Agnieszka Kurant

Agnieszka Kurant Time Code, 2007 - 2011 2 panels, 80 x 100 inches (203.2 cm x 254 cm) Dimensions Variable

Agnieszka Kurant Time Code, 2007 - 2011 2 panels, 80 x 100 inches (203.2 cm x 254 cm) Dimensions variable

LANGUAGE IS A VIRUS FROM OUTER SPACE, 2007

LANGUAGE IS A VIRUS FROM OUTER SPACE referes to the limits and solipsism of logic of human science. 'Wow signal' the only message ever received on Earth from outer space by a radio telescope 'Big Ear' in Ohio in 1978 was engraved on a crystal plate. This signal has been examined for past 30 years an innumerous number of times by many scientists, who do not either confirm or deny that the signal was sent by some other civilization. All accidental sources of the signal have been excluded. There are only two possible sources of the signal - either it comes from another civilisation or the message was sent from Earth, then encountered some planet or object and was reflected returning to Earth, distorted to such an extent that we no longer recognise it. Since science considers only repeated acts as phenomenons, this single signal is useless from the point of view of logic of science. It is also a code we cannot break or decipher. When the signal was received the scientist working in the laboratory wrote 'Wow‘ on the paper print-out of the telescope. This wow became part of the message s content and is the only part of it we now understand.

Phantom Library, 2011 Phantom Library is a project which consisted in creating physically a library of fictional, invisible books - books that don’t exist, except in the pages of other books. Fictional, imaginary books, artifictions, libris phantastica, and all books unwritten, unread, unpublished mentioned or described in real, existing books by authors such as Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Brautigan and many more. I used the archives of a few researchers around the world who have been cataloging these books for many years e.g. Brian Quinette in the US, Pawel Dunin-Wasowicz in Poland, Enrique Vila-Matas and Jean Yves Jouannais ( in his book Artistes sans oeuvres concerning never written books and artists without artworks) to produce the fictional invisible books as real sculptural objects for which I bought ISBN numbers and acquired barcodes to give them status in the material economic world. Behind each book there is a complex, elaborate and costly economy of its produc@on process designed to normally manufacture hundreds or thousands of copies. This complex economy serves in this case to produce just one single copy of each book. An imagined sci-­‐fi hybrid produc@on process betweet singularity and mass produc@on. Three chosen fonts were altered and distorted by different algorithms and viruses to produce endless quan@ty of fonts ranging from pure abstrac@ons to readable formal ones. On the back cover of each book there is the descrip@on of the source of its origin (the book in which it was men@oned and its author) as well as any addi@onal informa@on or the plot summary that is included about a given fic@onal book in the book describing it. Some of the books within the installa@on were produced with empty pages, some with recycled content of other books, some are printed with disappearing inks that appear only in the sun light and disappear in the shadow, or appear only in certain temperatures, or are visible for some @me and vanish aJer a while. Over the coarse of this year a few of these books will be outsourced and commissioned to be wriKen by invited writers.

The most famous examples of phantom books included in the Phantom Library: Stanislaw Lem wrote several books containing fic@onal books. In One Human Minute and Perfect Vacuum, he reviews 19 fic@onal books including Wilhelm Klopper’s “Die Kultur als Fahler (Civilisa<on as Mistake)” and Gian Carlo Spallanzani’s The Idiot. In Imaginary Magnitude there are several introduc@ons to fic@onal works, as well as an adver@sement for a fic@onal encyclopedia en@tled Vestrand's Extelopedia in 44 Magnetomes. The story of Philip K. Dick The Man in the High Castle revolves around a mysterious and forbidden book, wriKen by Hawthorne Abendsen, named The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Dick's book describes an alternate history where the Axis Powers were victorious in World War II and United States has been divided between Japan and Nazi Germany.

The book-­‐within-­‐a-­‐book is an alternate history itself, depic@ng a world in which the Allies won the war but which is nonetheless different from our own world in several important respects.

J.L. Borges's fic@onal crea@ons include Herbert Quain’s April March, The Secret Mirror, Ts'ui Pen’s The Garden of Forking Paths. In "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", a fic@onal poet named Pierre Menard aKempts to recreate Don Quixote exactly as Miguel de Cervantes wrote it.

In 2666 Roberto Bolano describes a number of fic@onal books by Benno von Archimboldi. The books include Bifurcaria Bifurcata, Railroad Perfec<on and Berlin Underground.

Phantom Library is a generic, open-­‐form work which will grow with @me and currently includes over 200 books.

Map of Phantom Islands, 2011 Map of Phantom Islands (2011) is the result of a long research focused on phantom territories that during the history of cartography were ever shown on maps of the world as results of Fata Morgana and mirages observed in different places around the globe as well as cartography errors, misconceptions about the world, rumors, etc. Some phantom islands were also intentional errors of explorers who tried to persuade governments to get funding for conquering of new lands and invented and placed on maps some nonexistent territories which later continued appearing on other maps over centuries. Most phantom islands continued to appear on political and economic maps till as late as 1943 (the development of aerial photography) and some still ocassionally re-apear. The phantom islands, though they are completely fictitious, were often sources of real conflicts and almost led to wars, e.g. Antilia caused a major conflict between Portugal and Spain. Bermeja is a tiny phantom island which USA still places on manipulated versions of Google Earth maps as a potential source of conflict with Mexico which allegedly occupies it.

