Computers have rendered hard thinking and orientating, in street trafic navigational help gives the direction. The voice from the P.A. does come from heaven here but it does not belong to Jean Paul's angels  but is transferred by satellites, which take care of permanent guidance and steering without thinking for the human beings besides the perfect supervision of them.  Aristoteles automatois direct the businesses and homo sapiens could make himself  comfortable.

But quiet as that it is not. Daily life unfortunatly is far from being perfect or even heavenly and that not least because of the technic. The magazine GEO featured the title
"Mensch gegen Technik" (human against technic) for its May 2005 edition, which was dedicated to human beings' increasing fright of machines. The discomfort is fed on one hand by the worry to become useless - whilst robots work in workshops the number of Hartz-IV -receivers increases (a term in Germany for welfare receivers, named after the leader of the 2002 commission upon who's report the new welfare rules were finally established). On the other hand fright of loss of control is growing - like in the movie "Matrix" where machines built by humans develop their own way of life and turn against the humans:they exploit and kill them. In the face of such worries the company HONDA reduces its humanoide jack-of-all-trades ASIMO already agian to a reasonable size of 1.20 meters and garanties forseeable movement control. - In short: something seems to have gone wrong, the direction having gone out of controll here and there a little.

The EINSTELLUNGSRAUM e.V. wants to explore this year the consequences that come along by steering and controlling this rudder these days, new ways of dealing and their consequences for the way humans see themselves. Departing from the car in several exhibitions the steering and controlling in relation to personal and objective ressources in a morphological field is supposed to be explored artistically.
The prelude is made by Joern Zehe.
Not the automobile but an heir of the automations, a robot, is in the centre of his exhibition. Sluggish and ponderous he shuffles through the room and presents shapes in blue, red and green.

With his projectors that remind of eyes he puts screens over his spectators, which become recognizable on the walls as dancing pictures. - Judged only visually the robot is more ungainly; Baron von Kempelen would likely have punished him with contempt. And also his inner values are - excuse me - not very spectaluar. Compared to the complex steering systems of intelligent automatons Zehes object appears like a dinosaur of the technic.
It is composed of a dated
Hitachi beamer and an already somewhat fiddely cube that steers in autopilot and was developed some years back within a research project by students of the HfbK (abbreviation for Hochschule fŸr bildende KŸnste, academy for fine arts in Hamburg). In there is a computer chip, some screws and wires, 5 infrared sonsors which prope the floor and finds free spots where the box can move on - and on top of that the huge tube beamer, which simply has the lights on and projects onto the wall what normally is not shown: the grid, composed of the spektral colors, which were a given by the producer and which is seen when actually nothing can be seen yet.
The behaviour of this technical dinosaur is aldo forseeable. Its equipment and programming are a given and its reactions mere results of the work of one beamer and sensory signals, which orientate in the room and are depending on the outside world harmonizing with their system. For this harmony we have done everything: switched the light off, cleared walls and floor, and of course I wanted to stand up here not to be in the way of the robot. In short, so that the system of the machine fits in with ours we adjusted the room to their desires and  the environment to their abilities  and we ourselves stick to firm rules that garantee the machine definitly enjoys itself.


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