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According to a certain myth a drawing was born through an act of a girl from Corinth who drew the shadow of her lover on the ground at the moment of his leaving (once upon a time, wars were a compulsory reason for moving from place to place, just as were the Olympic Games or pilgrimages). Einstein’s special theory of relativ-ity (1905), the thesis on the equivalence of mass and energy (E=mc2), and the use of a statistically credible apparatus in the interpretation of physical phenomena ensured that space and time, up to that point in time - and in accordance with Kantian theory - the assumed forms of objective cognition (i.e. the previous ones, independent of cognition gained through experience) now become variables dependent on observer-subject movement parameters. Travelling, like art - as described by Hegel - bears the “character of the past”; travelling is a Gada me-rian confrontation with a bourgeois religion of education and its ceremony of enjoyment (it shares the state of “not working” with the celebration of a festivity). There are two ways in which art approaches movement: as an object of an artistic act and as a view from which the work is ob served. It is therefore possible to differentiate between art which deals with the topic of a change of place (genre images of travels, the art of representation of movement, and works of art which are in motion - the actual movement of kinetic art), and art designed for a gaze from a moving car (billboards). But artists can move too. Just like Villard de Honnecurt, builder-traveller, whose knowled ge is based on direct observation, so did Le Corbusier set off on 7 May,

1911, on his journey to Istanbul, towards the past, a real and metaphorical - Voyage d’Orient - where, under the influence of rigid geometry, the whiteness of buildings and the triumph of a square, a cube and a sphe re beneath the glare of a coat of whitewash, his idea of the Domino system of construction, a mo dernistic manifesto, was born. Travelling as an invitation to escape, a synonym of uncon-ditional freedom, is “a source of emotion” (Le Cor buisier), of discovery, reading and interpretations. Le Cor buisier’s “mind and heart have experienced the most turbulent of emotions...” in that town “whose composite structure condensed within itself all the cities of the world.”

At the Tanja Dabo exhibition (2003) in the KriæiÊ Roban Gallery, entitled The Point of Encounter: You and Me, we see a scene on two opposing walls in its real duration time recorded from the bow of a ferry sailing the route Valbiska-Merag, linking the islands of Krk and Cres. Tanja Dabo tra vels on it when she visits her parents on the island of Lo πinj. Portraits of landscapes, plans of zooming in and out from the wreath of rocks, girdling the island along the di viding curve between the sea and the land, and the coastal belt of greenery, alternate rhythmically, thus pro-ducing the effect of transposition, pulsation of the islands and variations of their position. Two ferries on the same route, starting at the same time, travelling in opposite directions, meet halfway and immediately avoid one another, bypass one another and move apart from one another. An impact, a contact between them would be undesirable and fatal. Similar dynamics, like ships coming close and then again moving apart, is present in a relation-ship between two peo ple, and is characterized by extra-temporal and universal torment of bonding and maintain-ing contact. Closeness in relationship and interrelatedness of identities of two people do not grow along a progres-sively linear trajectory. Rather, it is a phenomenon of impossibility of a conti nual state of juxtaposition, just as the cyclic character of forces that rule nature deprives time of its direction as an irreversible sequence of points, in the sense of past and fu ture, of development and progress. The Point of Encoun ter: You and Me is a kind of a

ART AND TRAVELLING Silva KalËiÊ

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retrospective monograph, a private metaphor in the Ich form of Tanja Dabo who, ha ving left Loπinj to go to Rijeka to school, remains torn be tween Rijeka where she works, and Zagreb where her boy friend succeeded in finding employment. Cicero says: navigare necesse est, vivere non

est; mobility - which, it has to be said, in these contempo-rary times commands a lower price than the fact of life itself - is one of the causes of a considerable reduction in the importance of tradi tio nal social communities and rela-tionships. Based on the provision in the American Constitution which guaran tees freedom of the pursuit of happiness, F. Fukuyama (End of History and the Last Man, 1992 - correcting an earlier thesis on neo-liberal capitalism as a perfect social system, and therefore the end of his-tory), explains how “mo bility”, therefore, considerably reduces the significan ce of traditional social communities, tribes, clans, large families, religious sects, etc. These groups can be more hu mane, but since they are not organ-ized in accordance with the rational principles of eco-nomic efficaciousness they break up into their component parts.

