Diploma as Gesamtwerk / Diploma as Moment:
(Short description / diploma booklet)
The complexity of my work cannot be fully conveyed as a whole during the diploma presentation. There will also be no punchline. Only a moment on the timeline of a story. A meeting point of potentials. Levels of communication, transfer of information, and the depth of interpenetration. An opportunity to leave behind an image. It will pass quickly and remain forever.
RICHTUNG / STAND DER MATERIE
(Diploma work – Transmedia Art / June 2017)
Description of the diploma presentation / action and materialisation
My original intention for the final presentation was a conversation with the commission, without the usual spectators. For me, that would have been the most direct act of information transfer and an opportunity for shared reflection. But things developed differently than planned. The dynamics of the situation that afternoon led to a classical presentation with around 30 spectators standing opposite me together with the commission. As a result, the presentation took on a performative character.
It was a moment in which I presented the previous development to the diploma commission in a material form and offered them participation in its further trajectory. This meant that the work was not yet completed and that we would decide together in which direction and form it would continue to develop. A document came into being that carries not only its own history within itself, but also the result of a confrontation of potentials. The extract of what had existed up to that point, the factor of unpredictability in the present moment, and the materialisation itself — an information and potential carrier.
The final product was a book, Stand der Materie 2017. It visualised my artistic process of the previous three years up to the moment of the diploma presentation and was intended to contain the result of the situation within itself. The last eight pages of the book were blank except for their page numbers.
I confronted the commission with a choice: either to receive the individual torn-out pages as part of the story, as a document in material form, and afterwards to produce a joint photograph that would replace the torn-out pages in the book; or to sign the blank pages, which would remain in the book and would not be torn out.
The situation ended with the following result: a photograph was produced in which three members of the commission and I — Peter Kozek, Nicolaj Kirisits, Ruth Schnell, and Tomasz Vollmann — hold the torn-out pages in our hands, while the other four left their signatures on the blank pages that remained in the book. These signatures were made by Ilse Lafer (p. 213), Martin Kusch (p. 215), Alexander Martinz (p. 217), and Brigitte Kowanz (p. 219).
Final action, together with the commission:
Videolink: https://vimeo.com/250433114
The photograph showing Peter Kozek, Nicolaj Kirisits, Ruth Schnell and Tomasz Vollmann holding the removed pages was inserted into the book in place of the torn-out pages.
Richtung / Stand der Materie is the conceptual materialisation of a three-year artistic process in the form of a work that is at once document, object, structure and self-description. The book does not function as secondary evidence of a completed development; it is itself an original artwork, a material and informational body that contains, reflects and reorganises the conditions of its own becoming. It is both autonomous form and operative context, both artefact and carrier of the logic from which it emerged.
Its structure is existential rather than merely representational. Like a living formation, it has an origin point, a process of growth, phases of transformation and maturing, and a moment of ritual definition in which a certain state is brought to examination, testing, closure and transition. The diploma situation therefore appears not as a final presentation in the conventional sense, but as a threshold in which the work is confronted with another layer of reality and reconstituted through that encounter. In this way, Richtung / Stand der Materie marks both the end of one condition and the passage into another.