Eine Welt der Wahrheiten

2004

Stephan Maximilian Huber (DE)

Prejudices, xenophobia and right-wing extremism have by no means disappeared in modern-day Europe. They can be found among members of many different strata, groups and segments of society.

“A World of Truths” is Stephan Maximilian Huber’s confrontation with the subject of right-wing extremism and its preliminary stages. In going about this, he arrived at the conclusion that there are a wide variety of perspectives from which to approach this issue—sociological, economic and psychological. He uses the ball of yarn as a metaphor for this state of affairs—talk, discussion and action goes on all about an inner core without the participants being able to define the nature of what is at the center of the ball.

For his project, Stephan Maximilian Huber conducted interviews with friends in which he questioned them about their prejudices and the reasons for them. He also recorded passages from books and then interlinked the interviews and the texts. He divided the interviews in accordance with their individual questions and used this material to produce a long line of text that wrapped around an invisible ball. The result is a ball made up of text fragments wrapped around each other. The user can navigate through this tangled ball, call up content, or jump from one link to the next.

The video recordings of the interviews are synchronized with the text and projected onto an outer covering surrounding the ball of yarn. Since it’s coupled with the link positions on the text passages, it is distorted analogously to the user’s navigation.

Special thanks to Stefan Lieb, Claudia Strobl and Thomas Huber.