The Animatograph

THE ANIMATOGRAPH
A “Life Machine” by Christoph Schlingensief
by Jörg van der Horst, 2005

Pictures are always just reproductions. They are the one-way-mirror window of a representation that inevitably has already forfeited a certain amount of authenticity; pictures lack transparency, in more than one sense of the word. Up to the present day, neither the “old” nor the new media have succeeded in opening this window – not only to project the presenting and presented person, but also to make this person into a projector.
The creation of multi-layered spatial projections was attempted in the 1920s by artists such as László Moholy-Nagy, with his Light-Space-Modulator, or Ray Eames, the american architect who experimented with spatial complexity and overlay until the end of the 1980s. With Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Piscator, projections found their way into the theater, dissolving its characteristic boundaries of time and space and multiplying the possible levels of theatrics and of reality.
In the course of staging his productions “Atta Atta” und “Bambiland” (both in 2003), Christoph Schlingensief hit on the idea for a large-scale project in several parts, which became more clearly defined during his work on the stage set for “Parsifal” (Bayreuth Festival, 2004). during his recent production of “Kunst und Gemüse” (Volksbühne Berlin, 2004), Schlingensief developed a concrete plan for integrating and merging the disciplines in which he has worked – theater, opera, film and actionism –, freeing them from unmitigated art – acting – and entrusting them, in a kind of “Life Machine”, to the everyday stagings and rituals of people outside of the artistic sphere. “The Animatograph” is, first of all, a mobile revolving stage installation, with the usual construction elements and equipment, which not only gives visitors a frontal view but also
permits entry. Visitors can then operate the set, act on and react to the installation, “take the stage” as it were and direct their own scenes; at the same time they can use the installation by applying it to their own everyday lives and cultures.
In a figurative sense, the revolving stage installation is an “actionistic photographic plate”, which globally and cross-culturally captures the happenings taking place upon it and, wherever it is set up, projects the filmed, photographed and acoustic documentations of these happenings anew, each time enriched with the images of the previous stations. (...)
At first “The Animatograph” is to be set up for weekly periods in various places all over the earth, in Iceland, Germany, Central Europe, Africa and Central Asia as well as North and South America, and made available “for use”, e.g. in a Nepalese marketplace, in a Namibian slum, a “liberated zone” in East Germany, a Brazilian favela and an amusement park in the USA. Following this, the intention is to hold “happening weeks” at central locations in Berlin, Buenos Aires, New York, Reykjavik, Windhoek and Tokyo. Each station will create its own energy field, which will gradually become charged by its users, through everyday actions as well as through religious rites or artistic acts. In each place, the images, objects, sounds and music will be documented and, by means of projections and recordings, become part of the installation at the following stations. Thus, gradually, a hyperprojection will be created. The picture that is exposed will be that of a universal culture.
In a second phase, “The Animatograph” will be transported from the culturally dependent stage of everyday life back to the traditional artistic sphere and will be given presentations and performances at selected theaters (e.g. the National-Theater Reykjavik), opera houses (e.g. the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin), museums (e.g. the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, Museum of Modern Art New York) and festivals, where it will also be made available to its visitors for use.