It is by no means by mere chance that the video works entitled Lost amigos I and II, with their short frames, croma key technology and a decollage sound and visual compo-sition resemble a commercial video clip; at the same time, by way of the dynamics of the lead-in, the music sound-scape, editing and narrative structure of the video work, the authors Leo VukeliÊ and Wladimir (Vladmir Frelih) spo of an A production full feature from the “dream fac-tory”. The format of the projection onto a screen in a gallery simulates the atmosphere of a cinema. The tape was used to record personal processive activities by the artists who are simultaneously researching video form both as a style and as a medium. The artists have performed - “ac ted” their own performance of their own existence (at the time, being temporarily resident in Germany) in the style of the “Road Films”; repetitive rhythm of sequences of rides in a coupe, of human landscapes, urban sounds, a hedonistic lifestyle, distortion of time and space in line with Wittgenstein’s concept whereby “the world is every-

thing that an accident is”, alternates with a criticism of consume rism (in one frame all the retail prices of objects used are apostrophised, which underlines the fact that the entire visible world is convertible to consumer goods on the market and can be expressed through a price), while the en trance into an easel painting (which again is

TANJA DABO MEETING POINT: YOU AND I(Cres & Krk), video, 2003.

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but a model for a screen on a car window) as a quotation of a scene from Kurosawa’s Dreams, ironizes traditional mimetic art. The ritual intensity of travels by contemporary Argonauts who, in contrast to the mythical characters with a mission, are not seeking anything, but move aimlessly, evokes the image of a world of unbridled mobility without borders or passports; where travelling means to “outlive the space” and the “confinement of one’s own small coun-try” (a term used by H. Wallmann). Lost amigos speaks of friendship, overlapped identities of good friends and a feeling of partnership, the mutual belonging of fellow-tra-vellers in a new and unknown environment.

The Utopia Travel Mobile videotheque, a video archive which travels in a taxi in the function of a mobile video de vi ce, passing through ten capital cities (Cairo-Beirut-Is-tanbul-Sophia-Skopje-Belgrade-Sarajevo-Zagreb-Lju-bljana-Vienna, 2001) screens video works dealing with the idea of cultural, social and political reality contained in the fragments of detached societies, where the natio nal and cultural barriers issuing from the actual habitat of individual artists, (personal) identity, displacement and transfer of identities and codes, as well as the meaning and significance of borders as the reverse side of globali-zation (see the work by the Multiplicity, an Italian inter-dis-ciplinary group) created specific diversities within the visual sphere of information.

Utopia Travel is a project devised by the Austrian ar tists Emaneul Danesch and David Rych, started during the exhibition Das Experiment in the Austrian Secession in May 2001. Stored within the Utopia Travel video archives are works by Sanja IvekoviÊ, Zdravko MustaË, Vlado KneæeviÊ, Sandra Sterle, Renata Poljak, Alen Flo riËiÊ, Kristina Leko, Marijan CrtaliÊ, Denis KraπkoviÊ, Lala RaπËiÊ, Goran Trbuljak, Leo VukeliÊ & Wladimir, Dalibor Martinis. Transport of video works sent from countries along the route from Cairo to Vienna, in a symbolic transi tion from the African continent across the Middle East to Eastern Europe and, ultimately, to the “ante-murale” of Wes tern Europe, the spread of information in a polylogue on the subject of the construction of political territories, led to the

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LEO VUKELIΔ I WLADIMIR FRELIH LOST AMIGOS I & IIvideo, 2001.

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creation of non-institutional platforms directed at the issue of the possibility of communication and transfer of local cultural codes, of common segments of histo ry. The point in question is a process project that depends on the incom-prehensible structures of regional politics and unreliable quality of travel.

