Sphere – Puls

The landscape of this work is built from one figure: a shaft into which the city steps down in stages. Each of the six fields of the sphere shows a different section of it.

The work belongs to the Minimal Sphere series, the sister series of Minimal Quaderspuren: the same city of cuboids, now on a sphere closed all round, and on it cubes made of cubes that roll endlessly around it. The sphere clicks into place in quarter turns and springs back; the ground gives way to the cubes and keeps their colour for a while. The set-up is described under “Sphere – Spalten”, the basic form of the series.

Placement in the post-digital model of positing

One shared tempo for all the bodies. What is ordered here is the progression, not the position.

The series works with grid, rhythm and repetition. Deviation comes from the height at which each cuboid stands in the ground, and from the sequence: cubes rolling one behind the other are at different phases of their rotation. On the sphere every path returns into itself; the repetition no longer has an end and lives on this variance alone.

Square and rectangle are concrete forms, in the ground as in the bodies upon it – even the sphere is built from a cube. Only where the movement meets the ground does it receive an informal impulse, and the sphere adds one of its own when it rocks back and the cuboids spring along. 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 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 single body that the camera circles. The series is thus in fact a virtual sculpture in motion – a sculptural digital animation.