The Giant Wrinting-Machine / The Vitruvian Machine

 

Description

The Giant Writing-Machine / Vitruvian Machine is an art project by the authors and painters Lisa Kränzler und Tomaso Carnetto.

The project aims to realize the machines, to offer two different ways to express yourself directly with the movements of the whole body and fix the expression right away on paper or canvas.

The Giant Writing-Machine is exactly what the words say; a huge mechanical writing machine which you need your whole body, your hands, arms and legs to write with. Writing in this way will be much slower, that means to extend the time between touching the keys and the printing of the respective type-letter on the paper. The extension of the time between the touching and printing will have an importand impact on what you are writing because the time of thinking about is enormously stretched.
With having too much time to decide it will be very hard to make a decision about what you have to say.

In contrast to the Giant Writing-Machine the Vitruvian Machine will eliminate all the time between the movement of the body, the touching of the buttons and the fixing of the signs.
The Giant Writing-Machine works with regular type-letters whereas the Vitruvian Machine will use the basic shapes, just points and lines which yield the connection from point to point.

In its concrete form the Vitruvian Machine is a plate of two meters by two meters.
On this plate are sensors which receive the impulse caused by the movement of the body and pass it directly to the transformation into signs.
The signs are just visible as points and lines but having their fixed coordinates within a matrix, every sign is transformable into a letter, a sound or a spoken vowel or consonant.

Both machines will lead in their own way to the momentum of immediacy. The first one by stretching the time too much to think about what you will say until you lose the intended sense. The second one by eliminating all the time you need to say something which was intellectually intended.
In both cases, the sensitivity of the immediate touch will be the result - to touch the world immediately and to be touched by the world in the same way.

For the artists Kränzler and Carnetto the momentum of immediacy is the groundwork for all their future elaborations, their drawings and paintings as well as musical or vocal compositions (which will be done in collaboration with musicians and composers).

The project refers in important parts to Jewish mysticism: Every human being is a universe in itself, while the body has a universal significance; God himself is thought of as anthropomorphic in Jewish mysticism.

The machine’s aim is to lose all that prevents us from being a universe of our own.

God needs Man to become effective through him (Sephiroth פִירוֹת).

For this, Man must free himself from all that separates him from immediacy. Only in direct being can God be grabbed vividly.

From a philosophical viewpoint, both machines refer to the immediacy of the word in its grammatical dimension. Grammatical dimension is understood as the Logos of prophecy; what has to be said can only be said by saying it without thinking about it. In other words: Jewish prophecy in its purest form. What has to be said can only be said by us but the words are the words given by YHWH, they are identical with YHWH himself.

In this sense, you have to lose all meaning which you intend (as well as having to lose everything else, like Job lost everything he once owned) to remain under the immediate will of GOD.

The machines led us to the loss of all certain meaning. The result is that we do not have anymore to grab with violence the things which we think we see as essential for our existence.
In this sense, the Giant Writing-Machine as well as the Vitruvian Machine are loss-machines: Now our hands are free as we are with our body and in our mind to grab for the immediacy of our being and be grabbed by it.

Without any doubt, this freedom is the precondition not only for all art but for every vivid living together.

 

Context with Jewish Prophecy and Mysticism

Jewish prophecy in its main parts is not a prediction of what will happen in the future but a critical observation about what happens in the present and what has happened in the past.

Critical observation points to what is not, but has to become reality: that the men, the people, the subject believes in God and trusts His Will: to stay in His ethics commandments and therewith to touch and be touched by the vivid Being.

This is what the Lord says:
“For three sins of Edom,
    even for four, I will not relent.
Because he pursued his brother with a sword
    and slaughtered the women of the land,
because his anger raged continually
    and his fury flamed unchecked,
I will send fire on Teman
    that will consume the fortresses of Bozrah.”
(The book of Amos)

„In my reflections on the insolvability of the problem of God, I had not foreseen this possibility: that of a real touch from person to person on Earth, also means a real touch between the human being and God. Doubtless I had heard talk about this but I had not believed it.“ (Simone Weil)

The goal of prophecy is to redefine the present and past in the Word in a text that is not only written and read, but is living: „To imagine a true text that I do not read, which I have never read, means to think of a reader of this true text, that is YHWH.“ (Simone Weil)

This results in a concept of the present and the beyond which is fundamentally different from Christian or Muslim ideas; Paradise or Hell – depending on what we have done during our lifetime on Earth – are not something beyond. For the Jewish belief, such a life after death does not exist.

