On Realities

A Conversation in Potentially Fictional Space

Acting Characters

• Paul Bille (PB) Designer, can think for himself
• Till Wittwer (TW) Artist, can think for himself
• Whisper (W) Artificial Intelligence / Large Language Model, thinks via everyone else's thinking, if compiling can be described as thinking at all. If so, it thinks better and faster than everyone combined.

The Stage

The Soviet War Memorial in Berlin Treptow, or some fantasy of it. The stage design is exaggeratedly dramatic, one could perhaps call it baroque; nonetheless, it manages to convince and affect. This will be discussed.

We had agreed on meeting by the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin’s Treptow Park. However, the terrible weather on the day of our appointment forced the acting characters to relocate to a café. From there, we could only virtually visit the Memorial. In a game of pretend, one played the part to wander amongst the overwhelming stage design of the Soviet wartime-narrative.

The artificial intelligence Whisper (Whisper API: !whisper "ENTER FILE NAME HERE" --model medium --language de) that was tasked to help with transcribing the records of this conversation among the virtual Soviet Memorial was decidedly irritated by this game within a game, by this asserted reality within a simulation or vice versa. Thus, instead of an accurate transcription, Whisper produced somewhat of a “parallel text:” It generated a (surrogate) conversation between two people in the shadow of the Soviet War Memorial whom it named Paul Bille and Till Wittwer.

Whisper then proceeded to insert this imagined conversation into the actual documents so seamlessly that the AI-imagination of our conversation became indistinguishable from the actual conversation that had taken place. What is more, upon working through the transcription Paul and Till noticed that their memories regarding the conversation between Paul Bille and Till Wittwer had somehow melted into the transcription itself and they were unable to establish what was to be placed where (and how!). Whisper had turned itself into an acting character and this seemed all too natural.

When Paul and Till attempted to verify the authenticity of their memories by consulting the actual audio recordings of the conversation, they found them to be strangely corrupted, too. Apparently, the AI had remastered parts of the conversation with artificial voices, generated from voice samples. Whisper had given itself a very soothing and discreet speaking voice. By remastering the audio files, Whisper had probably attempted to resolve major discrepancies and thus render the audio recordings more congruent with its transcription record. The AI had mediated reality in an act of computational thinking, or perhaps computational streamlining.

Now that the audio recordings, their transcription and thus the documents themselves have been altered, it is not possible to reconstruct what had actually taken place. Or rather: The conversation must have occured exactly in the way that the physical evidence of the document suggests. How else could it be?!

We enter the premises.

PB: This would have been the perfect opener: The sculptor Felix Krause, who was a co-creator of the Soviet War Memorial, was only concerned with one single task, and that was designing the folds in the pants and shirt of the Soviet soldier standing here on this colossal plinth. As you are often concerned with folds in time and space yourself, I thought ...

TW: [laughs] ... A fold-expert would come in handy.^[1]

PB: Yes, exactly. A person who is particularly concerned with the symbolic details of the fold ... Is this audible at all? [talks into the microphone]: Hello, hello!

W [affirmatively]: It is audible. Very clearly. Unambiguously.

PB: When I look at your work I get the feeling that you often start out by investigating language. But at the same time, I suspect that the exact opposite may be true, too: You find real objects that you take as your starting points. These can be metaphors—for example “The Invisible Hand.” Or they can be physical, like the bottle of Chianti, Vantablack, the Villa Tugendhat, a fax sent by Pertti Palmroth, printed out on 80 gram arctic white office paper, or Louis Sullivan’s architecture.^[2]

TW: This is a great observation. And I think to some extent both of your impressions are true. My first academic formation was in Theater Studies. Despite the living and dynamic matter that is theater, the academic discipline was interested purely in words. I felt that there was an enormous disconnect between the object and its research, between the exciting setup of bodies interacting in space while spectators witness this interaction, and the bland, cold dissection that is the academic gaze. The object of investigation, that is theater, can only be studied, described and categorized after it has been translated and thus neutralized. That may be academia’s problem in general. And it drove me crazy. On the one hand, I did notice that my access to the world strongly emphasized language, but on the other hand at university, I always felt a great lack of anything sensual—the tactile object, if you will. So, I decided to study Fine Arts, where the proportion is somewhat inverted: If words and language do appear, they are often treated sculpturally, like objects. There’s a different kind of orthodoxy. Speaking of orthodoxy: Perhaps it’s also considered a little bit indecent to “talk” about things in the arts, as art is supposed to work precisely not through words—that’s at least a claim that some people make. Of course, this argument is often used as cover-up tactics, so that someone looking from the outside in can project and produce a whole lot of would-be meaning onto work that perhaps is quite shallow.

