Eastbourne Pier on July 30th, 2014, photography by Chris Williams, ed. gottrekorder

terra humana systematica

A gottrekorder production
by
Martina Egger – Registrar, Kevin Daryl Ferdinandus – Multimedia,
Robert di Pauli Gruber – Text, Kathrin Hanga – Organiser,
Laura Hatting – Voice, Luisa Franz Kleopatra – Communication,
Philipp Moosbrugger – Recording, Manfred Stocker – Manufacturer,
Jonathan Uhlaner – Translation

held at PARALLEL VIENNA 2024.

With works by
Anna Anvidalfarei, Ludwig Kittinger, Daniel Hafez,
Almut Reichenbach, Nigel Rolfe, sattler-glockner,
Rudi Stanzel, Céline Struger, Gwenn Thomas
and works from the collection and the collective.

Opening
11.09.2024, 17:00–22:00

11.09.2024–22.09.2024
Thu, Fri 13:00–20:00
Sat, Sun 11:00–20:00

PAVILLON 16
2nd FLOOR, ROOM 215
Otto-Wagner-Areal
Baumgartner Höhe 1
1140 Wien


parallelvienna.com
www.gottrekorder.com


Robert di Pauli Gruber
for Laura Hatting & gottrekorder e.v.

Vienna, 24.07. 2024

terra humana systematica

~
The Devine Ego / Prologue

History has us. Our own typeface. We go through it, it devours us and we nourish it. It is the worm that swells. In we go
on one side and out on the other. Where the worm bites its tail and embraces the world in eternal dance. The worm
continues to swell as the world of human beings passing through it. Enter here, get out there! Why did anyone want to
feed this monster with its history? For the sake of his ego. So that an ‘I’ can be! World without ego is a now. An ‘only
now’ that is. The ego is a typeface of it. I-worlds persist in the long run. That is: for a determinable time. The ‘only now’
is not mediated. Anyway, history grows and forms proportions. It pro-pagates. The nature of this pro-pagation is
religious – like any propagation without a real seed or germ. Just archival material. It is its goal and purpose to
transcend itself. The increase of archival material clearly reveals the purity of a religious propagation. This propagation
is itself its origin and religion continues to bear this basic trait in pure form. (There is no such thing as ‘before’; only a
propagation become typeface image in the midst of the act, in the process of multiplying.) The propagation is sacred –
for all eternity – from the point of views of the observance and fulfilment of the dogmatically recited in-out, in and out
of the worm of time.

The God-story dreams and tells of another, parallel world history: this is in the Hereafter – so the story goes – this
Beyond after excretion from the wormhole: front, back, probably plays no role in the multidimensionality without
space-time. The dream of the Hereafter becomes a metaphorical, linguistic This Worldly. The real promise in it, though
hidden, is not in milk and honey, but in the standstill of history. At last, history is left in the peace before all egos and,
even more, we in the peace before history! An eternal breather.

This parallel This Worldly has become world by writing, by one of the great religious tricks, whose presence is
believable and appears with believable features. Beyond this meaning, as the end of the tunnel, intestines, or whatever it
has been called it, means both entry and death. Admission and expulsion are the same moment; communion always
means both, without exception. (This is why imaginations of Paradise contain no real birth.)

The world is merely the conceptual, biographical vessel in which the ego gorges itself. From the ravening beast to the
excrement itself.

Remarkable. Body goes, ego goes – God remains. A nice idea. The God-Ego remains and is passed on as in a relay race.
The procession forms the worm. The worm is the beginning and the end that continues itself as a single moving mess –
as God's embodiment in spirit. A contradiction, of course. But so tempting! It is in this that the proof of God consists. In
the spirit that wanted to become matter, but made it only to the image – completely without seed. Passed on and turned
inside out, transformed and somehow also used up. The ego not only creates - itself as an image of the world of
permanent biography – no, it also consumes itself. It eats itself up; else it has no food. Certainly, it will hardly be
possible to abolish – conceptually – the quantum-theoretical absurdity of energy – as matter – that is, to concretize it.
Then the divine mystery of body and mind would be done with.

