STOA169 (manifest)
robotlab-Beitrag zur Säulenhalle in Polling
2020
“Everyone has the right to freely express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures.” (Article 5 of the German Grundgesetz)
STOA169 is a publicly accessible columned hall in the middle of the Bavarian countryside near the village of Polling. It consists of 121 individual columns designed by international artists.
The column designed by robotlab is based on the robot installation “manifest”, a machine that generates and writes legal texts. The work was on display in the exhibition “Open Codes” at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe from 20/10/2017 to 05/08/2018.
In “manifest”, the industrial robot stands in front of a writing desk, composes manifestos, writes them down by hand on paper and passes them on to the visitors and thus to the public. With each manifesto, the robot generates individual proposals for the laws of a future man-machine society. By this way the robot interfers with existing social structures. In doing so, it draws on the structure of authoritative legal texts such as the German Grundgesetz, the Declaration of Human Rights or various machine guidelines and combines these with new vocabulary so that machines take on an equal role as new legal subjects.
The engraving of algorithmically generated legal texts from a robot's handwriting in concrete is a transfer of the machine's political program to the traditional column format. The transformation of the ancient column into the present finds its counterpart in the use of concrete as a contemporary, industrial material.
Since ancient times, columns have been used for the public manifestation of political programs, which were carved in stone in the form of text and images. In this medial function, they have a connection to the political and artistic manifestos of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The term “manifest” (lat. manifestus, tangible, obvious, proven) refers to the connection between the robot's manual action (lat. manus, the hand) and the ceremonial act (lat. festus, festive, ceremonial) of the proclamation.