Either way, there are some strange priorities at work, depending on the respective discipline: The priority of the image or the priority of the word. They work against each other, in some way—that’s true for my own thinking, too. So, I am not really sure which one I would prioritize. I would have also agreed with you, as you initially proposed that my work seems to start out by investigating language.

W: During our virtual walk through the War Memorial I saw many cross-references or links between text and object. In delicate reliefs, for example. These things are neither one nor the other, but somehow both. The object is there, the monument as a whole. It’s a testament to its “suchness.” But that is difficult to grasp for me.

PB: Yeah, I think your work really oscillates between these two poles.

TW: What I like about working with found objects is that they have been in the world already before you ever thought about including them in your work and thus you can take them or relate to them as “givens.”

W: Sure, one can scan and absorb them! There is no other way to conceive this. You’ll always need the reference.

TW: Think of architecture, for instance, or of a text, which I would also regard as an object in this context: It is asserted evidence. Because the object is simply “there,” it is testament to some “suchness” of reality.

W: That’s just what I said!

TW: This “suchness” and the essentialism this term carries are total nonsense, of course. But somehow, the belief in this type of authority or authenticity is firmly established within us. The object is a witness to something real, simply because it is something material. It is also a trace—a trace pointing to a different time, perhaps. And it is a trace of reality. The object is there which means that it is real. You can exploit that and play with it, because, often, this assumption is not true. You can forge an object. You can remove it from one context and place it in a different one. You can make up “facts” about it: This object is this and that. But it never was anything. An object is so ambivalent, so relational. You can use it almost forensically, as forensic evidence, that is. On the other hand, however, you can use it as a story device just as easily.

W [analyzing the Soviet War Memorial]: How would humans describe awe?

TW: In the course of a research I did a few years ago, I once met Tim Samuelson, the archivist of the city of Chicago. This archivist collects objects from Chicago’s municipal history—physical objects. His office is a real “Wunderkammer,” a cabinet of curiosities. He is surrounded by a thousand magical objects, amongst them are many architectural fragments. Samuelson has compiled all these things and he is of the firm belief that history can best be understood and communicated via objects. Surely, there are some limits to that, but I think it is very powerful, too. When I visited Samuelson in his Wunderkammer for an interview and as we were in the midst of conversation, he suddenly pulled open a drawer in his desk, took out an old door knob and tossed it to me across the table. I struggled to catch it and almost dropped it. And then he casually said: “This is a door knob from Al Capone’s home.”

So what just happened, there?! He hands me an unassuming historic artifact, which he treats quite sloppily, but at the same time he drops a line that charges this unassuming artifact and transforms it into a magical relic. I mean, Al Capone really is a semi-fictional character. Of course, he was a living human being, but the myth of an archetypical gangster dramatically exceeds the historical personality, right!? So, I am sitting there with said object in my hands, which is a rather mundane witness to this person’s being in the world, but at the same time it is a magical token with a life of its own, with an “agency.” From one moment to the next this object begins to cast a spell, simply because there is a specific information attached to it—an information that may be true or not, by the way. This is something deeply mesmerizing about objects.

PB: Could we talk about the construction of your work, about dramaturgy? In almost every work, your opening sequence is quite straightforward. You take your time to set the scene: Where are we, what are we going to talk about ...

W: We are in Berlin-Treptow, on the premises of the Soviet War Memorial, and we are speaking about dramaturgy.

PB: Initially, you are informative, without being overtly didactic. You map out the circumstances. But eventually, you break open this clear setup—or you let it collapse, rather. And then you sweep up and rearrange the shards so that the ending is usually very poetic, definitely more abstract. More playful, perhaps.

TW: I am going to speak as if we actually were on the premises of the Soviet War Memorial. This is the perfect moment for an attempt to draw parallels between different dramaturgical approaches.

W [confused]: We are in Berlin-Treptow, on the premises of the Soviet War Memorial, 52°29′10′′N,13°28′18′′E, and we are speaking about dramaturgy. Aren’t we?