In the real world it is not only the space which chang-es, people inhabiting it change too: the truth is an histori-

cally open evolution of sense which no method can shape into

a perfect form, Gadamer tells us. At the end of the 19th cen tury man was already mobile - using mostly the strength of his body to move. In the 20th century he be came motor-ized, and today we could, as Virilio says, talk of motile man whose movements are mostly reduced to the upper part of his body and the occasional step. Contemporary man is less and less vernacular, and ever more planetary. His immediate surroundings are less and less local, and ever more digital. The all pervasive commu nication erases boundaries and differences. Whereas previously we were the inhabitants of a territory, we are now mere tourists visit-ing it, or even less, onlookers, who, in our slippers, sitting in our rooms, freely sail through information networks and data banks, perusing pictures of places in the Great world. With the abolishment of the concept of permanence and the collapse of the idea of distance as a time significant factor, our reality is increasin gly becoming a world of arbi-trarily manipulated sequences of virtual representations. Virtualisation of reality enables its deconstruction into arbi-trary component parts and their combination at will by way of film editing technology, video frames, sequences suitable for manipulation, hazy transitions, cuts, leaps, etc. Form no longer follows fun ction, nor does function follow form, the denoted - to quote Jacques Derrida - no

longer has a vital link with its denoter, and vice versa. Perceiving the transience (non-permanence, erasure of electromag-netic recording) of a video image as the fourth dimension of his works, video artist Dalibor Martinis, appearing in a public space of the German city of Rosenheim, put togeth-er a “composition” (in the meaning as in the coined phrase “train composition”) of fifty black and silver Volkswagen

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MOBILE VIDEOTHEQUE UTOPIA TRAVEL video archive, 2001.

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Golfs (Parken Verboten), a kind of keyboard of urban point of reference. Through objects whose primary function is motion, cove ring distances, Martinis created an immobile barrier preventing passers by to walk their usual corridors of movement, thus disrupting daily routine. VWs, function-ing as Morse code signals, spell out the sentence “Parking forbidden - sometimes it is nice.” Recognition of the urban aesthetics in the parked cars (some passers by say it as a marketing ploy - as it happened, all the sponsor cars were immediately sold) is linked to the message the under-

standing of which requires knowledge of the applied code; just as well hidden will remain the message of contempo-rary art to those who do not speak its “language”. At the start of the project Krajolik promjenjivog rizika (Variable Risk

Landscape, January-December 2004) invests a certain financial value into an investment fund for a period of 365 days. Once a month the artist goes to the mountains in order to climb the amplitude that corresponds (i.e. graph-ically depicts - a location is selected with corresponding altitude and configuration, while the height above sea level is measured by altimeter/GPS device) to the value of the share for the past month (a diary of climbing was published on the web page, with the artist’s photograph dressed


DALIBOR MARTINIS VARIABLE RISK LANDSCAPEmultimedia project, 2004.

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incongruously formally for the occasion, in an authoritative-come-business posture within a mountainous landscape - the photographer of the convivial lan dscape was Boris CvjetanoviÊ). Thus, the artist-climber experiences, both financially and physically, changes in the value of his invest-ment, and with his movement through a natural landscape reproduces the “landscape of a variable financial risk” (where the ascent of the graphicon curve denotes a “finan-cial gain but concurrently a physi cal loss, i.e. additional physical strain, while the fall in the value of the investment brings financial loss and a physical gain, i.e. a rest”). Throughout the duration of the pro ject, shares were both gaining and losing in value “depending on global bourse movements, which again depen ded on different events - in both a financial and a geopoli tical context.” After all, land-scape - just like organized ti me, services and spectacle - has become the object of buy ing and selling. How many people live in the place where they were born? That is a question posed by Darko Fritz, an artist who divides his time between Zagreb and Amsterdam, and is the author of the project Migrant Navigator, which deals specifically with the topic of migrations, displacement, identity, nostal-gia (in the meaning of the Portuguese word saudade - a feeling emanating from long voyages and the uncertainty of ever returning home), and the me aning and perception

of home as a relic of a family and national community. Migrant Navigator is a multi(hybrid)-medial and public art (with the Internet being seen as a public space of a tunnel and spiral virtual reality) project which began in April 2002 with a “dis-informative” Internet page the content of which gave an introduction to the frieze of the Home icons of the Netscape Navigator Internet explorer. The second phase of the Migrant Navigator is off-line: from June to October 2002 a horti-cultural installation entitled The Future of Nostalgia was planted near the railway station in Linz within the Talking

the City pro ject (at Ars Electronica, the so-called cyber art festival). A 9 x 9 metre plot was outlined in a meadow where, through a meticulously executed flower arrange-ment in different colours, a pictogram of a house in the image of the same Internet browser Home icon was depict-ed. The railway sta tion specifically selected for planting was - being a transit site and a check-in point for immigrants - a place of distortion of space, a place where people could eat, sleep, carry out transactions, buy or pray. For Augé, let us not forget, such places are non-places (nonlieux), pla ces without identity, without relations. The third part of the Migrant Navigator was realized within the Motel Jeæevo project. On both sides of the Croatian-Slovenian border, on the existing standard, or rather large-sized billboards, a 2x2 metre poster was displayed in its centre. The poster,


