Ring – Versatz

The landscape of this work is built from one figure: closed courtyards – a wall, deep inside, an alley outside. It repeats all the way round, without a seam.

Ring: 360 rods all round. Objects: small cubes on offset lanes. Gestures: sequences of three wheel steps. Camera: short sequences, many fly-bys.

The work belongs to the Minimal Ring series, the fourth after Minimal Quaderspuren, Minimal Sphere and Raw Cube: a city of rods on a ring with a rectangular cross-section, a seamless grid over the outer shell, sides and inner shell, and on it cubes made of cubes that roll endlessly round, outside and inside. The set-up is described under “Ring – Spalten”, the basic form of the series.

Placement in the post-digital model of positing

Each lane is shifted against the next. What results from this is not drawn but follows from the shift.

The series works with grid, rhythm and repetition. Deviation comes from the height at which each rod stands in the ground, and from the sequence: cubes rolling one behind the other are at different phases of their rotation. On the ring every path returns into itself, outside as inside; in addition, each work has its own ring shape, its own grid and its own rhythm.

Square and rectangle are concrete forms, in the ground as in the bodies upon it – even the cross-section of the ring is a rectangle. Only where the movement meets the ground does it receive an informal impulse, reaching across onto the side discs, over which a wave runs when a cube passes by above. Two concrete structures whose interaction has an informal consequence – here again lies the field of tension between the concrete and the informal. Between the two poles, stages can be traced here: the fixed grid, the cube rolling edge over edge, the ground that gives way and springs back, the restless steps of the sides, the trail that holds its colour only for a while.

Between the non-representational and the representational: the spatial view alone already presents the concrete forms representationally, as bodies in space – here as a ring through which the camera flies, so that one looks from the inside outwards. The series is thus in fact a virtual sculpture in motion – a sculptural digital animation.