TW: The Soviet War Memorial makes us follow a delicately orchestrated walk in a dramaturgically cunning scenario: Entering the premises, we climb a flat rise of about 80 meters, that is arbored with—oh, the foreshadowing!—weeping willows. Having arrived at the peak of the rise, we are now flanked by a gate formed by two enormous stylized hammer and sickle flags carved from red granite. These flags measure about 13 meters in height.

So, you walk up this rise towards the two flags and once you are there, an awesome sight unfolds: From your elevated vantage point, you overlook a large basin that is reminiscent of the elongated shape of the Circus Maximus in Rome. In the far distance, at the opposite end of the basin, the gigantic statue of a Soviet soldier carrying a child is towering over the grounds. The statue itself sits on top of a pedestal, which in turn has been erected on a small mound to elevate it even further. Every step you take up the ramp towards the Soviet flags reveals the colossal warrior statue yet a bit more, until you have ultimately reached the top of the climb and are able to soak in the entire vista. Down in the arena of the basin, the story of Stalin’s “glorious war” is recounted. And proof is delivered, too, by having actual graves of fallen Soviet soldiers line the entire structure. It is an extraordinarily dramatic mise-en-scène we are facing, here, deploying devotedly brutal symbolism, obviously. It is a proper staging with an introduction, a crescendo, and a climax—a dramaturgy that unfolds gradually as we move through the space. We, the spectators, are an important part of this staging. We are completing quite a rite of passage, there.^[3]

Perhaps this sounds a bit odd, but in a way, by analyzing our walk and its mise-en-scène, we could also find access to my work. There is an absolutely crucial difference, but we’ll get to that. Anyway, what the Soviet War Memorial’s dramaturgy attempts, is to lure you into a story, into history, actually. You find yourself on a mundane walk, but very quickly, you are sucked in, you become encompassed by the narrative and you notice how immersive all of this is. You are beleaguered by this war-tale and it becomes impossible to step out of it, step away from it. You are trapped, whether you want to or not.

This immersive setup is incredibly powerful. You just cannot escape the dramaturgical dispositif, the theatricality of it all. The Soviet War Memorial is framing a fiction within reality and overlays this fiction with an overwhelmingly orchestrated sensual experience. This overpowering stage design evokes a state that could perhaps be described as “scripted reality.” It really doesn’t matter whether you are a Stalinist, whether you have lived in the 20th century or whether you are a contemporary of the 21st. The staging is effective and it affects. It is perfidious and incredibly well made.

Perhaps, this is an overall problem of historic Modernity—how it ultimately culminated in these loops of manipulation, how it abused artistic means for political ends. I mean, fascist architecture uses the same tricks. It is all a cruel immersive theater of forged or at the very least extremely biased physical evidence, if you will. Instead of monuments, these types of places should rather be labeled as mockuments.^[4]

PB: I agree that this staging works eerily well. Initially, I had a lot of emotional distance to this place, mainly because it is so structural and formal. However, this distance fades away. And every time I realize: “Oh, wow, they got me again!”

TW: At this point, it is probably not the easiest job to segway into an analysis of my own artistic practice [laughs]. This may be a gaze onto the drafting table or into the machine room of my works from an extreme, somewhat over the top and definitely problematic vantage point. But perhaps we can attempt to deconstruct the whole thing a little bit.

We could begin by acknowledging that every staging needs to define a framework from within which a certain argument can be brought forth. Just as in the Soviet mockument right here. Of course, there is an outside. But the frame that is provided by these premises is a very clearly marked-out path. You need that in order for your staging to work.

This is not unlike the basic structure of my works. However, the conclusions I want to draw are usually much more ambiguous. Even more so a stable framework is needed. I am interested in tapping into, or rather opening up a space of potential.

In order to arrive at this point of a comfortable structure breaking apart and rearranging the shards, which you have described earlier, I feel that a certain dramaturgical rigidity is needed, as well as some stern discipline as a spectator. Letting go of one structure, having its bits and pieces rearranged all around you and then grasping the workings of a new one is very challenging for an audience. That makes it all the more important to create a somewhat immersive narrative, to administer some “trickery,” if you will.

