But you go one step further: the floor itself is the sculpture and ideally it’s oscillating. Once again, normally people assume the floor beneath their feet to be solid. It’s concreted into the floor, so to speak, making the floor solid. And here we see that you as a sculptor think exactly the opposite. How can I make the floor oscillate? How can change a material from hard to soft by investigating its properties – and how can one change space as a sculptor? It would of course be ideal to create an object with both material states – one which starts hard and finishes soft. This is a plastic ideal which can’t be achieved. But it would be very nice to hold something which is hard at the beginning and gaseous at the end. It would be possible by thinking beyond temporal phases. Imagine water on your hand in one room. If you take this water and enter another, colder room and wait for a while, it will turn into ice. However, the two stares aren’t possible simultaneously.
MW:In 2000 I hired a garage and started an
interactive project. At the end of this project
was the idea that car tyres could be tied
together and placed in the sea as a rollingworm which simply went into the sea and looked like a station here (Rolling Worm). I’ve been asked to connect ten towns and cities in the Netherlands together with a flowing, floating object. It’s supposed to last ten days. I was asked if I could build something like that because there is an incredibly large number of obstacles in the water. I began experimenting on a small model to see how it could be made to turn corners. I’m a useless technician: sometimes my ideas aren’t bad, but the technical aspects are handled for
me by other people. The model shows how it works. Elastic elements are fitted so that the
earthworm bends immediately whenever the current changes direction. It’ll be a 20-metre-long worm in a river with a length of 120 kilometres.
PW:Let’s move on to another section: these
basketballs. (compare with Ball-Turn-Bag; note) Here in Graz, a studio was set up
where production, an action, actually took
place during the exhibition.
Here we are in the midst of the action. We can
see that the action is producing a form. We can
also see here in formal terms that an industrial
form – the ideal three-dimensional form of a
sphere – is being made in a production process
designed such that the artistic nature is intensified
on the one hand, but that it also looks
as though it’s a natural product. Perhaps you
could explain how you arrived at this form? MW:This also goes back to the Hallucigenia Products. I partly refer to them as such because
I also made the first form out of silicone in
1992 in the initial years of Hallucigenia Products. (Reservoir, 1992) At that time, however, it
was an object for the bathroom.
