


Omnipresence documentary generator#
Along that decade, UBERMORGEN developed a consistent oeuvre, focused on the ability of media to infiltrate reality to the point of completely altering the perception of it (ote Auction, original Media Hacks, Generator Tetralogy) or even its social, biological or human infrastructure (Psych|OS, Chinese Gold, Art Fid) and on the potential of art to engage a dialogue with economic, bureaucratic and informational systems (EKMRZ Trilogy, Superenhanced and all of the above). Originally published in 2009, this book collects the work made between 19 by Austrian duo UBERMORGEN (lizvlx and Hans Bernhard). While Picasso, Oskar Schlemmer and many other artists are known for their set designs, that show their formal vocabulary on stage, this talk will focus on the influence and exchange of knowledge in terms of body and choreography between dance and painting. However, striking parallels can be discovered when looking at canonical questions of dance analysis: How can movements, that do not have a functional purpose, but an aesthetic one, be described? Which relation existed already in choreographical writings between the flat page, the floor and the acting body? Those questions will be asked on oeuvres of rather notorious painter Jackson Pollock but also on lesser-known artists such as Kazuo Shiraga of the Gutai group and others. Spontaneity has been deconstructed many times for gestural works of abstract paintings, but art historians have never gone so far as to consider these abstract paintings as traces of dance. This talk is considering the processes of abstract painting as a process of choreographic knowledge. Within this process, the whole body that acts on the “canvas floor” was determined as the body of a dancer. Several painters of the postwar era have laid the canvas on the floor. Key words: urban design, performativity, subaltern knowledge, postcoloniality, phenomenology.

We propose looking into informal urban worlds like that of Xonaca as potential sources of knowledge for the creation of socially, culturally and technologically sustainable urban solutions. Mexican cities and their peripheral settlements require architectural strategies that respond to their dynamics of social and material displacement. One of our goals is to investigate alternative approaches to urban design that sensibly engage with local realities. Informed by postcolonial perspectives on cultural mobility and studies on subaltern epistemic practices, this work proposes to reconsider the phenomenological understanding of territories not as undefined human experiences in places or private affective relations to space, but as the production of urban meaning through the cultural and communal body and its senses. Our research explores the subaltern urbanity and its production of spatial knowledge in Xonaca, Puebla, Mexico an old “barrio” where popular culture and everyday performativities construct material and immaterial realities that cannot longer be overlooked by formal urban planning. Contesting spatialities emerge from the cracks of formal design. The efforts of canonical urban design to bring these auto-constructed informal territories into a presumably universal order have constantly failed. From the scope of the Modern, euro-centric urban theories and design practices, these subaltern territories have long been considered impure, irrelevant for the production of architectural knowledge and subjects to be disciplined when not neglected. Abstract In postcolonial territories such as the peripheries of Mexican metropolis, urban designs are subject to endless processes of informal material and immaterial changes produced by complex networks of local socio-cultural performativities.
