me  and  vanish  aJer  a  while.  Over  the  coarse  of  this  year  a  few  of  these  books  will  be  outsourced  and  commissioned  to  be  wriKen  by  invited  writers.  The  most  famous  examples  of  phantom  books  included  in  the  Phantom  Library:  Stanislaw  Lem  wrote  several  books  containing  fic@onal  books.  In  One  Human  Minute  and  Perfect  Vacuum,  he  reviews  19  fic@onal  books  including  Wilhelm  Klopper’s  “Die  Kultur  als  Fahler  (Civilisa<on  as  Mistake)”  and  Gian  Carlo  Spallanzani’s  The  Idiot.  In  Imaginary  Magnitude  there  are  several  introduc@ons  to  fic@onal  works,  as  well  as  an  adver@sement  for  a  fic@onal  encyclopedia  en@tled  Vestrand's  Extelopedia  in  44  Magnetomes.  The  story  of  Philip  K.  Dick  The  Man  in  the  High  Castle  revolves  around  a  mysterious  and  forbidden  book,  wriKen  by  Hawthorne  Abendsen,  named  The  Grasshopper  Lies  Heavy.  Dick's  book  describes  an  alternate  history  where  the  Axis  Powers  were  victorious  in  World  War  II  and  United  States  has  been  divided  between  Japan  and  Nazi  Germany.  The  book-­‐within-­‐a-­‐book  is  an  alternate  history  itself,  depic@ng  a  world  in  which  the  Allies  won  the  war  but  which  is  nonetheless  different  from  our  own  world  in  several  important  respects.    J.L.  Borges's  fic@onal  crea@ons  include  Herbert  Quain’s  April  March,  The  Secret  Mirror,  Ts'ui  Pen’s  The  Garden  of  Forking  Paths.  In  "Pierre  Menard,  Author  of  the  Quixote",  a  fic@onal  poet  named  Pierre    Menard  aKempts  to  recreate  Don  Quixote  exactly  as  Miguel  de  Cervantes    wrote  it.  In  2666  Roberto  Bolano  describes  a  number  of  fic@onal  books  by  Benno  von  Archimboldi.  The  books  include  Bifurcaria  Bifurcata,  Railroad  Perfec<on  and  Berlin  Underground.  Phantom  Library  is  a  generic,  open-­‐form  work  which  will  grow  with  @me  and  currently  includes  over  200  books.    

Phantom Library is a project which consisted in creating physically a library of fictional, invisible books - books that don’t exist, except in the pages of other books. Fictional, imaginary books, artifictions, libris phantastica, and all books unwritten, unread, unpublished mentioned or described in real, existing books by authors such as Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Brautigan and many more. I used the archives of a few researchers around the world who have been cataloging these books for many years e.g. Brian Quinette in the US, Pawel Dunin-Wasowicz in Poland, Enrique Vila-Matas and Jean Yves Jouannais ( in his book Artistes sans oeuvres concerning never written books and artists without artworks) to produce the fictional invisible

Map  of  Phantom  Islands,  2011  Map of Phantom Islands (2011) is the result of a long research focused on phantom territories that during the history of cartography were ever shown on maps of the world as results of Fata Morgana and mirages observed in different places around the globe as well as cartography errors, misconceptions about the world, rumors, etc. Some phantom islands were also intentional errors of explorers who tried to persuade governments to get funding for conquering of new lands and invented and placed on maps some nonexistent territories which later continued appearing on other maps over centuries. Most phantom islands continued to appear on political and economic maps till as late as 1943 (the development of aerial photography) and some still ocassionally re-apear. The phantom islands, though they are completely fictitious, were often sources of real conflicts and almost led to wars, e.g. Antilia caused a major conflict between Portugal and Spain. Bermeja is a tiny phantom island which USA still places on manipulated versions of Google Earth maps as a potential source of conflict with Mexico which allegedly occupies it. Political Map of Phantom Islands depicts the „colonial“ and political divisions of the phantom theritories depending on which country or empire claimed to own a given land. The project includes Phantom Islands Archive - a series of 30 images and descriptions of real historical maps on which different phantom territories appeared. The descriptions include all information we have about a given phantom land based on allegedly real economic and political data from the times when the map was produced. The project includes a Map of Phantom islands which appears and dissapears in the sunlight and shadow depending on the weather, like a Fata Morgana.

F!"#$%&', I(%!"% and E#)$%&' appear *rs time on +e Carta da Navegar that is one of examples of early maps of Scadinavia that did not originate an edition of Ptolemy’s Geography.

