Blockchain Papers

Margarete Jahrmann, Max Moswitzer

Der nachfolgende Artikel behandelt 1. die Re-Appropriation von Online Räumen SPACE/PLACE(historisch und philosophisch), 2. die psychophysische Kondition von Raumerleben und 3. neueerweiterte kulturelle RäumeRaum und Lokalität schaffen Realität. Den Stellenwert eines Ortes wird definiert durch Objekte,Avatare und Identitäten bzw. Entitäten. Unique Identifier - UIDs definieren eindeutig virtuelle Einheitenim online Metaverse1. Diese UIDs werden aber mit weniger Euphorie betrachtet als vergleichbareindeutige nicht austauschbare Objekt Identifikatoren, also Non-Fungible Tokens- NFTs2. Imkünstlerisch forschenden Spiel mit und in Metaversen werden Konditionen kapitalistisch geprägterWeltmodelle reflektiert, und in künstlerisch gestalteten Omniverse „Islands“ verhandelt. So entstehtvor allem eines: ein neues Raumverständnis im Verhältnis zu symbolischem Kapital.

Matt Cornish

It was early October in Berlin, cold and damp, but not uncomfortable, as I rode my bike from Kreuzberg into Mitte, across the Spree and under the S-Bahn to the Berliner Ensemble. Outside the Theater am Schiffbauerdam, I parked near the Brecht statue and walked over to wait in a long line. When it was my turn, I showed an usher my certificate of full vaccination, my picture identification, and my ticket; he gave me a paper armband, like what you would get to enter a club, and I walked through the BE’s big wooden doors. It was not my first time back in the theatre since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic; here and there I’d seen performances, mostly outside. But this was different. In a crowded auditorium watching Nico Holonics as Mackie Messer in Barrie Kosky’s show-biz spectacle Die Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera, 2021], I felt back. We were alive, together.For the academic year, I have been living again in Berlin, for the first time in seven years. It has been strange. The pandemic waxing and waning, the German parliamentary elections, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have interrupted everyday life such that it has scarcely had a chance to feel quotidian. While there were no full lockdowns in Berlin this fall and winter, the threat of one loomed for months, and one critic I know estimated cancellations of performances at around forty percent. There are productions I have tried to see three or even four times, with each performance cancelled due to illness in the ensemble.Sometimes a production is switched on short notice: scheduled to see Brecht’s Der Hofmeister [The Tutor, 2021] at the Deutsches Theater one night in January, I received an email that the DT would instead play Die Pest, an adaptation of Camus’s The Plague directed by András Dömötör as a one-man-show. It had premiered in November 2019 and was now performed in entirely different circumstances. I wasn’t pleased to live yet deeper in a pandemic for ninety minutes, but I went anyway, and I was glad to watch Božidar Kocevski’s patient and explosive performance as Dr. Rieux, tipping over chairs as the people of Oran died. But the specificity of these entirely different circumstances made Camus’s existential conflict less powerful. And I’m still waiting to see Der Hofmeister.Despite (and in large part because of) the cancellations, the delays, and the switches, the 2021–22 season was packed. Premieres that had been delayed by a year or more emerged like a swarm of cicadas beginning in June 2021, when lockdowns loosened and productions were able to be performed in the open air.The continuing survival and vibrancy of the German theatre is due to billions of euro in emergency funding for the performing arts during the pandemic, and also in large part due to the system’s ensembles: to the actors, technicians, and other artists who have long-term contracts and are paid regular salaries. The deep bench of the public theatres allows them to sometimes tag in actors instead of cancelling performances: when Jeremy Mockridge fell ill in April (the dramaturg told us he was scheduled for five performances that week), Kocevski stepped in on twenty-four hours’ notice to play Melvil in Anne Lenk’s production of Friedrich Schiller’s Maria Stuart at the Deutsches Theater (2020). If you ignored the sides he was holding, you could easily believe he’d been performing in the production for a year—all the more amazing because Judith Oswald’s set is made from eleven stacked boxes, separating the actors from each other and preventing Kocevski from interacting face-to-face with Franziska Machens’s Maria. This was an “IRL” Zoom, built for a premiere between lockdowns in October 2020, during the peak of social distancing.1The situation is imperfect of course. The words of 2021 were “Premierenstau,” a traffic jam in getting premieres onstage, and “Publikumsschwund,” disappearing audiences. Too often, productions opened and then quickly disappeared from the repertoire, making room for the premieres waiting behind them.2 Meanwhile, audience numbers are down, though the full percentage of the decrease cannot yet be tallied. Speaking anecdotally, when a production has gotten