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transpublic
'Hans Kropshofer
Hans Kropshofer
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'Michael Kurzwelly
Michael Kurzwelly
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'Oliver Schürer
Oliver Schürer
In light of the worldwide transition “of that which is transitory,” social upheavals, or rather urban development processes, have become the key challenges of our day.
The symptoms and manifestations of crisis being exhibited by “growth-oriented society” are emerging with increasing clarity across the board and are radically and permanently changing political, social, economic as well as cultural conditions, people's identities, as well as the understanding of urban spatial structures that has prevailed up to now.
The designation “fallow,” a term whose original meaning comes from agriculture where it is used in a positive sense to refer to a so-called regeneration zone and thus a phase of preparation, has been cropping up increasingly with reference to urban space. The relocation of Linz's railroad freight yard has left behind a piece of temporarily fallow land in the inner city. This approximately 200,000-m2 parcel will be the site of one of the largest urban development projects of the next decade. Such wide-ranging situations of transition and redesign of urban spaces also always generate an enormous potential to re-cultivate that which is temporarily at hand as a qualitative element and structural basis of reality as lived out in everyday life and to embed it as a part of urban strategies.
trans_areale_ is an example of a botanical garden on fallow land. This project by Hans Kropshofer thus takes an emphatic stance in opposition to simply pretending as if such transitional spaces did not exist over the course of several years.
Reconnoitering, selecting and marking off fallow zones within this area according to the botanical principle of the cluster method as well as identifying and labeling varieties of plants typical of this local environment (so-called neophytes, pioneer plants) offer, in this connection, models of ways to gain insights and to take action in order to attract an interested public to these grounds and thus literally to open them up in the original sense of that expression.
The aim of the “philosophical strolls” with Wolfgang Kil through the “botanical fallow-land garden” that are being offered is to introduce the specific local situation into a current, all-encompassing urban development discourse and to make possible an open exchange of experiences and views of what needs to be done. Thus, opening up, investigating, communicating, networking, mixing and integrating are to be seen as indispensable accompanying components of re-urbanization in order to develop in step-by-step fashion a new, polymorphous identity for this neighborhood. In this connection, the artistic principles of action and communications strategies that are being applied here create the climate and the preconditions to make it possible in an unconventional way to experience the qualities “that are lying fallow” in this place and to promote bottom-up processes.
Thus, processual action is not, in principle, restricted to art or architecture; rather, it is meant as an auxiliary operative sphere of activity, as an accompanying component of the planning and execution of urbanization. trans_areale_ is a multi-year urban research and development project that is dedicated in particular to this commingling of highly diverse social structures, spheres of interest and disciplines, the productive shift of the interconnections among actions and impacts, and the analysis and processing of these events and phenomena.
Discursive exchange of insights and the development of integrative utilization models with the aim of long-term value enhancement is thus the programmatic intention of this concept. On the basis of this conception of what we are all about and within the framework of ARS 2005, we have entered into a collaborative relationship with Oliver Schürer and integrated a guest presentation by Michael Kurzwelly.
Translated from German by Mel Greenwald
trans_areale_—an urban-social R&D project was initiated by Hans Kropshofer in cooperation with Daniela Herold
and Rolf Touzimsky.
Konzept/Text: Hans Kropshofer
Credits: Maria Wöss, Leonore Geißelbrecht-Tafferner, Friedrich Schwarz, Bernd Geiger/city-vans, Clemens Mock/Image
Redundancy versus Synergy
Oliver Schürer Redundancy versus Synergy is the juxtaposition that characterizes the multi-layered city of dawning knowledge-based society. Urbanity presents itself as hypermedial chimera attached to which are new condensations and territories. The upshots of chimerical segregations are immediate fertility as well as fallowness. They are produced by telecommunications networks along interstices like marketplace and square, economy and culture, regional plurality and architectures of centrality, subversive and multifaceted practices of consumption, as well as among transitory and integrative spaces, since the position of the public spaces corresponds, via the media of popular culture, to an incessantly re-technologizing private environment.
Habitat and façade as that which encloses and that which excludes in the global public sphere reformulate the urban order of technical networking in a cultural context. Technology becomes the preeminent factor in investigating synergies of the chimerical: Which reciprocities become operational when two-fold or three-fold solutions are redundantly implemented for comparable functions just because they each possess a different internal structure?
