MAKE VISIBLE THE INVISIBLE

In 1914, a German writer named Paul Scheerbart published a futuristic treatise of one-hundred-eleven sections called “Glass Architecture”. Scheerbart was a poet and a science fiction novelist. Before becoming a writer, he was an inventor experimenting with a perpetual motion machine. He lived in Berlin, kept an impressive circle of intellectual drinking friends, and since the turn of the century had written an average of a book and a half each year.

THE GHOSTS OF TRANSPARENCY

Following the privatization of Deutsche Post in 1995, the company built a new office building in Bonn in 2002 to highlight the strength of its corporate image. The Post Tower, at 162.5 meters, is now the tallest building in Bonn, and as designed by architect Helmut Jahn, its oval glass sheath provides ventilation in the summer and insulation in the winter. Moreover, as befits a company devoted to communication, this monument in glass and steel sends a message: We are powerful; we are also transparent. See, nothing up our sleeves.

THE TERRIFYING BEAUTY OF ABSENCE: TRANSPARENCY IN MODERN ARCHITECTURE

1914 not only marks the beginning destruction of the historic stone facades of Western Europe’s cities. In the same year, the Belgian Emile Fourcault invented a method for the commercial production of large glass sheets: flat glass. Early generations of Modernists immediately became enthralled with the revolutionary potential of this transparent technology. For the first time in human history, it became possible to conceive of buildings, programs, etc – that would not be there; buildings, whose presence would be a studied kind of absence; whose form would have no expression.

Intelligible Materials

“Le predette sostanze, che abbiamo chiamate immateriali, devono essere anche intellettuali. Infatti una cosa è intellettuale in quanto è immune dalla materia, come si può percepire dall’intelligibile stesso.” (Tommaso D’Aquino)

Transparency: The Stranger in Our Midst

“Glass is strange”: With this statement, as seemingly mundane as it is illuminating, begins a recent attempt to write a “world history” of glass. Indeed one would say, but perhaps not entirely obvious. Glass is so omnipresent in our daily lives that it has become nearly invisible, taken for granted, but when we do take closer notice, it is hard to categorize, existing only as an in-between state of matter.

MUSEUM AND STORY

The new museum age is upon us. Only a decade ago, the “poetics and politics” of museum display were subjected to scrutiny, deconstruction, and plain criticism. Essays like James A. Boon’s melancholy piece, “Why Museums Make Me Sad,” appeared on the scene at that time. Douglas Crimp wrote his reflections “On the Museum’s Ruins” and, still earlier, Theodor W. Adorno famously compared the museum to a mausoleum.

HALLYU (THE KOREAN WAVE): A CULTURAL TEMPEST IN EAST AND SOUTH EAST ASIA

A gust - ephemeral, but transformative. The abrupt forays of hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunami bring about topographical and ecological changes. The same holds true for the socio-political domain as well. The tempests we have witnessed in the twentieth century, strikes, uprisings and revolutions, have triggered historical ruptures not just in the nations from which they originated, but also in the overall power dynamics of the world. In the realm of culture, too, such transformative events occur periodically, as illustrated by the upsurge of rock’n’roll, China’s Cultural Revolution, and the American hippie culture. ...

A CHINESE GHOST STORY

A gust of wind extinguishes the lonely candle in the room, a gush of fear rises in your gut as a shadow appears…

Such is a typical scene in a ghost movie. Since at the time of writing it is the seventh month in the lunar calendar (and this year, being a leap year, has two seventh months), I think I will talk about ghosts: ...

AN AIR OF CATASTROPHE

Tradition has it that a gust of wind or a squall is always also an impulse to a movement, an impetus for a new age. Calm is interrupted, the former movement disrupted. In Christian cultures the wind even represents something like the primeval age or the impulse for creation in general: after all, the biblical story begins at an airy height: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness was on the surface of the deep. God’s Spirit was hovering over the surface of the waters.” (Gen 1, 1-2) This “hovering over the waters” can be regarded as primeval breeze itself. ...

‘GLOCALITY’ AND CULTURAL IDENTITY

Western societies (and not only), and in particular their metropolises, are increasingly the meeting point for influences derived from a variety of cultural, ethnic and religious ambits. The progressive ideology of the ‘enlightened’ West has found its modern utopia in the concept of multiculturalism. Multicultural society is – or rather ideally should be – hospitable, aimed at welcoming and, in the best case, embracing diversity. ...

EUROPEAN COLONIAL GHOSTS AND EUROCENTRISM

Europeans have seen themselves as being at the centre of the world since the beginning of civilisation, and in many ways that notion still remains today. Two examples are the fact that we refer to Europe and to a minority of other countries with white settlers as the ‘First World’ and refer to the rest of the countries as belonging to the ‘Third World’, and we literally put ourselves in the centre and on top on a world map. ...