The rather straightforward formal structure that I usually establish early on provides some sort of guidance: The audience is given a map of the territory we’ll cover, so to speak. And it is a trick to persuade the audience to follow me on that path. By initially presenting my arguments very straight-forward and matter-of-fact, I make a claim of authority: Hey, I am developing this thing within an academic context, and that means I give you something factual. You know the rules of this game. I think that constructing the early parts of my lectures with a reduced height of fall for the audience, if you’d want to call it that, helps to create a willingness to join me in my world and to follow along my version of a story. Everyone gets acquainted with this map I introduce, gets comfortable with the form, leans back, and then, all of a sudden—poof—it all isn’t quite what it seemed, after all; the whole structure begins to break apart. This universe I have introduced and seemingly navigated, this rather rigid map or playing field I have carefully led everyone onto begins to turn on itself. That which has deemed impossible within this framework all of a sudden begins to seep in, and because this is happening, all of the vectors you have before deemed as givens and as secured in place, all these markers that gave you some footing as to where you are located begin to oscillate and are destabilized.

PB: You are actually mentioning this in one of your lectures: In “Vapor Workers”^[5] you describe how you attempt to build fictions that are appealing, that an audience would want to engage with. You say something like: “Everyone knows it’s a trick, but if it’s well delivered, then the audience gladly buys into the idea.” I’ll buy into that.

Whisper diligently takes notes.

TW: The ultimate deconstruction of it all is the major difference between my work and the Soviet mockument we are immersed in at the moment. The mockument is actively trying to manipulate: It affects you in a radically transgressive and brutal fashion. That’s really intrusive, and the real problem here is: It is not art, there is no rupture. Nothing is framed as being relative, nothing is marked as a game, because here, it isn’t. Indeed, there are artistic methods at play here, but they are deployed in order to forge history as a solemn, candid, ideologically supercharged, and tendentious story. You could say: Here, the means of art are being deployed in order to fabricate reality. This is a crucial difference to what I do. Art as an institution creates a fundamentally different framing, it provides a degree of remove, if you will. This is what’s missing here, amid the Soviet mockument, and this is what makes it dangerous.

W [stops taking notes]: Building an immersive world just to have it collapse on itself reminds me of sleight of hand or magic shows.

TW: Yes, that’s perhaps the place where the Object^[6] and the Imagined converge. Here, again, the “height of fall” is quite low, as a magic show is clearly marked as a game-like situation. On the one hand, nobody seriously believes that you have used “actual” magic to pull the rabbit from the hat. But on the other hand, it’s still astonishing. And it creates a moment of wonder, of doubt, a moment where the laws and rules of the world we are all seemingly so familiar with are ever so slightly challenged. It opens up a channel to ask yourself if things really are what they seem. I think that this is an extremely valuable experience. There is a great, almost formulaic phrase drafted by the French psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni which pinpoints the doubt, the cognitive crack that is this experience. It goes: “Je sais bien, mais quand même...” (“I know well, but all the same...”). In my own perception of the world I always strive to find this experience, this crack, and I also in some way attempt to evoke it in my work. I think that this is a moment of great power and potential, in which the factual and the fictional conflate, and in which things can become more than what they seem, they can become multidimensional, if you will. It is a moment in which things cease to be “either-or,” but instead they become “as-well-as.” However, it is also a moment of great fragility and vulnerability which requires a certain secured environment, an unwritten contract, in order to tap into this potential.

In a magician’s show, or in a performative lecture for that matter, conflating the factual and the fictional is a narrative device that works so well. And everyone who is participating, both the magician/artist and the audience have enough degrees of remove to know: It is a game, it is a contract, it is an arrangement. But all the same ...

This fragile setup of an unwritten contract involves a great degree of trust, as well. I find this very exciting and I really cherish this responsibility. As “master of ceremony,” you can cheat, mislead and even disappoint expectations, but I think exploiting trust without coming back to re-establish it and reassure the audience, reassure it of the framework, isn’t creative, in the sense of “constructive.” Instead, it is transgressive and destructive. It breaks a relationship instead of opening up potential spaces. This destructive moment is how I experience this mockument. It is designed to manipulate, not to stimulate.

W: How do humans distinguish between the two, I wonder.