Nicolo Zeno published a map to ilustarate the voyages of two ancestors in ,-./. A fuller title of his book that contains the map is Chart of Navigation of Nicolo and Antonio Zeni who were in the North in the year !"#$ and Annals of the Journey in Persia… And of the Discovery of the Island Frislanda, Estlanda, Engrouelanda, Estotilanda, and Icaria, made under the Nort Pole, by the two brothers Zeni, Messire Nicolo, the Knight, and Messire Antonio. One book. With a detailed map of all tha said parts of the North discovered by them. With permission and privilege. Venice: by Francesco Marcolini. !%%#.

+e title refers to a map of the northern regions, described in the book as “a navigation chart which I once found that I possessed among the ancient things in our house, which… is

all rotten and many years old.” However, later scholarly reae-arch, including that by Lucas, concluded that Zeno actually created his map from extant maps, including the Carta Marina of Olaus Magnus.+e map was widely accepted as accurate in the sixteenth century.

Zeno’s creation, with its imaginary geographics features, achived unexpected longevity and in0uence. Map of the myth-ical islands of Frisland and Icaria, thus assuring their appear-ance on maps of the north for decades to come.

Most famous is Frisland. Frisland appears to be born out of confusion between an imaginary island and the actual south-ern part of Greenland. Even in the mid ,.th century, explorers’ maps clearly depicted Frisland as separated from Greenland by a wide strait. +e myth of Frisland was exposed as explor-ers, chie0y from England and France, charted and mapped the north-west waters.

Frisland, Icaria and Estland

I. Map of the North Atlantic by Abraham Ortelius (,1.2) II. Carta de navegar, Nicolo Zeno (,11.) III. Frisland from Mercator’s Arctic map (,34-)

IIIII

I

I. Antillia by Andea Bianco (!"#$) II. Antilia by Albino de Canepa (!"%&)

A'()**)+ is a legendary island which was reputed during the age of exploration to lie in the Atlantic Ocean far to the west of Portugal and Spain. ,e island went by various other names such as Isle of Seven Cities, Ilha das Sete Cidades. Antillia was also connected at times with ancient legends including the Isles of the Blessed and the Fortunate Islands. By the !$th cen-tury, the legend gave rise to the independent Spanish legends of the Seven Cities of Gold, which were reputed by mercenary conquistadors to be fabulously wealthy and located somewhere on the mainland of America.

,e origin of the name is uncertain. A variant of the name, Atullia, appeared on a !#$- chart by Franciscus Pizzigano. Al-though di.cult to read, it has been translated as: “Here are statues which stand before the shores of Atullia ( ante ripas Atulliae) and which have been set up for the safety of sailors; for beyond is the vile sea, which sailors cannot navigate,” and a possible abbreviation mark over the ‘A’ was thought to suggest a better reading of Antullia.

Modern naval historians S.E. Morison and G.R. Crone speculated that the name may have derived from Getulia, the classical name for the northwestern part of Africa, and that the phrase on the !#$- chart actually read “ante ripas Getu-liae” where in medieval times it was thought that there were islands where Hercules had set up pillars warning that sailors had reached the boundaries of safe navigation, at the edge of the then known world.

Antillia is /rst marked in the Pizzigano chart of !"0" to-gether with its northerly companion, Satanazes (“Devil’s Is-land”). It appears in virtually all of the known surviving Por-tolan charts of the Atlantic - notably those of the Genoese B. Beccario or Beccaria (!"#1), the Venetian Andrea Bianco (!"#$), and Grazioso Benincasa (!"-$ and !"%0).

On these maps, Antillia was typically depicted on a similar scale to Portugal’s, lying around 022 miles west of the Azores. It was drawn as an almost perfect rectangle, its long axis run-ning north-south, but with seven trefoil bays shared between the east and west coasts. Each city lay on a bay.

A Portuguese legend tells how the island was settled in the early eighth century in the face of the Moorish conquest of Iberia by the Archbishop of Porto, six other bishops and their parishioners to avoid the ensuing Moorish invasion. Centuries later, the island became known as a proto-utopian common-wealth, free from the disorders of less favoured states.

Since these events predated the Kingdom of Portugal and the clergy’s heritage marked a claim to signi/cant strategical gains, Spain counterclaimed that the expedition was, in fact, theirs. One of the chief early descriptions of the heritage of Antillia is inscribed on the globe which the geographer Mar-tin Behaim made at Nuremberg in !"&0. Behaim relates the Catholic escape from the barbarians, though his date of -#" is probably a mistake for -!". ,e inscription adds that a Span-ish vessel sighted the island in !"!", while a Portuguese crew claimed to have landed on Antillia in the !"#2s.

In a later version of the legend, the bishops 3ed from Méri-da, Spain, when Moors attacked it around the year !!12.

