[open] spaces

he exhibition [open] spaces deals with states of spaces, be they political or media spaces, in many different ways. While some theoreticians lament the “disappearance of space” because of technical developments – surveillance technologies and telepresence in particular – European policy focuses on determining who belongs and who does not by means of creating a demarcated territory called which can be controlled in economic and geographic terms. In this manner, and depending on one’s perspective, Europe is to be a geographic, economic and cultural entity consisting of the countries which belong to it: a closed space.

How are we to relate the points of view that space is disappearing to those of a closed, monitored space? Visions of the future which predict onmipresent monitoring are tantamount to resolving this contradiction by means of concepts that the world is identical to the storage and processing of data about it. Surely, “space” will have disappeared when no gap is perceived here any more, and when instead, simulations coupled with control technology are considered a whole, as is claimed of them.

Another relationship between the ideas of a disappearing space and a closed one, which endure in parallel, would arise by recognizing that a contradiction exists. Elaborating this contradiction in order to perceive it as well as for political and artistic resistance is the foundation upon which the various positions presented in the exhibition [open] spaces act.

Illegal immigrants to Europe suffer from this contradiction in a concrete way, living with changing, split identities, simultaneously confirming and subverting the “fortress Europe,” and in constant danger of their lives. The contradiction between disappearing space and physical space which is still considered determinable also comes into play with RFID technology, as a surveillance technology which has long been introduced, but is rarely noticed. Transponders transmit data about people and products through a tightly-knit global network of readers andllong range antennas in a vision of the future that foresees the transmitting chips as closing the gap between designation and object, between data trail and person. Technologies with which these processes are brought to people’s attention operate at the boundary between political and technological enlightenment, agitation and art.

What the various works of the [open] spaces project show are tactical border crossings in imagined, geographical, technological and political spaces: the goal is both to recognize them and to use them oneself.

“Space” appears as a cultural thing between alleged reality, allocation and interpretation. Just as it is only cultural determinations of the genders which create what is onsidered “biological,” and new media make older ones seem like the most trustworthy and tangible reality, so do the respective technologies for documenting and measuring only construct the “space” which they strive to discern ever more comprehensively.

Spaces of meaning and action, too, are not originally open spaces, if one takes the political dimension of struggles around historiography and overeignty of interpretation into consideration. In this vein, one has some reason to think that “open space” is one of the most powerful fictions in defining reality. Mirroring this fiction against the all-encompassing tendencies of increasing surveillance of spaces as well as limitations on civil rights in an operative manner is what the works of [open] spaces do in a variety of ways.

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