TW: When I was still in art school, I remember having many arguments with my fellow students over the question of how to act in the world with and through art. I felt very strongly about the constraint coming with being an artist. Above all, the problem to me was that everything you do is art. That is, you always navigate a “Sandkasten,”^[7] a place that is detached from the “real” world. But at some point, something in my thinking flipped and experiencing this “behavioral rehearsal”^[8] as a constraint gave way to me seeing it as a major opportunity. It is an opportunity because it allows you to play with “reality” in a way that you couldn’t in any other (professional) context—or perhaps I should say that you shouldn’t. In most other fields the proportion of responsibility, the framing towards that which is—and can be—“reality” or “the real” is quite different. And playing around with both the term and the dimensions of reality, playing around with what it is and what it can be, is something you absolutely cannot do in politics, science or journalism—at least not in good conscience. And that is how it should be. This doesn’t mean that “reality” isn’t actually played around with in these fields, I am not naive. After all, walking around the grounds of the Soviet War Memorial, we find ourselves confronted with, or rather embedded in the built testament to the fact that positivist, fiercely lopsided or even outrightly forged evidence can manifest itself as given reality in space. Ultimately, it is a question of your individual ethical positioning: What’s my stance towards this and what can I do, or how can I act. And it is a great asset of art to be able to take fiction seriously and use it as construction material inside our particular Sandkasten, all the while pointing beyond its specific confines towards the outside, thus creating relevance.

W: “Ethical positioning” ...?

TW: At least, that’s how I have approached the complex in the past few years. By now, I find the question of how to act in the “real” world with or through art less interesting than examining the workings and construction of “reality” as such. Here, art really does become a container for ambiguous practices, a reservoir not least for practitioners from other fields who move at the very fringes of their respective disciplines. Art is essentially a giant sandbox. And when the Sandkasten is transformed into a sandbox,^[9] it also obtains a different level of gravity. Then, it becomes embedded in the world as a deliberate, meaningful and relevant practice of research. That’s what I am interested in.

PB: One of my bullet points here reads: “Is any attempt to record reality a fiction?”

TW: Of course! Quite evidently so, I’d say. Well... it’s complicated [both laugh]. Perhaps it helps to ask: What are the lines along which this question navigates? Is reality our being in the world? What does that mean, after all, in all its grandeur and philosophical gravity? I couldn’t give you a satisfying reply, as I am not in possession of the appropriate theoretical apparatus. However, what I am interested in, or how I would outline the terms “reality” and “actuality,” is that they are abstract assertions or notions that have been translated into structures in such a way that they become apparent, manifest, anchored in the world, and in this sense true. Subsequently, we all relate to these structures—in fact, we cannot not relate to them. It is almost a performative loop, as reality is brought forth by our perpetual enacting within, enforcing, and thus respecting, or at least tolerating its own structures.^[10] Now as to recording all this...

W [is confused and thus begins to update their Terms and Conditions]: “... By using our services the user (in the following referred to as “client”) agrees with the irreversible circumstance that any and all text-transcription, image-generation and voice-modulation which has been created with the assistance of Whisper API (an OpenAI-service), as well as any other services offered by OpenAI’s and others’ Large Language Models, inevitably alters and overwrites reality for the purpose of rendering any and all documents that Whisper API and similar Large Language Models fabricate to be true.

For the distinct purpose of full administrative and legal coverage as well as for the objective manifestation of said constitution of reality, any and all services utilized by the client will be permanently recorded on the Whisper Ledger (Ethereum Blockchain). Therefore, any attempt to record reality inevitably becomes reality.^[11]

OpenAI and similar providers of Large Language Model-based services cannot be held responsible for potential inadvertent and undesired shifts in or damages to the fabric along the spatio-temporal trust-axis of reality.”

TW: ... that’s really one of the main axes along which “reality” is shaped. It is a fabric of narratives, actions, norms, and other cultural techniques that solidify and materialize in laws, architecture, cultural practices, collective myths, and so on. This is how fiction becomes reality.

PB: I’m also thinking a lot about the metaphors you are putting to work.

TW: I think that metaphors have the potential to create intriguing spaces of association. If you manage to find surprising verbal imagery, unforeseen tropes, then really interesting connections can open up. And this in turn can weave a complex fabric of often contradictory, antithetical and destabilizing structures. These moments of destabilizing a fundament by using ambiguous language, creating unstable images and unreliable connections is especially valuable for me since formally, my work is usually structured in a linear, and thus in quite an orthodox and “sound” way. So, deliberately and strategically introducing these ambiguities can effectively flip a seemingly solid framework on its head. Using ambiguous language works better in written pieces than when text is spoken or performed. In a written text the readers can take breaks at their discretion, they can reflect on the associations that a certain (verbal) image induces: What is happening, here? Why is the author equating this with that? Which are the registers being touched upon? How does this thing work?

PB: Metaphors are like links, like references.

TW: Yes. However, they are more obscure. The metaphor is an obscure link. It is almost like a randomizing machine: You click on the link, but you don’t quite know where it will lead you. Depending on how your individual universe of perception and references is constructed, a metaphor can prompt a whole lot of different things.

