Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Let's have a pleasant evening together. Reality is so serious, so dreadful, that from this moment on, you and I won't take it seriously, okay? Tonight's topic is the question: Who is the friend, who is the enemy and who should be shot on the spot in the name of peace?
The Serbs or Zhirinovsky? The guilty or the responsible? The schmaltz musicians or the yodelling choirs? But still, would there be peace, if all we got rid of was them?
Sure, I'm doing fine. I even have a motto to live by: I'm not letting anything spoil the last days we have left. The future is in the bag, the present is almost behind us now, and what's past is past. (From Matthias Beltz's latest show, "The Last Few Days"). External and internal catastrophes - their interlinking and interaction. Their centers seem to contain a common human nucleus:
the "genetic make-up of a catastrophe".
Point of Intersection Perception.
The circulation principle: the glance-generated cycle / Information (external) and perception / processing (internal). The (re)production of causal-circular media catastrophes - a rotation caused by creation and presentation. No one is naive enough to believe that these countless catastrophes and their collected miseries are only shown in order to satis­ fy the need for information, and not as a form of enjoy­ ment. The cyclic catastrophe-glance and its production prin­ ciple. Does my glance cause the death?
Projections from: der Tod IST (Death IS), video-tape (1994), Light Sleep / Mondspiegel / Moonmirror (Installations), a.o. additional sounds: Paul Modler. The occidental subject is conceived post-catastrophically. Its model is Odysseus who survives one "shipwreck" after the other, all of which stand for separating from The Female, as either a woman or a material which holds him captive. Over the rising waves, the post-catastrophic subject glances back thinking, "Après moi le déluge". But looking forward, he pushes on to the motto of "I pulled it off again!"
Odysseus' glance is undoubtedly that of the televison, and this brings us to the invention of television - to a way of keeping more self-induced catastrophes off the back of our occidental subject.
I've dealt with all the variations and examples of this subject very carefully. I fear now that I've been in its self-regenera­ ting, catastrophic circulatory system much too long, that is, to save myself by working as a cultural scientist. Be it that I teach in Berlin and work in Vienna, or approach internal and external "shipwrecks" analytically and, whenever possi­ ble, not merely in retrospect. I don't own a television.