poor reviews, the empty seats in a house can be brutal—in the past, I think, audiences took more chances on marginal productions. Arguments can be made (and have been made) that really too much theatre premiered this year and audiences can’t keep up—or that the Covid regulations and cancellations have kept people away, or that people are still too afraid to gather, or that the theatre has become even more postdramatically self-obsessed, or that habits have changed and many people are happier at home with Netflix.3Such arguments do not apply to me. Riding across town for Die Pest, such a dreary evening, to see the wrong play, I thought to myself: how much happier I am going through all this to see a live performance than I would be on my couch watching something canned on a laptop. And even if overall audience numbers are down, I’m not alone. Despite ever changing regulations with ridiculous acronyms—3G, 2G, 2G+4—many performances I attended were sold out, and I felt palpable joy from the actors and audiences.Onstage, the pandemic was seldom directly addressed, but often there, haunting the place. For productions that rehearsed and premiered between lockdowns, like Maria Stuart, as well as Ibsen’s Gespenster (Ghosts), directed by Mateja Koležnik at the Berliner Ensemble (2020), you watch the actors keep separate. For Gespenster, Raimund Orfeo Voigt and Leonie Wolf designed sliding cubes, a fractured box set rearranged in a wing-and-shutter system: small dark rooms with aubergine velvet walls, electric torches shining flickering light on dark wood furniture. Ibsen’s characters spy around corners, listen to secret conversations, and, throughout, stay horribly alone as they confront a terrible fate. Conceived to keep actors safe, Gespenster and Maria Stuart were well chosen, raising the stakes of the plays, while also exceeding the times in which they originally premiered.In productions that premiered after vaccines were widely available in summer 2021, I watched actors wanting, and achieving, an intense intimacy. In Frank Castorf’s Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde [Fabian or Going to the Dogs, Berliner Ensemble 2021], adapted from Erich Kästner’s 1930s novel, Marc Hosemann and Wolfgang Michael eat and drink beer together—potato salad spraying from their mouths. I reacted viscerally, with disgust at the flying spit, leaning way back in my seat.Watching Florentina Holzinger’s A Divine Comedy at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (it premiered at the Ruhrtriennale festival in August 2021), I wondered how they ever managed to get the thing onstage during the pandemic: an ensemble of twenty-plus women, fully naked for two hours, performing all of the grotesque art actions of the twentieth century—painting with freshly drawn blood, masturbating, shitting. Not to mention riding dirt bikes, jumping hurdles, chopping wood, rolling down stairs, and playing cellos. It both reveled in checking off a list of gross stunts and superseded that list, becoming a third-generation feminist spectacular made by and about a self-sufficient community. No, there was no fear here.The most devastating response to Covid, though thematized only abstractly, and for me the brightest aesthetic moment of the year, was a new performance by Helgard Haug of Rimini Protokoll, All right. Good night. (Hebbel am Ufer, 2021), an excerpt of which is included in this issue of PAJ.5Five musicians sit onstage, lounging in beach chairs, reading in the sand, playing cards under an umbrella. They ignore their music stands and instruments, and all is silent but for the frothing of waves, projected against the back scrim and onto the beach. It’s a peaceful moment, but the text that scrolls across the scrim and proscenium, slowly, allowing time to read and think, tells a different story: of the sudden and mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 against the slow loss of a father to dementia. Directed and written by Haug and composed by Barbara Morgenstern, All right. Good night. (subtitled “a play about absence and loss”) investigates, through music, stillness, and text, disruptions in the order of things. The production meditates on catastrophes that are personal, the death of Haug’s father; large, the loss of 239 souls into the Indian Ocean; and world-historic, the absences that were the Covid-19 pandemic. How can something so big, just disappear?All right. Good night.