PETER WEIBEL:Martin, what I find so interesting
about your work is the development of
a concept of sculpture which is very sophisticated,
chiefly in terms of the materials
used and the idea of what nature, sculpture,
space and objects actually are. For decades,
a trans-formation process has been underway
here which has developed the concept of
sculpture in Austria more than anywhere else
towards new materials, processes and also
somewhat towards certain forms of action of
structural practice. At the same time, you have
also devel-oped the content of the concept of
sculpture. Therefore, my first question is when
did you start working on Hallucigenia?
I first came across Hallucigenia back in 1987 in a book; it’s a pheno-menon
of faith and science in the broadest sense.
Hallucigenia was part of a palaeonto-logical
discovery made by Charles Wolcott in Canada
in the early twentieth century. In 1989, Hallucigenia was first introduced to a broader
audience by Stephen J. Gould and examined by
Simon Conway Morris. Hallucigenia comprised
impressions of soft body animals. This was the
first discovery of an animal with soft parts,
which was 570 million years old, and in which
the structure of the soft parts could be seen.
This totally changed our ideas of what these
organisms could have looked like millions of
years ago. Gould used this discovery to call into question all theories, including the theory
of evolution. He turned the evolutionary tree
upside down, adopting Hallucigenia as one
of his heraldic animals. Immediately afterreading the book I may even have been the first person to reconstruct Hallucigenia, and I
was right in regarding it as a modern unicorn of science or our age. In the end, in 1992 the
Hallucigenia were quite simply turned on their head – something which Gould described as
the ‘Reversal of Hallucigenia’. At this time, his theory was attacked and also turned on its
head. Since this reversal in 1992, I have made a new Hallucigenia model almost every year in which something changed each time: sometimes it walked forwards, sometimes back-wards, and sometimes it was reminiscent of an ant eater. And I always tried to apply models of existing organisms to Hallucigenia. At that time, the internet wasn’t yet wide-spread. But when I first began searching for Hallucigenia on the internet in 1997 or 1998, I couldn’t believe how many examples I found there. It turned out that it wasn’t just me but also many other people who were fascinated by the name and the creature.
Hallucigenia Products developed directly
out of this Hallucigenia fiction. The first Hallucigenia product had a silicone form, a very
organic form, which I modelled on nature. In
order to build it, I had to extremely dysfunctionalise
the material. (continued >>>)
