Wait & Seek

The Zonographic Society and Yuki Jungesblut

Copyright Projektraum, Schwedenstr. 12, Berlin
type: mixed media installation, 2008
category: Zonographic Society/ Materialisations

This materialisation space reflects on the one hand side the voyage of discovery and research and on the other hand the situation of those left behind – those who have to receive and process these findings thus spending a long time actively waiting and contemplating. Effectively it aims to recapture that state of mind that is lost in research, just before the eureka. The research area in this case deals with waiting and associated territories.

Scenario: During this materialisation part of the Zonographic Society in actual fact had already secretly set sail to its grand expedition. So effectively the materialisation space reflects on the one hand side the voyage of discovery and research and on the other hand the situation of those left behind – who have to receive and process these findings thus spending a long time actively waiting and contemplating.

Set-up: This materialisation was divided up into two main spaces:
1)The Office Space which gives access to the processing unit, the archives of previous Zonographic Investigations (Experiments 1-4), the extended Zonographic Inventory amongs other things.
2) The Mouse Research Lab
In the course of the materialisation Zonographic Work continued and additional associations were added, amongst others a new Newspaper Processing space. At the end of the materialisation visitors were asked to collect their own visual clues of the space. (The Visitors View).

Background: In spring 2008 the Zonographic Society was tiptoeing about the often rather awkward situation that is called „waiting“: Looking at spaces of waiting, waiting rooms, waiting behaviour, states of mind in waiting; the tension, the angst and the silent desperation of waiting but also obviously at the potentials hidden in the concept of waiting.
At about the same time there was an artist run project space that had set out to orchestrate an exhibition and symposium dealing with the intertwining and shadow play of the twin concepts of absence and presence. This project ran under the title of „Here, There and Anywhere. Von Geistern, Hologrammen und anderen Abwesenheiten“. This as such was not something that could be considered as entirely alien to Zonographic Investigation. And thus this materialisation came about.

With the opening of the exhibition the basic setting of the environment had been set up – a stage, which reflects the fundamental characteristics of the Zonographic Society and their research endeavors. In the course of the exhibition the thought space was made more concentrated whilst coming to life.

The visitor, when opening the gallery door, enters another world. He/she finds a space where the light sources slowly move in circles, and traces of the Zonographic Society and their research can be found. Objects, notes, images and newspaper snippets tell their story. It is a space that is waiting for the visitor, a space in which a search is in progress and in which the visitor himself becomes the one who waits and seeks.

In a sense this space of loops and recurring thoughts might describe the point of time just before understanding, just before the Eureka!. The thoughts circle, as do the sources of light, videos and objects. One wonders what story is happening here? Which movie is being shot? Is the mouse, which is trapped in the laboratory in different situations of waiting a hint? Mouse only proclaims: World Domination by Waiting! And waits and thinks and waits and thinks.

For the closing event, the interchange between observer and actor is taken a step further and an end point for this materialization is set by making the visitors themselves become the producers of images. They were asked to take a few photographic impressions of the space and of their stay in that space. Two days later the exhibition had been taken down, the apparitions had gone, the space was “empty” again, returned to its state as a gallery space.

The plurality of impressions was paid tribute to at a later point of time by presenting a photo map of the visitors‘ photos and a short report on the occasion of another exhibition.