barbara wurm
Landscape configurations emerging from the perceptive body. From Kurt Lewin to Bady Minck
Two strands unfold in this text, which addresses how the human perceptive body approaches landscape. On the one hand, the film that Kurt Lewin never shot (and never planned) on the war landscape he describes in a 1917 essay is "reconstructed" in a sort of hypothetical history of science. Lewin, whose role as one of the early theorists of perception is almost entirely forgotten nowadays, did not only ponder in writing how landscape is actually changed (when it is perceived in different contexts – in wartime deployment or as a "peacetime landscape"). He was a pioneer of scientific filmmaking. Just as he undertook a scientific analysis (in this instance: from the perspective of Gestalt psychology) of his own experiences in WW I, from 1920 until the 1950s he shot teaching and research films to glean insights into affects, intentional behaviour as well as Lebensraum, living space – the phenomenological keyword of the era.
Lewin's practice in perceptual research becomes a passe partout for certain aspects of Bady Minck's Im Anfang war der Blick: for the threshold between science and art, as explored in each specific situation – sometimes as a filmic event in experimental phenomenology, sometimes as a surreally playful experiment in media phenomenology; for the coupling of senses and landscapes, as can be experienced in the simulation of concrete events of seeing, hearing, smelling and touching; and finally for the media exploration of landscape, – its utilisation, its structures and the (hi)stories deposited in it.
Heidi Dumreicher l Sergio Fant l Marcy Goldberg l Bodo Hell l Christoph Huber l Lilli Lička l Johannes Moser l Michael O'Pray l Hans Schifferle l Burghart Schmidt l Christian Stadelmann l Mika Taanila l Jean-Philippe Tessé