THREE’S A CROWD – VISITING BERLIN & friends gallery / Kunstraum SIAM Wilsnacker Str. 2, 10559 Berlin Moabit (off Mitte) Oct. 15 – Nov. 28, 2020 CORINNE GLAZIOU, Toulous/F BLACK NAPKIN, Caserta/I BLANCA.art, Berlin/D EVERYTHING WILL BE BETTER NEXT TIME - MARX ENGELS AND ME © BLACK NAPKIN international project
Anything Anytime Anywhere for No Reason at All
The Marx-Engels-Forum “The Marx-Engels-Forum lies on the eastern bank of the Spree river. It is bounded to the south-west by the river, to the north-west by Karl-Liebknecht-Straße, to the north-east by Spandauer Straße and to the south-east by Rathausstraße obliquely opposite of the Rotes Rathaus. Across the river it faces the site formerly occupied by the Palast der Republik (now demolished) and the Berliner Stadtschloss. Before World War II the area now occupied by Marx-Engels-Forum was a densely populated Old Town quarter between the river and Alexanderplatz, named after a street called Heiligegeiststraße (Holy Ghost Street) which ran across it between Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße (now Karl-Liebknecht-Straße) and Rathausstraße. The area including the main post office was heavily bombed during Allied air attacks in 1944/45 and most of its buildings reduced to ruins. After the war the ruins were cleared but nothing replaced them. While the adjacent Nikolaiviertel was to be rebuilt, the GDR authorities in 1977 set up plans for a green space between the Palast der Republik and the Fernsehturm. The sculptor Ludwig Engelhardt was appointed as director of the project to redevelop the site as a tribute to Marx and Engels, the founders of the communist movement to whose ideology the GDR was dedicated. It consists of a rectangular wooded park with a large, circular paved area in the centre with a sculpture by Engelhardt, consisting of larger-than-life bronze figures of Marx (sitting) and Engels (standing). Behind the statues is a relief wall showing scenes from the history of the German socialist movement. The inauguration took place in 1986. After German reunification in 1990, the future of the Marx-Engels Forum became the subject of public controversy. Some Berliners saw the Forum as an unwanted relic of an evil regime which they opposed, and argued for the removal of the statues and renaming of the park. Others argued that the site had both artistic and historical significance, and should be preserved. The latter view eventually prevailed. The statues are now a tourist attraction, and a steady stream of people sit on Marx's knee to have their photos taken. With regard to the planned extension of the U5 line of the Berlin U-Bahn turning the park into a construction site for several years, the Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit has recently[when?] launched a discussion whether to rebuild the medieval quarter afterwards.”
Fuzzy-trace theory “FTT was initially proposed in the 1990s as an attempt to unify findings from the memory and reasoning domains that could not be predicted or explained by earlier approaches to cognition and its development (e.g., constructivism[8][9] and information processing). One of such challenges was the statistical independence between memory and reasoning, that is, memory for background facts of problem situations is often unrelated to accuracy in reasoning tasks. Such findings called for a rethinking of the memory-reasoning relation, which in FTT took the form of a dualprocess theory linking basic concepts from psycholinguistic and Gestalt theory to memory and reasoning. More specifically, FTT posits that people form two types of mental representations about a past event, called verbatim and gist traces. Gist traces are fuzzy representations of a past event (e.g., its bottom-line meaning), hence the name fuzzy-trace theory, whereas verbatim traces are detailed representations of a past event. Although people are capable of processing both verbatim and gist information, they prefer to reason with gist traces rather than verbatim. This implies, for example, that even if people are capable of understanding ratio concepts like probabilities and prevalence rates, which are the standard for the presentation of health- and risk-related data, their choice in decision situations will usually be governed by the bottom-line meaning of it (e.g., "the risk is high" or "the risk is low"; "the outcome is bad" or "the outcome is good") rather than the actual numbers.[5] More importantly, in FTT, memory-reasoning independence can be explained in terms of preferred modes of processing when one performs a memory task (e.g., retrieval of verbatim traces) relative to when one performs a reasoning task (e.g., preference for reasoning with gist traces). In 1999, a similar approach was applied to human vision. It suggested that human vision has two types of processing: one that aggregates local spatial receptive fields, and one that parses the local receptive field. People used prior experience, gists, to decide which process dominates a perceptual decision. The work attempted to link Gestalt theory and psychophysics (i.e., independent linear filters). This theory was further developed into fuzzy image processing and used in information processing technology and edge detection.�
Special thanks to Lucia Cianciulli, Roberto Delfino, Domenico Esposito, Corinne Glaziou, Blanca SambakĂŠ-Dahms, Mirco Tea, Thierry 85/08 and Cinzia Toscano