The ego not only creates; it also changes and transforms. The more it does so, the greater the design, the image. The
greater the image, the more it feasts on its own excrement. It, the picture, nourishes itself at the expense of the options
that are lost. Our own. That is the transformation in it, the transformation in the creation of images. Possibility in
thought into impossibility through writing. Indeterminateness into determinateness, immediacy into mediation, and now
into always! ‘... the temporal is held fast, but refined in a sensual eternity, in the eternal instant of an embrace.’1A
breather ... a digestive break. Possibility in thought of impossibility and of exclusion, of the already consumed and the
wasted freedom of the possible – from the fluid to the fixed, from the easily movable to the difficult to move. So don’t
make a picture of yourself! Of you! This is the first iconoclastic requirement. For we are being overcome by the
suspicion that this idea of the world is simply going nowhere.

Part 1: The emptiness that becomes ritual is real.
After post-modernity comes, is now – real postmodernism! The replacement of rational decisions by aesthetic ones –
without a link. The reversal, the turning back to faith, the stupidity of self empowerment as and in therapeutic
impotence, inexperiencabilty of significate, realisations of multiple virtualities – into an easy standardising “pluralism
for the future”.

(Beautifully ideology-free?)

"What is done to our individual life experience by means of high-tech, namely to let it dissolve its own experience in its
experience, is also applied post-modernly to the social past, which thanks to high-tech becomes so recitable that it can
be received immediately, as if one had travelled to yesterday, so that one is no longer from yesterday, but from after
yesterday."2

Of this it must be said: what is presented as drafted is here already practically closed in the draft – never open. The
necessarily selective traversal of the always instantly different river as a polylogy of artistic aesthetic practices stabilises
into the constant outflow of productions that can/are allowed to be thematised and commented on as artistic decisions -
to become nonchalant but no longer negotiated (in the sense of processual vividness or, even more, actual – with respect
to their potentialities – presence). Above all, more and more technical (applied) new additions, whether as materials for
informing and information or as tools for doing this (the means justify the means, the end is mediocrity), have been and
are being integrated, concisely presented.

There is necessarily an overlapping of sense data, mixing and cancelling, a "cross-over esotericism" of pop-formalist
content evacuation. Even an opposition of form-statement-institutions within a few decades or even years. Levellingly
global in different places and for different groups. In relation to the Western industrialised and everyday digitalised art
world, however, the zenith is already well passed and tendencies are recognisable which, while not a retrogressive
movement, yet correspond to the actually usable potential of supposedly innovative technologies; weighed against the
statements actually obtained and produced in this way.

Was that the choice then? Virtual therapy (self-empowerment) and infantilism instead of rationalization and
technocracy? The living zoon politikon is desired dwindlingly small, should desire to give way to "anything goes",
adoring itself as an art figure, making aesthetic/more theological decisions or not making them, individualized
collectively and throwing around and away from itself. Rather art figure without conscience (historical
experienceability) than real (acting) person. Seen sociologically, a pseudo political "colour-blindness" independent of
class? Who is going to shoot whom virtually? Just so. The impatience of the bourgeoisie, jiggling at the world clasps,
has passed loss at the short-lived longeurs of the last decades of the last millennium; and how could it revolt otherwise
than as a history-less non-rebellion of the real postmodernist generations? To whom can all the utopias, efforts, constant
toil (formerly the civilizing project) be left now? Is the old time still young? (Post-modernness faked for real.)