POST-APARTHEID LITERATURE BEYOND RACE

The wind of change that blew through South African society after the collapse of the apartheid system brought sudden transformations in the law and in attitudes to everyday life. The end of apartheid witnessed the emergence of new social problems that writers have attempted to confront in their works. Post-apartheid writing is marked by an abrupt shift away from a racial focus towards a wider concern with all of the many and various dimensions of human existence. ...

CONTEMPORARY MAORI WRITING: TRADITIONAL IDENTITIES AND THE GUSTS OF MODERNITY

Recent claims that the M?ori, the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, carry a so-called ‘warrior gene’ that is associated with anti-social behavior such as gambling, addiction and aggression are, needless to say, untenable. However, the wider debate on the cultural roots of identity and social behavior sheds some light on the fissures that still exist in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand society. ...

An Interview with Ralf Dahrendorf

If computers decline in performance, tuner software programs are used. If electrical impulses need to be amplified, radio specialists use “tuners”, so, for example, radio receivers, as amplifiers. How can performance improvements can be achieved in politics and societies, societal development effects be amplified, this was the topic discussed by Frankfurt journalist Norbert Schreiber with the renowned sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, who has published a new book from CHBeck-Verlag about the role of intellectuals in today’s society.

Our Cloistered Flights

I took a long-haul flight yesterday, and god knows, long-haul is long. I can’t think of anything more boring than flying, except maybe bad theatre. Billy Wilder, the director of Some Like it Hot, once said something I always remember when I’m on a plane. He said, “I went to see The Mastersingers of Nuremberg last night. It started at eight. Three hours later I look at my watch. It was eight fifteen.”

A phrase!

Madness, a protruding terrace overlooking the sunset.

Of all that I have written, this is the only phrase I remember. Were I to count all the sentences that I have written, there would be many, tens, certainly, no, even hundreds. And not one to remember. I do remember sentences of other people’s, few as they are, but they are relatively numerous. But of mine, I memorize none, except this phrase in my first novel. A single six-word-phrase, and nothing else.

Irony, contemplation and judgement: tuning in to the minds of fictional characters

The attempt to recount the past presents the cinema with very specific choices. Narrative choices, because the plot of a film can follow events chronologically in a historically accurate manner, or instead abandon a strict interpretation of the facts in order to give a better idea of the overall sense of an event, a period, or person.

Farewell to Slovak: Czechs turn their backs on once-traditional bilingualism

The phenomenon of Czech-Slovak bilingualism is, apart from Serbian-Croatian, unique in Europe. Its origins can be traced to the idea of the Czechoslovakian state as it evolved within the national movements of both Czechs and Slovaks from the year 1800 onwards.

The Nature of (Digital) Being

While tapping the backspace or delete key is a familiar act for every computer user, the question arises: where do all the letters (signs, images, pixels) go? Were they ever ‘here’ at all? What hides behind the deletion?

An e-mail conversation between Korean writer Kim Young-ha and German writer Matthias Göritz

I feel stupid, because I sent you a catalogue of questions three weeks ago, or at least I thought I did, or did I and you did not receive it? Not like it, not believe it? Not answered it?

Anyway, it’s weird with modern times, e-mail sounds to my german ears always a little bit like "Emaille", a shimmering, glittering material, like a pot no one could smoke.

The Attraction of Taking Everything Away

Tim Etchells in conversation with Florian Malzacher about never-ending stories, making things disappear and God deleting the world.

In ‘And On The Thousandth Night …’, a durational performance of six hours, eight performers wearing cardboard crowns and red robes tell stories as if to save their lives. The rule of the game is that any of the performers can interrupt at any time – and start their own story. I remember a performance in Frankfurt where you desperately tried to tell the story of God sitting at a computer trying to drag the icon for the world into the trash …

Weeding the Digital Library?

For Paul Valéry, the motto of the library is more about selecting rather than reading (“élire plus que lire”). To withdraw is a critical rejection.

In traditional libraries, this function of de-selection is known as ‘weeding’. As the term suggests, weeding involves removing books that are no longer used. Librarians perform this operation regularly to free up space for more recent acquisitions.

Nava Semel on literature, the creative process, the relationship between literature and lyric opera, on editing and deleting

Tel Aviv, December. Europe is snowed in, but here the sun shines and it is quite warm. The coffee shops are open everywhere and it is difficult to find a place at the tables that crowd the pavements. The country is in a pre-election fever. But then Israel is always finding itself in the grip of events that seem destined to decide its future. Everything feels so fateful.

The disappearance of the objet d'art: becoming as an aesthetic form

The fact that is really rare and worthwhile remembering is that the last works of certain artists and the paintings left unfinished (…) are more admired as such than if they had been completed: in them, you can indeed observe the outline of the project of the missing part, and thus perceive the very line of thought of the artist. And the regret for the hand that is no longer - that left us when it was busy as never before - beguiles and feeds the public’s admiration.