Political Map of Phantom Islands depicts the „colonial“ and political divisions of the phantom theritories depending on which country or empire claimed to own a given land. The project includes Phantom Islands Archive - a series of 30 images and descriptions of real historical maps on which different phantom territories appeared. The descriptions include all information we have about a given phantom land based on allegedly real economic and political data from the times when the map was produced. The project includes a Map of Phantom islands which appears and dissapears in the sunlight and shadow depending on the weather, like a Fata Morgana.

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Frisland, Icaria and Estland

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Antillia Antillia is a legendary island which was reputed during the age of exploration to lie in the Atlantic Ocean far to the west of Portugal and Spain. The island went by various other names such as Isle of Seven Cities, Ilha das Sete Cidades. Antillia was also connected at times with ancient legends including the Isles of the Blessed and the Fortunate Islands. By the 16th century, the legend gave rise to the independent Spanish legends of the Seven Cities of Gold, which were reputed by mercenary conquistadors to be fabulously wealthy and located somewhere on the mainland of America.

The origin of the name is uncertain. A variant of the name, Atullia, appeared on a 1367 chart by Franciscus Pizzigano. Although difficult to read, it has been translated as: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Here are

A Portuguese legend tells how the island was settled in the early eighth century in the face of the Moorish conquest of Iberia by the Archbishop of Porto, six other bishops and their parishioners to avoid the ensuing Moorish invasion. Centuries later, the island became known as a proto-utopian commonwealth, free from the disorders of less favoured states.

Since these events predated the Kingdom of Portugal and the clergyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s heritage marked a claim to significant strategical gains, Spain counterclaimed that the expedition was, in fact, theirs. One of the chief early descriptions of the heritage of Antillia is inscribed on the globe which the geographer Martin Behaim made at Nuremberg in 1492. Behaim relates the Catholic escape from the barbarians, though his date of 734 is

UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE

A real, small-­‐scale island that hovers in the air due to magne?c levita?on. It moves slightly when people talk next to it as it is fragile to movements of air. This an?-­‐gravity territory is governed by an unfamiliar logic, the rules of which are yet to be invented.

Universe is Immobile

CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, Warszawa, 2009; Frieze Art Fair 2009

Wypchana wiewiórka zatrzymana w pół skoku, zamrożona w ruchu, unosi się magicznie nad postumentem. Trwający kilka sekund skok wiewiórki staje się dla widzów momentem trwającym w nieskończoność, jakbyśmy znajdowali się w równoległej rzeczywistości z płynącym wolniej czasem niż czas zwierząt. Elektromagnesy, wiewiórka, drewno.

FUTURE ANTERIOR

- a version of New York Times from the year 2020. A professional clairvoyant who collaborates regularly with Interpol, police and governments and is a reliable source of information for businessman and politicians was asked to create a forecast of what will happen in and around 2020 . The forecasts were later developed into an issue of New York Times with articles written by several NYT journalists and other ghostwriters. The newspaper has all the parameters of NYT from a bar code to advertisments bought by existing companies. It is however printed with disappearing paint which becomes completely invisible above 18 degrees and comes back to black when it is cooled down. As a result the newspaper appears and disappears depending on the weather conditions and the temperature of the room or when touched by human hands which warm up the paper.

Agnieszka Kurant 88,2 Hrtz , 2012

88,2 Hrtz (the work changes title depending on the frequency that is used in a given place) - is an accumulation of silences (silent pauses) from various important political, intellectual and economic speeches from the beginning of voice recording till today. The work is inspired by the short story of Heinrich Boll “Murke’s Collected Silences” (1955). The Murke of the title is a young editor, a graduate of psychology working for a radio station. He starts collecting bits of tape discarded on the studio floor—tape containing silence —splices them together, and takes them home to listen to in the evening. Murke ultimately trades a portion of silences with a radio producer for fragments of other recording he offers him in exchange, turning the silence into a currency.

The use of silent pauses can be very strategic and meaningful and its political impact was often analyzed by philosophers, anthropologists, linguists and coachers. It can be compared to use of intervals in music.

Certain famous pauses in speeches of e.g. Hitler, Winston Churchill, JFK, Georges Pompidou or Fidel Castro have become iconic examples of creating impact through powerful silence and its timing. Silence represents also the omission, censoring or supressing and concealing of certain information which in public speeches often relates to manipulations of collective memory. What is of interest for Kurant are also the problems of copyrights of recordings of public speech which belong to a public domaine and are considered the national heritage of a given country.

Therefore the sales of records with the recorded speeches has to be managed solely by the state and coanot be privatized by record companies. This has caused numerous lawsuits for copyrights. The copyrights

Agnieszka Kurant 88,2 Hrtz , 2012

Kurant’s piece is a realization of a phantom work that existed inside Boll’s short story. Kurant produced an entire record of silences which was broadcasted on Polish national radio station in prime time creating a program with no content, pure silence. This accumulation and the real broadcast is presented in the gallery in 2 ways: 1) by the magnetic tape recorder (image below) similar to the one used by Murke in Boll’s story, playing the accumulation and the phantom work which Murke created. 2) This broadcast is also echoed by the broadcast of the same accumulation of silences by the short circuit 1 watt broadcaster at the gallery and a single ordinary radio tuned to this newly created silence channel, an empty broadcast, an empty format. The radio standing somewhere in a casual way receives the silence broadcast channel and plays it as the unhearable soundtrack for the show.