Better one cannot ...Because this always has, what appears aesthetically charming, the consequence of justifying itself,
if at all possible, also ethically.3

Part 2: In the Balancing
Why is that? Did they – they who came after the Post-War Dream, the formerly post-modern accelerated cohort driven
to the point of fear and (oh dear!) rejuvenated by, through and on “media overload” – did they drop out of the world?
Out just like that? Out of the world that was theirs (yes, yours!), but which, according to that very credo, would only
ever let the young, that is, the perpetually irritable, have their way with it. And this, even for only a short historical
sojourn. For the World Ship, as a referent of the ecological-economic guest-host function, lists to one side; exposes its
and their diseased side as pure nature.6 (Pure or not pure? That is here the question!) Prevailing, hardly time-honoured
states of decay in the formerly innovative, pruriently circuiting “project of world-creation”, the civilisational project.
“For Western society, too, has produced something other than what the cynical system-theoretical gaze of a desperately

hopeful critical theory read from its eyes”. 4

Part 3: fabula rasa
Art has a symbolic function. It points to the separation of nature and human space as cultural geography and world
creation! As civilisation. It is not only a mean between ethics and aesthetics and a measure of aesthetics placed on
ethics, but thus also stands at the origin of conduct and relations in the social sphere. The symbolic is a devise of social
life. Symbols as mediators and functions between world and non-world often bring with them the potential for
confusion. In themselves and because of us, for the very reason of this mediation. 5 Becoming human as lived confusion
marks and masks the origin and also the duration of civilisations. “The life of animals hangs on the thread of the genetic
species; the life of human groups is able to realise the replacement of the genetic order by the ethnic order only under
the cover of a time, a space and a society that are completely symbolic in character [...].”6 But even more than identity,
this requires the incongruity of the symbol with the thing symbolised, and both, incongruity and identity, as proportional
relations.7 A range of variation, length, depth and height, for this world and beyond the border.

For a Critical Utopia also contains that hope of not always believing the mask, although, mediated as it is by the myth,
one must believe it! 8 Martin Luther translated “videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate nunc autem facie ad faciem”
in the First Epistle to the Corinthians (chapter 12, verse 13) with the words:“We see now through a mirror in a dark
word, but then we shall see face to face.” Well then! The main thing is that the balance is drawn up correctly. In the
balancing, the details get lost in that post-nihilistic dream which is the life of post-utopian societies.

Part 4:
In a symbolic universe
the shards of the mirror

veritably collapse into one gaze.
~

1 Søren Kierkegaard (Copenhagen 1843), Entweder-Oder (Holzinger Verlag, 2013), 368.
2 Burghart Schmidt, Zeitökonomie des Individualismus (Wien, Edition Splitter, 1996), 86.
3 Cf. Umberto Eco, Kunst und Schönheit im Mittelalter (München, Carl Hanser, 1991).
4 B. Schmidt., 164f and Leroi-Gourhan, Hand und Wort. Die Evolution von Technik, Sprache und Kunst
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 385: “[...] the progressive dissolution of mythological thinking has, within several
centuries, set the most highly developed societies on the path of l`art pour l`art and covered over the crisis of figuration.
At present, individuals are imbued with and determined by a rhythmicity that has reached the stage of practically total
mechanisation (rather than humanisation).”
5 Note: Think also of the popular confusions in theological theorems. Even here, people have been resorting to symbol
and image since the early Middle Ages, because the representability and clarity of diverse dogmas in their complexity
can hardly be explained with the rigour of the necessary theological formulations.
6 Leroi-Gourhan, 387.
7 Cf. Umberto Eco on symbols as an expression of a pedagogical system and a cultural policy in the Middle Ages and
the mental processes typical of the time: “Symbolic attribution is thus based on a certain agreement, a schematic
analogy or a connection of essence” (Kunst und Schönheit im Mittelalter, (München/Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1991),
83 ff.
8 Cf. B. Schmidt, 167: “The chance to take it (the mask) off now and then contains a moment of freedom. [...] For it is
precisely through our consciousness that we are driven back to the mask of the ‘as if’.”

Text: Robert di Pauli Gruber
Translation: Jonathan Uhlaner
Voice: Laura Hatting
Music piece: Marc-Antoine Charpentier Prelude from Te Deum Transcription for guitar by Ganesh Del Vescovo