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executed in serigraphy technique, contained the image-quote of an enlarged and graphically processed Home icon of cyber aesthetics against a shining silver background. The boundaries are places with their own “psychopathol-ogy”; the border crossing between Croatia and Slovenia (until 1990 a boundary without border facilities; today, the eastern Schengen border) is entered on the map of inten-sive trafficking. The posters with the Home icon were also displayed in Zagreb - intended for the eyes of pedestrians and commuters. “Experiencing myself, I experience the world.” (Merleau-Ponty)

Ivana Keser and Aleksandar Battista IliÊ are inter-ested in people’s lives and self-organization within a commu nity, and the influence that economy, urban development and advance of communication technol-ogy have on social processes: “A woman from a village in Croatia told us that she felt no urge to move out of her village. Likewise, a wo man living in Manhattan told us that throughout her whole life she had felt no urge to leave there. There is nothing bad in the attitude of a woman from a small village, nor in the attitude of a woman from Manhattan.” Indeed, the great philosopher Immanuel Kant never left his native Kö nigsberg (today Kaliningrad). Weekend Art: Hallelujah the Hill is a series of photographs (over 800: a film-created-from-photographs) which IliÊ and Keser together with (the artist who once was called) Tomislav Gotovac (due to the physical appearance of the members they also cal led themselves the XXXL group) shot on Sundays on the Zagreb mountain of Medvednica over a five-year period (1996-2000) of their joint rituals of walking through nature in tune with the seasons of the year. Among the early works that issued from the idea of walking as a form of art are the footprints of Dennis Oppenheim left in the sand. They adopted the ideals of the Victorian travellers Richard Long and Hamish Fulton (no walk, no work), who crossed the uncharted expanses of Africa and Asia, and, according to Miπko ©uvakoviÊ,

shaped them conceptually into a strategy of artists’ behaviour, according to Miπko ©uvakoviÊ, who says: “...they documented their walking by marking the stages of their travels on maps, by photographing the landscapes or, in the case of Long, by leaving sculptural traces (cir-cles, lines made of stones, sticks). Fulton experiences his walking as a contemplative discharging of his spirit and receiving the direct effects of nature (sun, wind, rain). The Land Art artists left the walls of galleries and undertake their work in the landscape (vastness; only the works of Christo have a precise social basis, performed in an urban landscape), art in na ture and from nature (trans-national spaces), modelling the landscape they create temporary (the condition of “being on the road”, “travelling”, usually also has an ephemeral character) works which are erased by weathering factors, and the existence of which are documented by a photograph: “presence” is a physically relative concept. In his Scene

za novo nasljedje (Scenes for a new heritage, 2005, 2006) David MaljkoviÊ is preoccupied with a journey into the


DARKO FRITZ THE FUTURE OF NOSTALGIAspatial installation, 2x2 m, 2002.

DARKO FRITZ THE FUTURE OF NOSTALGIAhorticultural installation, 2002.

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ALEKSANDAR ILIΔ, IVANA KESER, TOMISLAV GOTOVAC HALLELUJAH THE HILLphotographs, 1996-2000.

