Raw Cube – Gegenlauf

The landscape of this work is built from one figure: rows whose height runs as a wave. It stands exactly in the centre of each of the six sides.

Grid: 30 rods per cube edge. Objects: up to 96 small cubes. Gestures: mainly rubber band with a long after-swing. Camera: free gliding.

The work belongs to the Raw Cube series, the third after Minimal Quaderspuren and Minimal Sphere: a large cube of six flat sides, each a grid of dark rods, drawn only by their edges. Colour belongs solely to the cubes made of cubes that trace their circles on each side, and to their trail. The set-up is described under “Raw Cube – Spalten”, the basic form of the series.

Placement in the post-digital model of positing

Each circle follows the same rule, only the direction changes. The beat arises between the circles, not in any single one.

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 circling one behind the other are at different phases of their rotation. Unlike in the two sister series, each work here has its own grid, its own objects and its own beat – the variance also lies between the works.

Square and rod are concrete forms, and the large cube is the most concrete of all. The ground is reduced to the utmost: dark, drawn only by its edges; colour is carried by the objects and their trail alone. Only where the movement ploughs a furrow through the rods does it receive an informal impulse, and the cube adds one of its own when it rocks back and the rods 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 object tracing its circles, the furrow that quickly grows closed again, the colour that stays in it 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 cube so large that it often extends beyond the frame. The series is thus in fact a virtual sculpture in motion – a sculptural digital animation.