Head for the mind’s merry-go-round. Drugged-up air traffic controllers point us towards a runway.
The present’s fairground rides hurl us over the abyss. Are we stuck yet? “The experience of the abyss becomes the experience of an elementary disorientation and freedom,” Marcus Steinweg proclaims. “It is the experience of ontological incommensurability, which denounces the incommensurability of everything the subject holds as commensurable—all its certainties, values, evidence, and consistencies.” Will dizziness break apart the inescapable meaning of language? Can the philosophical thinking of unbalance find an equilibrium in language? And further, when we all speak of dizziness: are we a dizziness-choir? Dizziness, as the subject of our polyamorous projections? What effect is produced by the simultaneity of many dizzy voices? Contagion? What can the dizzying of language and philosophy comprehend, if dizziness is a state that not only suspends language but all communication, breaking it down into its elements until all we are left with is confusion, altogether squandered velocity, or acceleration after all. What moves in the moat between thinking, speaking, writing? Murmur, murmur, murmur, murmur, murmur, murmur, we hear Dieter Roth whispering from within the repetition’s pull. Do Laura Brechmann’s disequilibrium practices help us to regain balance, or do we, once again, only stumble over our own thoughts, which, gone berserk on the merry-go-round, are incapable of disembarking.
Students of the language arts engage with the dizziness of the present. What stands still, what spins loose? How to set the movement of texts into dizziness, given the uncontrollable shift of emphasis these days. And: What texts emerge when we understand the pandemically suspended rides in the fair ground of the Prater as text-generating machines? A performance between agitated thinking, writing and speaking in an unstable equilibrium.
June 30, 2021 4 p.m.
University of Applied Arts Vienna, Institute Zentrum Fokus Forschung
Rustenschacher Allee 2-4, 1020 Vienna
Programme:
Introduction Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond, Navigating Dizziness Together, FWF-PEEK AR 598.
Lecture performance, followed by discussion, by Marcus Steinweg, Professor of Art and Theory,
State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe.
Performative intervention by Laura Brechmann, project member, Navigating Dizziness Together.
Introduction by Monika Rinck, Professor of Language Arts, University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Reading of texts by students of the Institute for Language Arts, University of Applied Arts Vienna.