Spacebeings

Space_Being 4-handed, 2017. Photo from: INTRA, INTRA, Jauernik/Tschapeller

14.00–18.00

Wolfgang Tschapeller Damjan Minovski

ADP

ANALOGUE DIGITAL PRODUCTION

These thoughts are about Space-Beings1, about beings neither anchored in Vitruvian confinements, nor in symmetries, nor in anthropomorphic proportions. They are shape-shifters. Their limbs do not fit into cubes measuring 220 cm, and their feelings – if any – are not at a height of 250 cm. Instead, their limbs are endless. Arms like those of Marvel’s Super Avenger successor, young Kamala Khan, equipped with shape-shifting abilities, stretching out 35,786 km to the Clarke Belt, an area where the atmosphere has thinned out completely and merges with interplanetary space. Here, the Space-Being’s ears and eyes rotate in geostationary orbits, in perfect harmony, synchronized precisely with the spin of the Earth. This is the size of the house, and the size of the Space-Being today and in the future. 37,386 km plus 12,724 km plus 37,386 km, thus 87,496 km in total is the height of the figure’s whole body. Once crouched between the “Introduction” and the “Classification of Temples” in Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture, the figure has expanded enormously. So much that the proportion of the face – once “from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lowest roots of the hair, a tenth part of the whole body height”2 – is now a 397,709,090th part of the total body height. Such is the size of the Space-Beings. And such is the size of architecture: 87,496 km on average.

Imagine a drawing of the Modulor showing the well-known contours of an upright male body with a somewhat clumsy and disproportionate arm reaching up not 220 cm but 37,386 km, right into the Clarke Belt. And imagine what that means for Spaceship Earth3, imagine what it means for “macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive”4 .

Then there is virtual space and physical space. Space-Beings are both Space and Being, and they are both virtual and physical, as if it were a metaphysical condition. In the late 1970s in Vienna, Arnold Keyserling , himself a metaphysician, practiced a method of analysis called “Rückführung”, which is remotely comparable to psychoanalysis6. Typically, the analysand has to imagine certain situations, such as standing before their own front door and looking through their own eyes as if looking through a camera, to map this very familiar surface in detail. And yes, everyone is able to map certain portions of their front door. Certain portions, yes, sometimes more and sometimes less, but never all, and doubt arises … and exactly here, at these points of doubt, invention – that is, design – takes over. After one such session, Keyserling himself spoke of “incredibly beautiful beings who produced by every movement of their hands a geometrical piece of art.”7

1 Space-Being is a term introduced by Vera Bühlmann on the back cover of INTRA! INTRA!: Towards an INTRA SPACE, Christina Jauernik, Wolfgang Tschapeller, Sternberg Press, Berlin 2021. Much of this article is written in reaction to Vera Bühlmann’s Space-Beings. 2 Frank Granger (ed.): Vitruvius on Architecture, 2 volumes, edited from the Harleian Manuscript 2676, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1931, pp. 158-161 3 Richard Buckminster Fuller: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Southern Illinois University Press, Chicago 1969 4 Ibid. 5 Arnold Keyserling (1922-2005) was a religion scholar and metaphysician. He was a student of Georges I. Gurdjieff, Josef Matthias Hauer and Yogi Maharishi, and taught at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. 6 More precisely, “Rückführung” is a method relating to the practices of Stanislav Grof and the rituals of American Indigenous tribes performed in order to communicate with their existences before birth. Arnold Keyserling: Der Traum vom Paradies, IV. Inkarnationserinnerungen, Der Weg der Rückführung, source: https://schuledesrades.org/ (17/01/2021) 7 Ibid.