Christian Waldvogel — Hybrid Naples
Chance Encounters of Happenstance
and Negative Entropy
Waldvogel’s studio is space. As in: outer space. Including planet earth. This has nothing to do with megalomania, but with conceptuality. For the Venice Architectural Biennale 2004, with his futurist vision ‹Globus Cassus›, he turned the earth inside out like a glove; and in 2010, ‹The Earth Turns Without Me› involved an actual flight with a Swiss fighter jet. Flying westwards at a speed of 1158 km/h, the sun, as seen from the cockpit, stands still – for as long as this speed, equal to the speed of the earth turning, can be maintained. Waldvogel turned the cockpit into a camera obscura to take a picture of the sun standing still. The elaborate process leads to a simple, humble image. By way of real experiment and speculative scientific enquiry, Waldvogel accelerates Conceptualism and Land Art towards the astronomical.
With his project for ‹Hybrid Naples›, Waldvogel turns to Giordano Bruno, the great philosopher born in Nola near Naples. With his cosmology, influenced by Copernicus and Nicolaus Cusanus, Bruno has defined happenstance as the ruling of God’s universe, and he was arguably the first to state, with his ‹De l’Infinito universo e mondi› published in 1584, that the stars in the sky are really other suns, and that consequently a plurality of other planets, similar to earth, was circling around them. His views have been proven correct by contemporary astronomy (as of 6 June 2013, 891 extrasolar planets have been identified), but back then, this was one of numerous heresies that lead to Bruno being tried by the Inquisition, imprisoned for seven years, and burned at the stake in Rome, in 1600.
Waldvogel’s homage to the great Nolan is ‹Chance Encounters of Happenstance and Negative Entropy› (2013). It is a simple-seeming, yet intricately designed machine, ‹RPM› (2013): on the top of a pedestal-like metal frame, a candle burns, paraffin drips down into a heated funnel, and underneath, two revolving axes – programmed to turn randomly – will gradually produce a globe: Bruno’s ‘other’ planets. Over the course of the exhibition, these planets will be inserted into the aluminum circles of a large ‹Armillary Sphere› (2013), forming an imaginary solar system (reminiscent of the historic armillary spheres – metal devices meant to represent our solar system – known to Bruno and his contemporaries). Eppur si muove – and yet it moves!
Jörg Heiser
Credits
Random Positioning Machine Consulting:
Dr. Jack van Loon, VU-University Amsterdam NL / ESA
Random Motion Algorithm:
Prof. emer. Jörg Waldvogel, ETH Zürich CH
Programming:
Patrick Sibenaler, Zürich
Press Release (PDF)
Hybrid Naples — L'ordine delle idee deve procedere secondo l'ordine delle cose
With his project for ‹Hybrid Naples›, Waldvogel turns to Giordano Bruno, the great philosopher born in Nola near Naples. With his cosmology, influenced by Copernicus and Nicolaus Cusanus, Bruno has defined happenstance as the ruling of God’s universe, and he was arguably the first to state, with his ‹De l’Infinito universo e mondi› published in 1584, that the stars in the sky are really other suns, and that consequently a plurality of other planets, similar to earth, was circling around them. His views have been proven correct by contemporary astronomy (as of 6 June 2013, 891 extrasolar planets have been identified), but back then, this was one of numerous heresies that lead to Bruno being tried by the Inquisition, imprisoned for seven years, and burned at the stake in Rome, in 1600.
Waldvogel’s homage to the great Nolan is ‹Chance Encounters of Happenstance and Negative Entropy› (2013). It is a simple-seeming, yet intricately designed machine, ‹RPM› (2013): on the top of a pedestal-like metal frame, a candle burns, paraffin drips down into a heated funnel, and underneath, two revolving axes – programmed to turn randomly – will gradually produce a globe: Bruno’s ‘other’ planets. Over the course of the exhibition, these planets will be inserted into the aluminum circles of a large ‹Armillary Sphere› (2013), forming an imaginary solar system (reminiscent of the historic armillary spheres – metal devices meant to represent our solar system – known to Bruno and his contemporaries). Eppur si muove – and yet it moves!
Jörg Heiser
Credits
Random Positioning Machine Consulting:
Dr. Jack van Loon, VU-University Amsterdam NL / ESA
Random Motion Algorithm:
Prof. emer. Jörg Waldvogel, ETH Zürich CH
Programming:
Patrick Sibenaler, Zürich
Press Release (PDF)
Hybrid Naples — L'ordine delle idee deve procedere secondo l'ordine delle cose