—supposedly the banal last words of the pilot of Flight 370—is mostly a concert, haunting contemporary classical, performed with a clarinet, percussion, violin, saxophone, and double bass by the Zafraan Ensemble. Then again, it’s mostly a monologue, but with the monologist always absent. Or perhaps it is an opera without singing. Haug’s projected words, shifting back and forth between father and flight, lap against the scrim like waves, often gentle and melancholy, occasionally violent and angry. It is a series of tableaux vivants picturing death in eight parts, or “years,” plus a prologue and epilogue, over 150 minutes: an airport terminal, the beach, a concert stage. Holograph-like images of a larger absent band are projected on top of the onstage band. This was like no other production I’ve seen by Rimini Protokoll, known especially for bringing “experts of the everyday” onstage, non-performers who tell their own stories in productions such as Karl Marx: Capital, Volume 1 (2006). All right. Good night. is more playful, more theatrical, more grave, and less interested in facts.In the beginning, the musicians walk on stage and form a line: they carry luggage, scroll through their phones, and open a book, waiting to board their plane as announcements reverberate in the background. Slowly, they unpack instruments from their luggage and begin to play Morgenstern’s spare music. “In the spring of 2014,” Haug’s text opens, “The father gets on a plane. // A Boeing 777. / A big machine.” Soon, the plane will disappear. Slowly, the father will as well. We, in the audience, are back: we have returned. But we have returned with so much lost, and All right. Good night. understands and performs both. When I left the theatre, I nearly sobbed, my breath ragged and uneven.Elsewhere in Berlin, galleries and museums also reawakened after Covid with a backlog of pictures and objects to show off. Especially noted this year was the seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death, with exhibitions, and performances, arranged around the themes of plague, hell, purgatory, and paradise.The 2021–22 Transmediale art and digital culture festival, presented at the Akademie der Künste in January and February, was titled “abandon all hope ye who enter here,” with projects by nine artists and groups from around the world exploring “the various circles of hell that exist in our digital modernity.”6 With non-fungible tokens, images generated by artificial intelligence, and a “methodology” (Queering Damage by the collective Underground Division), this was art as knowledge production, or knowledge production as art. The texts that accompanied the exhibits referenced Karen Barad, Lauren Berlant, and Judith Butler, among others, and read, to me, like a mélange of academic theory-speak: lots of zombie nouns adding up to few ideas. Still, some of the exhibits themselves that went especially The three large of and on a interrupted or by as well as by to the sides of the the and the of watching them to on death, and and exhibits art from the by the and the of the Erich the Akademie der beginning in are and and and the showed images from some of the most productions and of time especially from the In of Die [The by directed by in at the on a in into For of for and the of and from on three Der [The Deutsches Theater Berlin, and Theater Berlin, the and images and such as a and the set for the first of that most (and of the year was the a of the Berlin on the of much the of the the of the German as a objects during the German in the Berliner is both what most and the the has a the of the and it but too and too the Spree the is With four of large by long and and and the here could be the of an just about in the The two at the of the without at a by a and not to be could of this a you feel like you are in a or an airport lots of long one set of there is a titled with to exhibits and the set of on the you will the of the and the of with has both to objects and to the of the of own in Berlin, and The Berlin have been a of for or a of of the Berlin through all of stories of and and and artists and and and and the Berlin the Berlin the of the All into a walk by with lots of to watch and with and a few objects in Meanwhile, many of the scheduled this year have been to on in a on in a by and exhibits at the as in the part of a and in museums as part of an past, confront and They are an to have and keep it though most of the be returned to many other objects are that felt in an academic stories to and open to in this of a large like to of and while and I do some of the at the is and some and artists have been (and to to the There is a regular time for with picture theatre, and music for all in one of the and, more of the exhibits in by I’ve the felt at the down of the of the in and with this new will not because that is artists and to do with the place. But the in the Berliner will be into the will get and and less and a will up with of reading and watching It will always be an but so is Covid this year, the through which we watched our our also for of us who The German parliamentary in both the and of as who had for and also for at large since stepped down from the could not a without under who had on managed to a of the the like and own we have the of the among The of that sudden seldom has to be to the from to has felt like a in not a in or The as has had to be on the pandemic; their in October and November on while the and social than Covid the first to life in has been the a during the summer for and public that only nine Berlin alone such a It’s a an S-Bahn that is to more no one is about public or long-term that would Berlin, the of the was a an on a in this the from large under the (the is artists were and the were and to and to over the that have long a in Mitte, was in October to way for new the Berliner a to but their too and