As they entered the ‘bastard space’ of Warum 2.0 (see post here under), the visitors entered a different time. ‘Re-structuring and articulating time – re-ordering speeding up, slowing down, halting and reversing – is equally essential in cinematic expression.’
Teleportation, surveillance webcam streaming, remote control and sensor driven animation – these were some of the means for the visitors ‘to encounter themselves and their own being-in-the-world in an intensified manner, activating their imagination in an extraordinary way.’
Sensitive and bodily experience was essential in Warum 2.0: the body moving, size and speed; the eyes; the ears; the hands touching sensors, teleporting live into Second Life. The thinking hand of Heidegger. ‘The hand’s essence can never be determined, or explained, by its being an organ which can grasp… Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element.’ (Martin Heidegger, ‘What calls for thinking?’. Basic Writings, Harper&Row, New York 1977).
The structuring of the place, space, situation, scale, illumination, etc… reframed the human existence of the visitors. It also offered them a chance to test their deep defense against this kind of terror.
‘Media are magical mediators of experience, feelings and affects. They possess a hallucinatory quality: ‘I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images’, writes Georges Duhamel in 1930 of the secret power of cinematic images.
‘Images open up streams of association and affect. They strengthen our sense of self, and the existential experience, and they sensitise the boundary between ourselves and the world.’ Networked media spaces give us the primary horizon of the world we live in. I exist in a space, and the space settles in me. ‘I am the space where I am’, the poet Noël Arnaud aknowledges. We do not live separately in material and mental worlds: these experiential dimensions are fully intertwined.
(Quotes from Juhani Pallasmaa, in ‘The haunted house: Visuality in global culture’, published in ‘architecturanimation’, CDAC, Barcelona, 2002).