With this legend underpinning growing reports of a boun-tiful civilisation midway between Europe and Cipangu, or Ja-pan, the quest to discover the Seven Cities attracted signi/cant attention. However, by the last decade of the !1th century, the Portuguese state’s o.cial sponsorship of such exploratory voy-ages had ended, and in !"&0, under the Spanish 3ag of Ferdi-nand and Isabella, Christopher Columbus set out on his his-toric journey to Asia, citing the island as the perfect halfway house by the authority of Paul Toscanelli.

Others following d’Anghiera suggested contenders in the West Indies for Antillia’s heritage (most often either Puerto Rico or Trinidad), and as a result the Caribbean islands be-came known as the Antilles. As European explorations con-tinued in the Americas, maps reduced the scale of the island Antillia, tending to place it mid-Atlantic, whereas the Seven Cities were attributed to mainland Central or North America, as the various European powers vied for territory in the New World.

Antillia

II

I

UNCERTAINTY  PRINCIPLE  A  real,  small-­‐scale  island  that  hovers  in  the  air  due  to  magne?c  levita?on.  It  moves  slightly  when  people  talk  next  to  it  as  it  is  fragile  to  movements  of  air.  This  an?-­‐gravity  territory  is  governed  by  an  unfamiliar  logic,  the  rules  of  which  are  

yet  to  be  invented.      

Universe  is  Immobile  CSW  Zamek  Ujazdowski,  Warszawa,  2009;  Frieze  Art  Fair  2009  Wypchana  wiewiórka   zatrzymana  w   pół   skoku,   zamrożona  w   ruchu,   unosi   się  magicznie   nad   postumentem.   Trwający   kilka  sekund  skok  wiewiórki  staje  się  dla  widzów  momentem  trwającym  w  nieskończoność,  jakbyśmy  znajdowali  się  w  równoległej  rzeczywistości  z  płynącym  wolniej  czasem  niż  czas  zwierząt.  Elektromagnesy,  wiewiórka,  drewno.  

         FUTURE  ANTERIOR    

- a version of New York Times from the year 2020. A professional clairvoyant who collaborates regularly with Interpol, police and governments and is a reliable source of information for businessman and politicians was asked to create a forecast of what will happen in and around 2020 . The forecasts were later developed into an issue of New York Times with articles written by several NYT journalists and other ghostwriters. The newspaper has all the parameters of NYT from a bar code to advertisments bought by existing companies. It is however printed with disappearing paint which becomes completely invisible above 18 degrees and comes back to black when it is cooled down. As a result the newspaper appears and disappears depending on the weather conditions and the temperature of the room or when touched by human hands which warm up the paper.

88,2 Hrtz (the work changes title depending on the frequency that is used in a given place) - is an accumula-tion of silences (silent pauses) from various important political, intellectual and economic speeches from the beginning of voice recording till today. The work is inspired by the short story of Heinrich Boll “Murke’s Col-lected Silences” (1955). The Murke of the title is a young editor, a graduate of psychology working for a radio station. He starts collecting bits of tape discarded on the studio floor—tape containing silence —splices them together, and takes them home to listen to in the evening. Murke ultimately trades a portion of silences with a radio producer for fragments of other recording he offers him in exchange, turning the silence into a currency.

Agnieszka Kurant88,2 Hrtz , 2012

Agnieszka Kurant88,2 Hrtz , 2012

The use of silent pauses can be very strategic and meaningful and its po-litical impact was often analyzed by philosophers, anthropologists, lin-guists and coachers. It can be com-pared to use of intervals in music. Certain famous pauses in speeches of e.g. Hitler, Winston Churchill, JFK, Georges Pompidou or Fidel Cas-tro have become iconic examples of creating impact through powerful silence and its timing. Silence rep-resents also the omission, censor-ing or supressing and concealing of certain information which in public speeches often relates to manipula-tions of collective memory. What is of interest for Kurant are also the prob-lems of copyrights of recordings of public speech which belong to a pub-lic domaine and are considered the national heritage of a given country. Therefore the sales of records with the recorded speeches has to be managed solely by the state and co-anot be privatized by record compa-nies. This has caused numerous law-suits for copyrights. The copyrights

Kurant’s piece is a realization of a phantom work that existed inside Boll’s short story. Kurant produced an en-tire record of silences which was broadcasted on Polish national radio station in prime time creating a program with no content, pure silence. This accumulation and the real broadcast is presented in the gallery in 2 ways: 1) by the magnetic tape recorder (image below) similar to the one used by Murke in Boll’s story, playing the accumulation and the phantom work which Murke created. 2) This broadcast is also echoed by the broadcast of the same accumulation of silences by the short circuit 1 watt broadcaster at the gallery and a single ordinary radio tuned to this newly created silence channel, an empty broadcast, an empty format. The radio standing somewhere in a casual way receives the silence broadcast channel and plays it as the unhearable soundtrack for the show.