Veil – Spalten

“Veil – Spalten” is the first work in the Veil series. This is where the set-up is described that all the others share.

A sphere of rods, on it a landscape and rolling cubes – as in Minimal Sphere. But the bodies are black: they conceal what lies behind them, and only their edges stand out in white. The edges, too, do not glow evenly. Slowly drifting clouds of light stand in space; where a cloud meets the framework, the lines light up and become wider, in between they fade almost entirely.

Everything that moves leaves a trail of white points that stay fixed in space: every corner of every rolling cube, the edges of the landscape and individual tall rods as soon as the sphere turns, clicks into place or springs back. The faster the movement, the stronger the points. Then they drift on, with the momentum of their source and in a fractal drift, fan out into veils and mists, become smaller and more transparent and fade. The camera moves freely around the sphere and through the point cloud – space itself becomes the memory of the movement.

Veil is the sixth series after Minimal Quaderspuren, Minimal Sphere, Raw Cube, Minimal Ring and Ring Quader: the sphere becomes a veil.

The landscape of this work: column bands in columns, three tracks with cube objects made of 3 × 3 × 3 cubes.

Placement in the post-digital model of positing

The basic form of the series: tracks on the sphere – and every movement sets points into space that remain while their source moves on.

The series works with grid, rhythm and repetition – and with what the movement leaves behind. Every corner, every edge that moves sets points fixed in space, the stronger the faster it moves. In this way the repetition becomes a trail that overlaps itself and slowly fades.

Sphere, rod and cube are concrete forms, here reduced to the utmost: black, drawn only by their edges. From their movement a veil of points breaks away, drifts, fans out and melts away into mist – the informal consequence of concrete structures, as clear as in none of the previous series. Between the two poles the stages can be traced: the body, its edge, the point, the veil, the mist.

Between the non-representational and the representational: the spatial view presents the bodies representationally. Their trail loses contour and order and becomes informal – yet it remains representational, for it continues to take up space; space itself becomes the memory of the movement. The series is thus a virtual sculpture in motion – a sculptural digital animation.