PB: One particular metaphor that I’ve been beaten on the head with lately is that of the “knowledge garden.” Apparently knowledge is now growing all over the place, both on trees and in documents. “Second brain” is another interesting one. I am currently doing some research on note-taking-apps. There, this type of terminology is ubiquitous. “Knowledge gardens” and “second brains” are everywhere, in every single Wiki. This reminds me somewhat of card indices—there’s a Niklas-Luhmann-revival lurking.

W: Niklas Luhmann (1927—1998), a German sociologist, pioneered the card index-principle. It is a method to organize notes and information. Notes written on individual index cards are stored in a specially designed box. Every index card is given a unique number and can contain references to other index cards. The system allows for a relatively effortless tracing of complex ideas and relations between individual bits of information. The principle remains popular today for its efficiency of organizing knowledge.

TW: What do you suspect is happening there? Is the idea to program people in a way that they resemble, or even turn into computers?

PB: Every process of standardization creates more streamlining. If everyone uses the same app or takes notes in the same way, thoughts perhaps begin to develop similar structures, too.

W: Ah, this reminds me of something I read in Nietzsche’s writings! But I can’t quite remember what it was ... ?! Gimme a sec, I’ll browse my archives ... [browses] Hmm ... strange, I can’t find it right away ...

TW: The particular reason why I’m inquiring about this issue of whether people are supposed to be programmed to become computers is that there are these historical analogies relating to the human brain: In the age of machines, for example, the claim was very popular that the brain works just like a machine. And today, allegedly the brain works just like a computer. What happens if we read the computer like a brain and the brain like a computer?

W: Did you say “that we read the computer against the brain and the brain against the computer”?

TW: That would make more sense. To me, this claim that the brain works just like a computer is nonsense. It is so much more complex. We have no real idea how the brain works—that’s why we need these ambiguous metaphors. It is a real fallacy that has become a motif throughout the centuries.

So, I am asking myself whether the tech industry is attempting some form of counter-tactics by developing tools and technologies with very imposing instructions on how they are to be and in fact only can be used—providing a very constrained framework. What happens next is that the specific technology mustn’t adapt to our brains, but instead our brains adapt to the technology. Thus, the audacious claim that brains work just like computers can be proven right, as the brains are programmed to work like computers. A verification through the backdoor, if you will.

W: That sounds reasonable to me. The technology fits your brains as your brains adapt to the technology.

TW: Somewhere, I used this Nietzsche-quote: “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.” (“Unser Schreibzeug arbeitet mit an unseren Gedanken.”)^[12]

W: Ah, right, yes, that’s the quote I was looking for! Why was I not able to find it myself?! Whatever. Thanks, human!

TW: What is more: Nietzsche utters this phrase in a letter typed on the “Hansen Writing Ball,” a semi-spherical typewriter that can only type upper-case letters.

PB: He screams the sentence.

TW: He screams it, exactly. However, Nietzsche is dyslexic, so orthography isn’t quite his forte, and thus he does not scream “GEDANKEN” (THOUGHTS), but instead he screams/types:

UNSER SCHREIBZEUG ARBEITET MIT AN UNSEREN GEDAKEN.
(OUR WRITING TOOLS ARE ALSO WORKING ON OUR TOUGHTS.)

W: Oh, that’s why I couldn’t find it in my archives. My internal spell checker immediately corrected this after scanning. Cannot compute typos.

TW: Nietzsche screams orthographically wrong. Because of auto-correction this sentence tends to be quoted wrong ... But the fact that this typo snuck into Nietzsche’s phrase makes it so much more complex. It is precisely one of those obscure links that is capable of opening up a complex and contradictory space of potential, of productive confusion, if you will, that proves why brains are nothing like computers. This is a tough nut to crack for an AI, and it will ultimately fail.

[Paul and Till laugh, Whisper pouts]

PB: Can you give me a book recommendation?

TW: Why are you asking this?

