Speculative topology

• Muskelspannung wandert von zehen über Knie, Tallie, Bauch, Brust, Hals, Kopf, Arme zu den Händen. Und zurück.

Topology is the study of space. With speculative topology I am looking for properties of space for a new earth. An earth that we as humanity can not leave, and just because of that, shouldn’t destroy.

In our everyday lives we imagine that we are living in a cartesian space. Every object has coordinates in space, a straight line is the shortest connection between two points, and distances don’t change. Our human perception, however, is much more muddied. A walk through the park may appear shorter than a busy street and a path you walked many times faster than a new one.

How can we use the intricacies of human perception to tell the story of a new earth, an earth that we are going to live on, an earth worth saving?

#Representation

Maps are representations of the world, and those who create the maps are in a position of power, as they are shaping our understanding of the world. So I re-shaped some maps. In this experiment I gradually removed the free spaces on the maps. After all, if there would be something interesting in the space, it wouldn’t be empty, right?

– video maps

As a result I have created a constricting world, in line with the narrative of the global village - the notion that everything moves closer together and we are all neighbours. That’s your global world.

If instead we let some free space grow before consticting it again, we end up with some sort of a breathing world.

– video maps breathing

While I was writing the software to create breathing maps, Vladimir Putin was presenting some new intercontinental rockets as part of his presidential campaign. To a question about the possible destruction of earth he answered: «Certainly, it would be a global disaster for humanity; a disaster for the entire world. As a citizen of Russia and the head of the Russian state I must ask myself: Why would we want a world without Russia?» Interestingly, the maps used in the video to illustrate the nuclear attack do not include Russia. Nor do they include any other known country or continent.

– images of world without russia

Except for Florida:

– Image of Florida satelite

Humanity has been making maps for a long time, and they haven’t always looked the same. There were some maps made out of clay, some others out of wood sticks, other again were tattooed on your back signifying your place in the universe. Three volumes of History of Cartography are available for free on the University of Chicago website and go into great detail on the topic of non-western, indigineous, map-making.

The most fascinating for me are the inuit carved wooden maps. They represent the icelandic shoreline, even though they look nothing like the shoreline from above. They are compact enough to be carried in mittens and are intended to be read by touch.

— Image of Inuit carved map

With ubiquitous 3d printing and injection molding, custom 3d maps of the exhibition space could be made. This kind of ‘prop’ would not only get visitors into thinking about space and representation, but also let them experience space as an inherently phyical phenomenon.

Just as our paper map offer less direct interaction than the inuit maps, our scientific infographics often fail to include the richness of the surroundings and the complexity of earthly lifecycles in a visual way. So I sought to combine the dry contemporary infographics with a pre-20th century scientific illustration style used most prominently by the german biologist Erns Haeckel.

Most of you must be familiar with artistic style transfer with neural nets. It can be described as a series of algorithms that learn the visual style of a particular picture and are then able to recreate another picture in the same style. For a while, a lot of images that looked like Starry Night by Van Gogh floated around the internet, and many apps exist to convert your selfie into a painting with a predefined style.

I used the images of Ernst Haeckel to convert block diagrams often used in geo sciences into something more visually complex

– image of block diagram + image of style

These are the results:

• Images of the complexity of the world

We are accustomed to infographics containing a lot of hidden information, and we are trained to spend time trying to understand it all. In case of the style transferred images, their visual complexity is even higher, while virtually none of the previous information content remains readable. And yet we search and search for meaning.

The neural style transfer process is non-deterministic. Meaning, every time you run it, a somewhat different result will appear. Combining these results makes the diagrams of a slice of earth feel alive, as if populated by thousands little creatures.

– video of the diagrams

A NEW PERCEPTION OF SPACE

//EVERYBODY LOOK UP AND REMEMBER THE LAST TIME

As maps shape our perception of the world, so does the concept of euclidean space - the idea that space expands uniformly in three dimensions, and that every point has its own set of x, y and z coordinates. Let’s imagine that space around us is not uniform. What are the alternatives?

A popular effect that of a tiny planet. You take a panorama photo and wrap it in a circle to create the effect of being the Petit Prince on your own tiny planet.

– images of tiny planets

If you invert the coordinates, you end up with an infinite tunnel:

– images of infinite wells

If we would be living on a planet that - due to some athmospheric effect - would appear to be folding on itself, we would probably never develop flight, let alone space travel. Would we be taking more care of the planet, knowing it is our only one?

In some ways, tubes describe our perception much more accurately than detailed 3d maps. When moving from one place to another we may take a bike or a tram, only to find later that we don’t remember many details of our rides. We took a tube from one point of interest to another.

– images of slides

Like slides, our tubes of perception pierce the boring space between places we want to be. We don’t care for the ride that much. Maybe we should?

Electronic devices act like instantaneous tubes, piercing the space for our attention but not for our bodies.

