In Berlin, the S41 and S42 routes of the S-Bahn train are known as the Ringbahn, as they encircle the central city. If you look at the Ringbahn on a map, it has the shape of a dog's head, and so it is known colloquially as "Hundekopf", German for "dog's head". It is an integral component of the city's transportation network and of symbolic significance for its restoration into a complete circle after the fall of the Berlin Wall. From its windows an incomplete perspective of the city as a whole can be gained, with the TV tower (Berlin's most iconic landmark) always in sight as a central hub. Knifeandfork uses the Ringbahn as a literal vehicle to move through a text-message based narrative. Investigating the public versus private experience of space, the piece begins with fliers distributed throughout Berlin with the emblem of a resistance organization and instructions on how to join it. Text-messaging the name of a Ringbahn station to the phone number printed on the flier, the participant receives a message instructing her to board a train which will be arriving within the next few minutes. Hundekopf has a unique approach to location awareness. Thanks to the BVG (Berlin's transit authority) website, individual trains can be automatically tracked as they move throughout the city. Once what train the participant is on is known, the location of participant is known, without the use of any kind of advanced locative technology. The Hundekopf system, which uses a GSM modem, delivers a message to participants after each station they pass on their way around the Ringbahn. This message is specific to place, and there is a certain cinematic quality to the piece as the ordinarily passive features of the landscape are put into a new context. One of the primary concerns was to build a narrative structure derived from the specific physical structure of the environment. What emerged was dubbed a 'hub narrative', as it was not tied together by a series of events, one to the next to the next, but was anchored by the central axis of the TV tower. With no beginning and no end, a participant enters the narrative at any point, and the meaning remains coherent. Knifeandfork was interested in the potential for a narrative to be taken out of its traditional contexts of literature, film, or theater, and into an arena in which normal rules could be bent and expectations overturned. As such it follows in the footsteps of many other figures that have been interested in experimenting with traditional structures and formats of narrative.
The theme of resistance was central to the piece, a resistance against de facto modes of inhabiting public space. The messages sent to the participant outlined a Situationist-inspired manifesto, tactics for experiencing the environment within and without of the train in a novel and provocative light. Additionally, in the context of creating the piece, publicly available resources were used, not only the transit system itself and the BVG website, but the public Wi-FI, as all the programming and conceptualization of the piece took place in the cafes of Berlin. It was required to take the timetables of the BVG website, which were created for one purpose, and hack them to use for another purpose, which was cast not only as a performative act, but a subversive one as well. The Hundekopf project deals with questions of narrative and architecture, and explores the potentials of using or exploiting common technologies for uses other than the intended. It is primarily concerned with an exploration of a possibility for interjecting an element of the poetic into the everyday with the idea that creative experience should not be isolated from the common life, but integrated. |
|||