During Ars Electronica 2005, this discourse and its accompanying installation in transpublic / Linz will provide a reflection of the latest technological research.
re:form “Habitat as Prosthesis as Cybernetic Assemblage”
Ludger Hovestadt (CH), ETH Zürich, and Dietmar Dietrich (D), Computertechnologie Wien
Lectures and a discussion about the end of habitat-from sphere of withdrawal to a new form of electro-physical medium. Plus, whither dwelling when the long-dead background of human action is synthetically resuscitated, when the digital habitat, via its perceptions, is supposed to develop a consciousness?
re:fine “Ornaments as Facade as Dissolved Screen-Net”
Kari Jormakka (F), a-theory Wien, und Peter Greenwell (UK), ZKM Karlsruhe
Lectures and discussion about the end of the façade as skin or screen to a new urban medium. Façade becomes a membrane of osmosis between electronic and physical space. Ornament and façade, this dialectic that is fundamental to postmodern architecture, is dissolving in the face of the potential of a new technology, since new technologies are making possible previously inconceivable dimensions and forms for medially pervaded areas.
Translated from German by Mel Greenwald
Slubfurt City?
At the border of two countries that do not exist
Michael Kurzwelly
Slubfurt is the first city located half in Poland and half in Germany. Ours is a young, dynamic city that derives its strength precisely from the coexistence of two cultures. We’re proud of this. A new feeling of identity has grown up here. Nevertheless, we don’t wish to conceal problems we have to face particularly in Slubfurt.
In fact, the city has existed only in the minds of a few people until now. But nowadays, the process of specifying ones own identity is getting increasingly difficult to pin down to within the boundaries of a particular nation-state. Many people temporarily take leave of or permanently forsake the culture and structures into which they were born. They become bearers of multiple cultural identities and gladly adopt elements of other cultures when they make this move on a voluntary basis.
Can the nation-state still live up to the demands of this form of cultural identity? Indeed, the national borders are still there, but for the people of Slubfurt they’ve become meaningless. How can boundaries be reconceptualized in the zone of tension and interplay of orientation, protective function and the sense of being restricted and fenced in? Do our actual borders still even have a physical location on a geographical map? Even if the City of Slubfurt doesn’t yet exist for all, it can still be perceived by all, since boundaries exist above all in people’s heads.
At this presentation in transpublic, an urban planner and tour guide will present Slubfurt on the basis of two films—“Slubfurt—City on the Oder” and “Slubfurt City?”—and a variety of products and materials like picture postcards, a city guide and PROFIL, the local newspaper.
A mobile Slubfurt Tourist Information Bureau will also be making its way around the Linz metropolitan area to spread the word about the City of Slubfurt and to offer insights into the project’s outcomes. For all interested parties, www.slubfurt.net and the Slubfurt Infobox provide an excellent summary of all activities undertaken thus far and developments connected with Slubfurt City.
Translated from German by Mel Greenwald
Credits: Ingo Randolf, Tanja Tomic, Jan Poppenhagen, Holger Mai, Marek Gut, Christoph Schaffer, Stiliana Mitzeva
trans_areale_—an urban-social R&D project was initiated by Hans Kropshofer in cooperation with Daniela Herold
and Rolf Touzimsky.
Konzept/Text: Hans Kropshofer
Credits: Maria Wöss, Leonore Geißelbrecht-Tafferner, Friedrich Schwarz, Bernd Geiger/city-vans, Clemens Mock/Image
trans_areale_ FBhf / Linz – Daniela Herold, Hans Kropshofer and Rolf Touzimsky (A)
Technology Discourse “Redundancy versus Synergy": Oliver Schürer (A)
Guest Presentation: “Sl¼ubfurt City?”: Michael Kurzwelly (D)
Overall Program and Organization: Hans Kropshofer trans_areale_ in cooperation with Oliver Schürer
Credits Sl¼ubfurt City: Ingo Randolf, Tanja Tomic, Jan Poppenhagen, Holger Mai, Marek Gut, Christoph Schaffer, Stiliana Mitzeva
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