– Philipp Engelhardt microscope video

When I was thinking about perception of space I also thought about perspective, and the simplicity of a world with an orthographic or reverse perspective.

With modern technology we can recreate the ortographic projection of russian orthodox iconography.

– 3d video of Ivana

Here, I took a few dozens of images of my friend Ivana from different points in the room. Using some sophisticated algorithms, a 3-d scene can be recreated automatically from the photographs, and in the scene we can choose the perspective we want.

Reverse perspective is interesting in its own regard. There’s something warm in the perception that things farther from you are just as big or bigger as those close to you. Like a hug of the universe. You can’t leave because there’s nowhere to go.

– video of true reverse perspective

Another experiment that I did deals with the idea of immutability of space

– terra trema gifs

I took these panoramas with the smartphone and every time my hand was unsteady in a different way. Our perception is like an unsteady hand - it constantly fluctuates over time.

Finally, there’s a question whether we need to be disoriented to find new orientation. A paper by … postulates that there are two cognitive maps in the human brain, one is a map of landmarks and how they relate to each other and the other is a bearing map - a map of your bodies position in space. In the exhibition we can manipulate the perception of space by the visitors, if we believe that disorientation should come before reorientation.

///// EVERYBODY CHANGE YOUR SEATING

INSIDE AND OUTSIDE

As I was researching old illustrations I came across this illustration of taoist inner alchemy. The internal alchemy is about balancing what is inside the body: some kind of essence, spirit, soul, energy. The illustration shows a meditating monk, with his internal organs represented by different parts of the landscape.

– image of neijing

It does look in some way similar to the images of block diagrams created by neural networks. It also uses concepts of outside world to illustrate the inner workings of the human bodies.

In our perception, our bodies are specifically ours: there is a border where the body ends and the world begins. However, bodies are also distinct participants in the world.

I searched specifically for experiences that overcome that dualism.

One is breathing. Air is all around us, but also inside of us, every living moment. We do not clearly experience it, however, unless we breathe in something toxic. My pet theory towards the attractiveness of smoking tobacco is, that you get to experience your lungs in an immediate way. Next time you crave a cigarette, just try to sigh seven times over two minutes. It’s quite a treat.

Another simultaneous experience of the same inside and outside is what I call the topology of the lover. During sex, your lover is at the same time intensely inside and outside your body.

– image hokusai

This drawing by Hokusai is called The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. The role of the lover is played by an octopus, which is honestly a big upgrade. After all the intensity of the experience of transcending the dichotomy of inside and outside is much stronger with a creature that has eight arms and is able to fully transform its geometry.

– image octopus

The octopus’s and jellyfish’s alien, undefined geometry is what makes them so intesting as an alternative to human-centered views. Not only is their intelligence alien, it is probably mostly defined and formed by their boneless structure.

– image harraway ////// touch someone’s back with 5 different hands

I talked to a mathematician about octopuses, and while topologically they are equal to mammals - the shape of a donut with the mouth-anus line being the donut hole - they do have different properties just on account of having eight squishy arms. For the mathematician, the interesting aspect of it was the ability to tie them into far more complex knots than human extremities would ever allow.

Finally, the third example of transforming the outside into inside is food. And this, luckily, is something that we could actually use in an exhibition.

• Maria Bätge Melon Head

breaking affordance of nuts, food, earth cake and pudding, iceberg salad

breaking border of human body (dirty skin) is horrifying.

ARRIVING AT A PLACE AND A BODY

//// EVERYBODY left hand touches right ear and vice versa

Finally, the exhibition will try to find a way to “land”, to arrive at a new place. At the same time, our visitors are also going to arrive in a new place. So, when you go into a space where you’ve never been before, how do you arrive, how do you land there, how do you become one with the space?

I found some methods

0. become part of the space Willi Dorner installations in urban spaces

1. Give things names. It’s an excercise by Keith Johnstone, of the Impro theater fame. Look around you and just give things names. Not the ones they have, but give them new names. Call a table “Elephant”. Call the door “Steven”. Call the dirt under your fingernails “clouds”. Somehow, through the violence of giving a name to an object, they become yours.

2. Paint things.

– images of kids painting walls

– images of graffity on icebergs

3. Expression / rearranging things / repairing things (is actually more important than the structue/content)

• image of zen garden With a rake, you create patterns in the sand, but the patterns are not important. Important is the connection towards the space that you create, just through the act of creation.

4. Voice

voice originates inside, it vibrates and fills the room and touches everything. Screaming mirror

//////// EVERYBODY Make some sound!

5. Physical experience:

Let’s imagine there’s a water bottle lying on the ground with it’s contents spilled on the floor - we can expect some visitors would clean it up or at least put the bottle upright or to the side as to stop other visitors to step on it.

repair as ownership - Externalized cognition - we are the world, so we should take care of it.

destroy ’nature’ with your bare hands. It’s fun, but also hard to destroy a tree, even when you have thousands visitors.