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past (embodied in the monument on Petrova gora by Vojin BakiÊ), transposed by way of a collective amnesia into a future rid of historical facts. In his travels through America, particularly to New York at the beginning of the 1950s, Edo MurtiÊ expressed his experiences of the coun-try with a gesture of abstract expressionism (Tachisme) presented in the form of an itinerary in paintings of “urban landscape”, a western metropolis (let us recall the pulsat-ing optical effect of the heart pictogram in the work by Milton Glaser, I love New York; it is there that Zlatko Kopljar travels, but only to assume a motionless, kneeling posi-tion; K9) dynamized by electric lighting and a road grid (“gestuality” of lines, explosion of light, optical movement of colours; according to Kandinsky the white non-colour is motionless and hopeful, the black is motionless and hopeless...). Artist Damir StojniÊ (Vladimir Nazor Gallery, 2001) uses the gallery floor as a primed canvas, produc-ing new reality of interior into which he intervened in order to achieve the character of a street, of the exterior. In other words, through the radial layout of the “sleeping police-men” across the gallery floor, StojniÊ compels visitors to slow down, while at the same time encouraging them to move on, movement being the precondition for slowing down. The gallery-come-reading room becomes a space

of experiment; it acquires the identity of a round-about. The pedestrian-oriented “sleeping policemen” indicate the dangers of the fast driving of everyday life, almost as murderous as is the pressing of the accelerator pedal in a car, although with a delayed effect.

In a world of intensive globalisation, in which travel to a distant land ever decreasingly means going to a different world, the gulf between rich and poor is at the same time becoming ever wider. Only four per cent of the world’s population travels by plane, while the vast majority is limited in their movement due to economic or political and legal reasons (a humorous example on the subject is the joke about Marx, Jesus and Buddha: if all three were alive today only Marx would have a “desir-able” passport and would be constantly wandering through the world; from the text about the piece Password

by Andreja KulunËiÊ). A noteworthy oddity: when writing this text, of the three the Croatian-language thesaurus underlined only his name as being unrecognized; tem-

pora mutantur (nos et mutanture in illis). As the fundamen-tal mode of the essence of nature, Aristotle lists change, change of place, constant motion, and he defines time as something in which that which is changeable moves. In the work entitled Copycat by Kristina Lenard and Michael Johansson, the phenomenon of a pen-friend was extended to the exchange of photographs, like the exchange of postcards - according to Cedric Price, post-cards are a distortion of time and place. Johansson, a young artist from Sweden who has also studied in Germany and in Norway, and Kristina Le nard - a young artist from Samobor, Croatia, who has stu died in Zagreb, Poland and Sweden (which is where they met) exhibit together (in collaboration) a range of paper-backed pho-tographs taken by a digital camera at diffe rent locations. Observant visitors will soon notice that in a monotonous string of pictures one has to view them two by two. The cycle grew out of the idea of finding similar motifs at locations that are greatly removed from each other: through a description or a picture Michael presents an object found or a situation encountered, and within a


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specific period of time Kristina has to locate a similar object or a situation in her own immediate surroundings; and vice versa. Some urban situations have been syn-thesized into a single scene following the(ir?) processing in a Photoshop. Within Croatian contemporary visual expression it is the works by Sandro –ukiÊ that are the embodiment of a desire for a change of place, for travel-ling - which, ac cor ding to Jung, testifies to a discontent that drives one to seek and discover new horizons (“happy valleys”). For western civilization landscape is a scene of human acti vity, and not a remote space of solitude, while in the works of the Far East human figures are reduced to brief ara besque lines. Horizons can be moved, elevated, lowered, revolved... Using models resembling mythological landscape scenes, –ukiÊ simul-taneously counterposes to the Arcadian dream (let us not forget, death is Et in Arcadia...), ironically, the destina-

tion industry, the instant tourism of imperative enjoyment through the rental of spaces of travelling (i.e. by renting images of attractive, not easily accessible choice land-scapes from photo-stock agencies, i.e. visual archives), of travelling not factual but by way of the media (slide - pixelized photograph of a video monitor - photograph - monitors set around a laid out table) with a clearly defin-able distinction of a real space and the space of observa-tion. Journey around the world in 100 days (1994, 1998) is a series of self-portrait photographs taken using the croma-key procedure (as a simulacrum triumph: more real than the real). The artist’s image found itself in the “tunnel perspective” situation of a virtual journey, a jour-ney through images (by adopting the aesthetics of televi-sion) or rather, identifying the gaze through a “plot less” film in pictures, with reciprocal perspectives and inter-changeable views. According to R. Hughes, perspective is a form of abstraction, a simplification of the relationship between the eye, the brain and the observed object, conceived as that which is seen by a one-eyed person. Counterposed to the pictures of mosaic-like dra maturgy in –ukiÊ’s works is a string of scenes linked by the artist’s image as the extendable motif, but gliding through them


MOBILE VIDEOTHEQUE UTOPIA TRAVEL video archive, 2001.