The Christian and Muslim belief contains Pagan references. The idea of a Heaven above is related to the belief in personalized cosmic energies, concentrated in one almighty God, enthroned in a Paradise created by himself.

Life and death are within this concept different states of the cosmic energies. One state is blessed with the flowing force, coming from God, and by his will, he can restore the energetic flow as an eternal light; the other state, which resist the flow from above, is identified with death and eternal darkness.
The one who stays within the cosmic energies will not only be rewarded with eternal life in the Paradise above, he will also be blessed down here on Earth.
Endurance, courage, force, strength, iron will, cultural superiority, intelligence, success, beauty and health are the proofs that one has remained under the forces of the divine cosmic energy.

Today God is obsolete, what's left is the belief in the cosmic energy and if this does not work, they restore God as pagan almightiness.

In Jewish prophecy, philosophy and mysticism, life is continually present in the Word; must be united word for word into a text in which the reality is re-read over and over again.
So any form of speech is prophecy, as long as it succeeds in accomplishing the turning to God, that is to fulfill God's reality in a real touch from person to person.
All individual and collective aims, which oppose the literal execution of the touch, lead into the diaspora. Our reality is the Being in the diaspora.

With reference to Heidegger and his contemporary apologists: Heidegger tried to clean the pagan cosmos from the belief in a monotheistic God and identified the cosmic energy with the Being (Sein) itself. In his philosophy every single being (Da-Sein) is committed to be part of the energetic force which is materialized in the German blood and ground. The primary condition to fulfill this commitment is to be Aryan. An Aryan is a self-evident part of the cosmic energy, simply given by his nature.

Therefore the German has the historic task to free the relation between the people and the cosmic force. One can feel the cosmic force if the energy flows unimpeded through the body. The result is an ecstasy with which the body is united with the cosmos. The aim is the ecstasy of combat as well as the ecstasy of orgasm ( more or less the male orgasm...). Both are signs that blood and ground are now united.

In contrast to the Aryan, the Jews rebel against the cosmic forces. The rebellion consists of the conviction that there is a God who keeps personal relation to the individual, a relation from human being to human being and with it a relation from YHWH to his people, in the end to all people. People not in the sense of blood and ground but in the sense of those who have gathered at His table.

Who rebels against the cosmic law will judge himself. In Heidegger's understanding, the Holocaust is the fulfillment of the self-caused judgement.
Seen from the viewpoint of jewish-philosophical mysticism, the Being (Sein) is the diaspora itself. It is not the Being in the World (Da-Sein) that is to be overcome, but rather the Being (Sein) which has to be fulfilled in the Being in the World (Da-Sein).

 

Our Position

The religious thing is quite easy if you look at it from the position of concordance: if you go through the holy book of the Muslims you will find the Christian origin as well as the Jewish and if you go through the holy book of the Christians you will find the Jewish origin.

From this point of view, the monotheist God is a God with no name and at the same time he has thousands of names and there are three holy books in which we find the shadow of YHWH's unspoken words, written down in black on white. By reading and singing what is written, the shadow will return, that means, the truth is returning.

The one who tries to deny this simple truth is a fearful idiot and because of his inability to admit his fear, to lose the security of a stupid one-dimensional belief, he is also an angry idiot sometimes with ambitions to suicide-bombing.

For us, it is extremely important that all the very old synagogues in the Arabic countries are restored because these holy buildings are similar to our machine.

The aim is identical: to totally yield to the Word of God means to give up the will, to speak by yourself. For this you have to let go of everything you believe that it is indispensable for your life. Each has to stand naked and with empty hands in front of the other and the words of God will expand between you.

The old synagogues in the Arabic countries (partly from antiquity like the synagogue in Aleppo) are so valuable because there are no others which stand as close to the origin of the celebration of God's Word as those spaces.

It is not difficult to understand that all names by which we are called and all narrations we have to tell through the millennia are names and narrations about the relation between Man and the Nothing.
If you try to understand how God can be named, then you will find his name is given by what we are: beings in between the Nothing and the Everything.

This is exactly what all kinds of art are working towards: to name and to tell about what we are between the Nothing and the world which surrounds us. For us the world is the Everything. The world is the space in between, which is what we show and tell about by making art.

In this sense, writing, drawing, painting or any other art is not a violation of the first and second commandment of God but its strict observance.

This is the reason why we are forced to build our machines (the Giant Writing-Machine and the Vitruvian Machine); to get into the In-between as deeply as possible, where we are able (if we will activate all our forces and all our concentration) to capture the whisper of God's words in the fleeting being of our movements and breathing.

The machine is our reformation.