too and the of their them to in The by a large This to and in the is more an of than an it now be and not the Berlin on the has tried to and as it the invasion by of has made a from the gave way on the a in German much more for the while for the first time living up to And he to to the that will be to Russian have only after and and have has not to the of and have been they into while many of the German have yet to be with be the and in after and disgust Ukraine can feel a world from all of in But the is less than from Berlin, about the between and A with and and in the in which had been a with as the and a of there were in Berlin, and the and and the public and and again The just a few from the Deutsches by it on way to and from the theatre, now of and and and a Russian were and after music and in after art and performance took on new beginning in For their Theater der an of the theatre on the Russian for in still in of the on an on and an on the theatre do Theater der all of gave has been known for of for two texts to their For the Berliner Ensemble this in he directed Wolfgang vor der [The The play in the to of an after in a with set mostly ignored the it in a of the night a to a is always onstage, both and by to the are not but they are less for that of a who has and and been by to or be own over to a in of for the wanting, both of and of only a that of a German without and But silent and open in and the for me, and at In and alone. the the we who sit in our from the like the who from which now and we who sit in our and about we are to which opened in the time to to the us in and who was in and and up in the during the of adaptation of and Not only the four in on and in the while interrupted music. A The and and as we in the audience, left to is a to the theatre here that it can to these many some of like I even been able to without by of the all around but the can both a and an performance about is also about the the of the The Berliner Ensemble can for a to people living on the in and a with while an vor der Die and I last a from Berlin for in I by on the in at the The Berliner Ensemble is under now since like with many like the and the not much to about the still by not much to that you have about the back in or even it a aesthetic making art for and about audiences in Berlin, and to which their productions often originally a critic and to the Deutsches Theater with an on and the ensemble there is the in Berlin, and the production the most The is under of of in spring 2021, an this fall in this the productions about who to as directed by and a adaptation that both the and directed by the Volksbühne of under the under is a theatre against much to In the opera and theatre Barrie is down as of the after during which he the as an in with productions such as a to the made Barrie Kosky’s All All three of and Kosky’s It was all a much many so many in so many but even just to watch Barbara about making and about catastrophes at the Volksbühne since have been as the through This season was the first with as a there, he had been Castorf’s was to the It has to it a slow for who to be a with a of and of with a new repertoire, the season has been built slowly, with a on own productions. The slow is perhaps but the they have has been new production at the Volksbühne has felt even without and without ideas. Divine which I about was an it was not an While the making theatre like Fabian that you no you their for a and that are no Meanwhile, the has been slow to a with the around slow to a and and on many this fall and winter, their I will be the time to to the are you which opened this spring Fabian light to the Volksbühne the a and of and two as well as by the and made me at my Covid do you keep a so it’s five and so much from these two years. A large, by slowly, the Berlin is ever more in both and can see productions in even if sometimes you can’t be in The still has for all many of which are in anyway, and the other theatres now often, at a of times a some of the such as and you at as often, if not more often, than you I at times this the theatre, of But that which I too am a is often and as for by and in which in objects around a small from one to the for a nearly ninety in There is so much art in Berlin, in so many different and Despite Covid, and of in it always be for this was with the of a to for me at the during and to for on theatre the All are by the

Christina Schweiger

Der digitale Wandel hat auch auf die Schule große Auswirkungen. Im Beitrag wird das anhand des Kunstunterrichts gezeigt. Für die rezeptive Praxis bedeutet das neben dem Einsatz digitaler Lehrmaterialien wie Digitalisate von Kunstwerken auch Bezugnahmen auf aktuelle Entwicklungen in der Kunstwelt wie beispielsweise den Hype um NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens, nicht austauschbare digitale Dateneinheiten). Auf beides wird eingegangen und ausgeführt, dass Digitalität und Virtualität den Abgleich mit der physischen Realität verlangen. Deshalb ist es wichtig, im Kunstunterricht nicht nur die Betrachtung von digitalen Reproduktionen, sondern auch die direkte Begegnung mit Originalen zu ermöglichen.