DAVID MALJKOVIΔ SCENES FOR A NEW HERITAGEvideo film, 2004.

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also are clouds and some wondrous meteorological light phenomena, as for instance, the deep green of Iceland (geography instead of landscape) and the town of Sniffes, where the artist was staying during his residency pro-gramme in 1992, a place from which Jules Verne’s heroes set out on their journey (place memo ry, loci of the

mind - mental places have no link with anatomy). In the distinction between a person and his/her arm, the 1000

self-portraits series is a form of a document of a process, of a journey at the “length of a forearm” In his work Sem

Maritime Company (1996) a ferry plying the Ancona-Split line is, during its voyage through international waters, displaced into a metaphysical non-territory, a form of a parallel division of the world. Adventure & Co. Ltd. is a fictitious company owned by –ukiÊ and friends; in the retrogradely designed poster of simulated historicity, of “time detachment”, (directed towards the past times of trust in progress and the bourgeois idea of a happy valley), the skipper of a sailing ship is attempting to prove, through his efforts of steering his ship through the winds, that the earth is not round but flat - the world is not necessarily limitless, just as time is not necessarily infi-nite. –ukiÊ invokes the character of Captain Nemo or Corto Maltese, the ironical captain with a gold earring who extended the life line on his palm with a knife, not ac cepting any authority, not even that of fate. Corto Maltese, the Conrad-like anti-hero, an existential adven-turer and the pioneer “citizen of the world”, a loser to a degree ne vertheless, differs from the costumed super-

heroes who fly. The anti-hero has been created as a form of protest against the figure of a phoney hero typical of the romantic and patriotic literature of the 19th century, thus heralding the history-weariness of contemporary man who is now fighting only his own battles.

Roman ships had no knowledge of sailing against the wind - travel closely linked to the technical possi-bilities of changing the place. A train enjoys an advantage over cars since public transport is more important than

personal (no work is allowed on the Sabbath, not even driving a car). In Tokyo 80% of the population travels to work by public transport, while in Los Angeles 80% trav-els to work using their own cars). Turner’s painting of a speeding locomotive, Rain, steam & speed (the embodied movement: Nike of Samothráki which became the icon of the futuristic movement, embodies the beginning of the age of faith into a machine which make it possible to make a journey faster. And the journey, although not made by way of burning coal, continues to be extolled in the age of post-modernism. In some of his works, –ukiÊ deals with the topic of train travel, which does not represent only a movement from point A to point B, but is also an event, social grouping and a sensory sensation; or rather, it is a picture of a collective life (floating popula-

tion in a flexible landscape). Travel is the awakening of one’s consciousness, a form of awareness. As a para-


SANDRO –UKIΔ VOYAGE AROUND THE WORLD IN 100 DAYS, detail, photographs, 1992.-1999.

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phrase of Ber nard Tschumi’s claim whereby there is no space without an event (the said space-time continuum as a 4D object, in contrast to Euclid’s theory), it can be the matter of the mind, de-materialized or conceptual discipline with all its typological and morphological variations, while on the other hand it can be an empiri-cal event focusing on senses, on the experience of space. “True passengers are tho se who make a journey for the sake of travelling” (Bau delaire), but travel which is an escape from oneself does not attain its aim. Tiziano Scarpa tells us that the only pla ce worth going to in Venice is to become lost; purposes quite contrary, lines in different colours against the classic canvas of the London underground (The Tube) by Har ry Beck denote different train lines: Piccadilly Line, Northern Line... thus making travelling the underground a multi-coloured sensory experience. The Great Bear, a 1992 work by Simon Patterson, was named after the homonymous constellation which, in the opinion of the author, is what the map of the London underground railway looks like. The names of the stations have been changed into names of public personalities, journalists, philosophers, footballers, actors ... so as to create a plan of contem-porary space. A metropolis is a place (of exceptionally selective multi-culturalism. A town as a context) of swift vista changes, of encountering the new without chan ging the place: Benjamin talks of the horror of a big city, “two strangers meeting face to face, in direct contact both through gaze and breath” (ecstasy of communication rather than the drama of alienation). The architecture accompanying this universal motion in search of new spaces of relaxation, enjoyment, fun and oblivion is ambivalent. On one side it follows the global trends, the spirit of the times which is explicated in the ove rall atomization of society, introducing into its discourse sequences, disjunctions, dislocations and deconstruc-tions, using techniques similar to those of film editing and produ cing settlements which look like a haphazard stringing together of images. Having rejected the full volume, stone and strength (in other words, some of its


