EINSTELLUNGSRAUM e. V. Konzept 2011

EINSTELLUNGSRAUM e.V. is an initiative by artists interested in the aim to research contemporary art and culture and to impart it to an interested public. In partikular the society is concerned about automobility and tries to analyse its phenomenons.
In 2004 the FOUR-STROKE ENGINE in the version of its inventor, Nikolaus August Otto, was the year long topic. The year long project in 2005 brought up the term of PARADISE in relation to the automobil, in 2006 DRIVING and STEERING in relation to personal and material resources in the morphogenetical field. In 2007 the point was the SHINE, in 2008 BRAKING, in 2009 SHARED SPACE, 2010 HYBRID.

The Einstellungsraum e.v. would like to continue this work also in 2011 by dealing with the topic Cars do not take stairs through-out all exhibitions and actions.

Cars do not take stairs

Cars haven't been invented to overcome stairs. Rather the ascending slope - respectively the descending slope - of the to passing field was a highly problematic exceptional circumstance for the first motorist driver. The horizontal was to be preferred to the angled plain if it was only for the possibility to experience flushes of speed. In some places height differences were and still are coped with by long-range and in-so-far detoured road loops

Why and what for stairs at all?
To ascend step by step be it on narrow winding stairs to a look-out platform or in small steps across a red carpet on wide free steps - it is an act of human bodies that creates the experience of surpassed gravity. This is left with the motorist when with the help of his machine in higher altitude gains the overview of his present situation.

We humans have always declared the 'Up' as the aim. The poet Vergil gave the motive for it. The light of an enlightening world of thinking (I.Kant) illuminates tightrope walks in different hights. Question is how can gain in our own general view be achieved. Are steps as potentiating effect of a small point of view - a previous position so to speak - truly conditio sine qua non (the absolute condition), or is it about the clarity behind our shadow? Do we need self experience via steps for this?

"Jabob's Ladder" by which the angels came ascending to Jacob and descended again has many steps (Book of Genesis 28:11-19). Jacob, Isaac's son, did not climb up this ladder/flight of stairs himself. The stairs quasi came to him. It quasi appeared to him during a life crisis in a dream - thus when he was in a resting state.

With the advent of the industrialization 'Higher and Further' has been linked to the output of the combustion engine in the three-dimensional materiality only.
In Nicolaus August Otto's so-called Internal Combustion Engine Without Compression, the preform of the modern Otto-engine, after each explosion of the gas mixture the piston falls down again in the cylinder where it is right away hurled up again by the coaction of vacuum and renewed explosion rattling along a gear rack. The age-old 'to die and become' in the human developmental process is mechanized insofar (also in the modern engines). The piston is not conscious of this process. As long as the soulless machine is not worn out it produces the illusion of an inexhaustible energy potential.
Interestingly there is an old alchemistic drawing by Thomas Norton which in its structure is very much alike the first Internal Combustion Engine without Compression Stroke. The comparison of the structure of the first motor and this drawing lead to the founding of the EINSTELLUNGSRAUM.
In 2011 the EINSTELLUNGSRAUM has been in existence for 10 years. We would like to return to this approach for the anniversary because we think there are still notes to be made about the identified divergency.
In 2004 we concentrated the interest on the '4-stroke-engine'.
Now we'd like to have signals for an - again and again newly to be debated about - balance between vertical development (practice, asceticism) and forward pestering mobility at the interface where horizontal and vertical direction is decided. What has to accrue here so that not one direction dominates?
We invite artists who would like to grapple with this antagonism of machine and 'inner path' to send us an abstract for a concept with vita and 2-3 examples of their work.