Das vorliegende Material dokumentiert die performative Arbeit ELEMENTARE MECHANIK im öffentlichen Raum im Rahmen der Vorlesung Einführung in die elementare Mechanik an der Tu Berlin. Die Intervention war unangekündigt, hatte experimentellen Charakter und wurde in friedvoller Weise vollzogen. Hauptakteure waren Markus Hoffmann als bewegliches Element (pater noster Text/Tafel) und Andreas Greiner als statisches Element (Meditationshaltung/Podest) der Arbeit. Im Laufe der Intervention traten Bilder religöser und Bilder naturwissenschaftlicher Herkunft in einen vielschichtigen Dialog. Die Performance dauerte circa 45 Minuten, dann wurden die Akteure vom Sicherheitspersonal gebeten, den Raum zu verlassen.
[M.Hoffmann/A.Greiner]
Preventing natural science fromt becoming religious or fanatic is owed to criticality…
We all believe. Whether it is conscious or not. The offspring of the most common belief - the belief in our sensory input - appears to be a result of our inability to imagine a reality different from the one that we are perceiving. When we use language as a tool to reach abstraction from this perceived reality we are happy to experience a common agreement on our perceptions by abstractly agreeing on it. It seems that our perception of reality gets distorted by the way of predetermined rhetorical conditionings alongside our commonly accepted sensory capacities. Colours, shapes, tones, pressures, tastes, smells, feelings (we could go on) all seem to find a common agreement serving as vocabulary, being a model to follow, silencing the need of individual exploration, and furthering, of interpretation. Yet, we as species due to our need for explaining what surrounds us, whether the driving force is to know more or to get in closer contact with what surrounds us in matters of non-perceivable realities, managed to develop another layer of evenly complex and beautiful systematical belief systems like the one described above. Let's not claim that everything with an abstract quality is a good myth. But good myths certainly are able to inspire our lives and imagination. They might elongate our senses. Sometimes if a myth is really well composed it can reach a high level of social relevance, reaching a point that a lot of people share a common belief in. It seems like we had elongated our senses into an area we normally wouldn't be close enough, in order to see it in high resolution or not far away enough to see it from a distance. (My Dear, but some people say, that the elongation of our senses is a depreviation of our minds.) This thought leads to the point where one might question if science creates reality or if science finds reality. Probably you should treat everything very carefully so let us decide to treat everything in a way of friendly antagonism and constructive questioning. Being as inclusive as possible while keeping alive as many positions as our individual capacities allow (and hopefully gradually expanding those borders) in order to keep the friction that hopefully supports developing our own criticality, instead of getting stuck in only one perspective. It seems that natural science is not exactly a religion but gets more and more standardized and rigid in its interpretation. This appears to be the reason for why we should keep questioning and supporting playful unconventional minds. Adding to this we should try to develop an inclusive vocabulary, flexible and open for new inventions and redefinitions of until-now turgid terms. Of course, due to our restriction that language at this point of time seems to be the most accessible tool to create new realities, we have been reduced to text once more. Joyful irony.
