Perpetuum Mobile Exhibition – Section 03: Deep Time of Czech Spirituality

Michael Bielicky - Perpetuum Mobile - 03- Deep Time of Czech Spirituality - 2020

[0:09] Here we go and pass the book collection, this are the first four editions of R.U.R. [Rossum’s Universal Robots], Karel Capek’s famous book where for the first time the term robot appears – also a first Russian version – and here are other wonderful designs, also Marinetti’s very famous Liberated Words, and also other publications, partly made by Joseph Capek, brother of Karel Capek who wrote R.U.R. - and Karel Teige an avant-gardist designer of wonderful book covers.

[1:01] And here we go, this is the show of Peter Weibel from above, which is a nice perspective as well. 

[1:10] We can continue here to the next box, this is one of the short tapes called Next Year in Jerusalem made in the 1980s. It belongs to a series where I compared religious people in Jerusalem with the world underwater because they are so odd and alienated, so that an analogy to the underwater world can be drawn.

[1:52] Here is another piece about Walter Benjamin’s escape across the Pyrenees from Germany to Spain: I re-walked his escaping route with the help of GPS, night vision and other technologies. I walked this difficult path of his last walk, where at the end he was not let into Spain and died at the border. This was made for an international conference in Barcelona about Walter Benjamin.

[2:45] This is another concept of Jerusalem. It is called This Year in Jerusalem and here you can see me waving in real time on screen. This is a live Wailing Wall stream from Jerusalem, a live web camera stream. As a visitor I can virtually enter this place now, for this it is not called Next but This Year in Jerusalem. You see lots of life there, lots of motion and the visitor enters this magic moment with the help of telematic technology and the capture motion technology Kinect, which we can see here on the floor, the small box.

[3:40] Here we go to a performance piece from 1995 called Exodus. In 1995 for four days I drove through Negev Desert in the steps of Moses, with the help of GPS and early Internet and other technologies and was comparing the Biblical Exodus of Moses and the exodus of our time: the technological liberation of time and space. Since 1995 we are on our way into the Internet and can be part of a liberated time space where we can embark on an endless travel to liberate humans from location and time.

[4:50] This is a piece called Creatio Ex Nihilo: a wooden screen, where you can see the words NoThingIs and Nothing: again there is no beginning and no end, you can start reading it from any point and it reflects this philosophical and theological term of creation ex nihilocreation from nothing.