Sphere – Spalten

“Sphere – Spalten” is the basic form of the Minimal Sphere series. This is where the set-up is described that all the other works share; each of them changes exactly one rule of it.

The city of cuboids lies on a sphere. The sphere is inflated from a cube: six fields, each with a square grid, and every grid line is a great circle. Avenues run along the twelve edges of the cube, and squares lie at the eight corners – the seams of the sphere become streets. Each cuboid stands in its cell, with a narrow gap to its neighbours, and becomes slightly wedge-shaped towards the top so that the gap stays the same at every height. Each surface carries exactly one colour from the palette; the light adds only gradations: roof, sunny side, shaded side. It stands fixed in space – when the camera circles the sphere, the night side moves with it.

The objects are cubes made of cubes. They roll endlessly around the sphere on closed lanes, each over its edges in its own rhythm, and emerge from behind the horizon instead of coming out of nowhere. The floor gives way to them, springs back behind them and keeps their colour for a while – on the far side too, so that the trails come round to the front again. The sphere moves itself: it clicks into place in quarter turns and rocks back, is deflected as if on a rubber band and swings back, and the cuboids feel the acceleration of their floor and spring along. Whoever touches an object punches a square hole around it into the ground – it carries the colour of the cube and only slowly grows closed again.

Minimal Sphere is the sister series of Minimal Quaderspuren: the same twelve works, the same figures and movements – except that the surface is now a sphere, closed all round.

The landscape of this work is built from one figure: bands, each at its own height. Each of the six fields of the sphere shows a different section of it.

Placement in the post-digital model of positing

The basic form of the series: one lane around the sphere, round after round, nothing else. Everything further changes exactly one rule of it.

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.