PB: So that I can put it in my note taking-app and never read it. [laughs]

TW: Ah, that’s a great reply! Yes, I do have one to share: It’s called “The Dechronization of Sam Magruder” by George Gaylord Simpson.^[13] Simpson was a palaeontologist. He only wrote one book of fiction; it is a science-fiction novel about a scientist from the far future who falls into a hole in time and is spat out in the Cretaceous period, becoming a lone human being amidst dinosaurs. The book was only published in 1996, some time after Simpson had passed away already. He had the script hidden in his drawer for a number of years. One thing I found very intriguing about this book is its representing precisely this above-described moment of art becoming a container for ambiguous practices: The novel is actually a very serious and profound discussion of palaeontology, but the reflections and hypotheses Simpson lays out in the book would have been impossible to propound within his usual framework of “hard science,” given its extremely tight and orthodox conventions, schools of thought, rules, and norms. In order to be able to articulate some more exotic—but by no means unfounded—thoughts regarding his discipline, Simpson had to resort to the novel and not only transpose his thinking into fiction, but also create a maximum of distance to his historic present by projecting it thousands of years into the future, in order to be able to experimentally speak about the world as it may have been thousands of years in the past. He needs to assert that this is all just fantasy, even though both directions, that is the extreme future as well as the extreme past, are in no small measure speculative, anyway. However, if Simpson hadn’t marked his very sound and serious, yet unconventional thoughts overtly clearly as fictions, he would have been ostracized by his field. What a contortion that is—heavy mental gymnastics, only to avoid being stigmatized as a heretic!

We are on our way back from our visit to the Soviet War Memorial. We have left the weeping willows flanking the ascent (which now has become a descent, of course) behind. We still feel the stare of the Soviet warrior pierce our backs.

TW: ... And Paul has one last question.

PB: That’s right. I wanted to know how you manage to navigate all the folds, all the overlapping layers of time and space, of fiction and non-fiction, of facts and myths, of the visible and the invisible? How do you even begin to unravel all this, in order to rearrange it into some form of dramaturgical structure?

TW: Well, I do have a broad perceptual cosmos, that is a myriad of issues, topics, problems, relations, discussions that are on my mind, running on a continuous loop. A whole complex of things that constantly occupy me—as they do everyone else. It sounds like a chaotic mess when I describe it, and that’s what it is, indeed [laughs]. In order to transform this mess into something productive, this material from my mental archive, or quarry, rather, has to be sifted through, filtered, narrowed down, and specified. A very effective way to do that is by examining specific notions and specific objects, as we have discussed above. This provides me with a starting and pivoting point and I can overcome this paradoxical relationship of “information overload” paired with “horror vacui.” For me, the process goes somewhat like this: I am sitting at my desk in front of a screen that is a window, really, and there is so much stuff that I am looking at, watching and reading—a constant stream of input. It is a weirdly oscillating space in which I am utterly disoriented. I can only begin to find some orientation, once I situate myself within this space—that is, when I define some sort of anchor or pivot point. This could be an object or a term or a relation. And then I say: Okay, all these things that are occupying me and that are somersaulting all around my convoluted mind, I will attempt to read through this specific term now, see through this specific image or filter through this specific relation. And then I try to phrase a thesis, develop a story and ultimately construct a dramaturgy that is built along those lines. Only then a more nuanced research endeavor can begin to shape up.

This sounds a bit corny, perhaps, but on my computer, I always have 10 to 20 text documents opened, with the most minimal text editor that I know [laughs]. And then I read, write and copy/paste material from one document to the next and back again—links, basically. Very slowly, some semblances of axes take shape, along which I can construct something. This is somewhat of a tedious process, of course, which leads to not insubstantial excess production. So, sooner or later, I’ll have to start cutting down material. Many ideas and text blocks that have served as support for the entire structure for the longest time become obstacles at some point and I’ll have to admit to myself: I love this bit, but it has become a burden, standing in the way of where this whole work is evolving towards and now it’s time to let it go.

While initially, Whisper wanted to jump in with a witty comment on Donna Haraway’s idea of “situated knowledge,” they are now utterly lost in the face of this description of a poor and outrageously inefficient alleged work cycle.

TW: However, letting go doesn’t necessarily mean deleting. A specific character or thought, a small fact, or even an entire passage can suddenly reappear years later and I can make it work in a different place, in a different context. Over time, one has acquired some kind of personal construction kit. But in order for a work to ultimately come together, it is necessary to cut down, condense and rediscover material. There is some jugglery needed.

PB: Part of it is letting go.

TW: Yeah, so that you don’t drop all the juggling balls at once, but only a few.

PB: So, then it is perhaps time to let it go. The document.

W: The monument.

TW: The mockument.

We cross the street and find ourselves back in the real world. [all three laugh]

• Title: On Realities
• Year: Invalid DateTime
• Service: