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Politics and Poetics of the Closed Box

Pandora's 'box' was a jar. The container is the new Pandora. A disjunction of content and form serves as its basic principle.

The idealism of logistics: pure operationability through meta-encoding.
The radical freedom of images: packaging functions as a double screen, at the same time shielding off materiality, and opening up projection space.

'All the romance of a tin can': container bashing is symptom of an anachronistic longing for substance.

No black boxes, no containers – no consumer capitalism, no pop art, no globalization.

(full manifesto, pdf 400 KB; will be published in: Homo Oeconomicus, vol 24, ArtsSection)



	Politics and Poetics of the Closed Box Pandora's 'box' was a jar. The container is the new Pandora. A disjunction of content and form serves as its basic principle. The idealism of logistics: pure operationability through meta-encoding. The radical freedom of images: packaging functions as a double screen, at the same time shielding off materiality, and opening up projection space. 'All the romance of a tin can': container bashing is symptom of an anachronistic longing for substance. No black boxes, no containers – no consumer capitalism, no pop art, no globalization. (full manifesto, pdf 400 KB; will be published in: Homo Oeconomicus, vol 24, ArtsSection)
	(inverted movie-theater-box)
	The videoclips were projected from within the box. (Actually, the size of the box was mainly determined by the minimum distance necessary for the videobeamer; contingency in finding measurements like in the case of the ISO-container: its height is said to have been initially determined by the maximum height possible to cross road bridges at harbor of New Jersey/New York.) The idea was that the box tells its stories by itself through sounds and imagery. I started the action by reading a "container manifesto". Then I gave over to the box.

	Containerclips 1 Zug / 1 Move (1:10) (Quicktime Movie, 2,9 MB) Fluten / Streaming (1:38) (Quicktime Movie, 4,3 MB) Fuge / Joint (2:14) (Quicktime Movie, 2,5 MB) Hof / Backyard (2:13) (Quicktime Movie, 1,9 MB) Behältertaumel / Container Rapture (3:20) (Quicktime Movie, 12,6 MB) Paranoia (2:10) (Quicktime Movie, 3,2 MB) Suez (2:38) (Quicktime Movie, 2,2 MB)