KRISTINA LENARD I MICHAEL JOHANSSON COPYCAT digital photographs, 2004.

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Vitruvian principles), such architecture uses rasters, modular systems, shells and membrane-like casings, while the overall effect of its buildings represents the supra-position of light and material. In a way, such archi-tecture becomes an (3D) image of itself, with shots becoming more alive than reali ty itself, and quite often more than people themselves. Just as R. Barthes observes: we are living in accordance with the generalized

imaginary. The so-called developed societies today con-sume pictures (pictures, like Borges’s words, imply a common experience), and not - like previous ones - beliefs. Consequently, not even a television - a place of generation of a constant call of optimism (according to Houllebecq) and the mediator of travelling - is any longer a large box in the centre of a living room, on a massive commode (from where N.J. Paik moved it to the space of gallery or a museum), but a picture on the wall. Travelling in place: within the frameworks of his philoso phic system of the unprovable, but possible and probable, since 1964 Vjenceslav Richter has been deve-loping the concept of a synthesis-based, or rather of a “synt-urbanism” of an ideal city named Heliopolis. In residential ziggurats which would be revolving around their axes very slowly, and at different speeds, each morning the citizens of Heliopolis would be waking up facing a different side of the world and in a different neighbourhood. And since the rotation is programmed to avoid re petition, the city is always new and different. Such an ambience is denoted by the concept of “polient”, its definition has not been fully completed, and - the author stresses - it depends on our abili ties of reception, the level of the instruments of science, and that of both scientific and artistic thought. In parallel with his synt-urba nistic projects Richter is creating the so-called simultaneous perspective as an informatics-come-graphics system which can provide full technical infor-mation about the object presented in perspective. Bearing in mind that each presented room contains its own infini ty, the thickness and structure of a wall and both its sides can be pre sented, as can the installations

within it. “Now here, however, but truly nowhere, does man to day meet himself, i.e. his essence.” (Heisenberg) every jour ney represents the possibility of change (but even without change a place we travel through the Universe, through time: Nikola BatuπiÊ suggests that “we live too fast, and we are left with too little time for finely composed lei sure.”). By travelling we take away a part of the world within ourselves, our spiritual space, so as to insert it into a new external context, and every time there is a ho pe that this inner system of ours could, given a diffe rent environment, react differently, function differently. Interaction with a new environment some-times also offers new an swers to old questions, and for us, people and things in a different context reveal them-selves in aspects unsurmi sed. It can be said that, hav-ing completed a jour ney, a traveller never remains the same, untouched. In the mo ve ment towards the goal, in the bypassing with the se quence of landscapes that fly into our face (unless we com bat it with a book or with newspapers), imperceptibly we leave the pattern of eve-ryday behaviour, becoming more open to the world around us, possibly because we think we shall never see it again.

Consequently, we allow ourselves more creative tole-rance in our approach to people, things and events, sin ce we believe it costs us little or nothing, which is why eve ry journey carries within itself a certain creative potential that is “born” within us when we set out (trav-elling as ecstasy, in the sense of “being outside oneself”, getting away from one’s own po sition - stasis, total iden-tification with the present moment of complete oblivion of the past and the future; according to Kundera). Today, this potential has been greatly reduced due to the speed that eradicates distance, turning distance into close-ness, but also due to the possibility of travelling through the virtual space of information data bases where, with no effort and without any empathy, we reach places that would otherwise be out of reach for us. And that is precisely why the greatest and the most meaningful journeys take place within ourselves.


k15

Documents

art approaches movement

art of representation

actual movement of kinetic

past travelling

real duration time

tanja dabo exhibition

independent of cognition

kantian theory