Until now, the form of space has been designed in subordination to its function. However, the new concept of space called Programme Space - that I began to consider through my participation in the research project by Jascha Viehstädt „So Soft“ is not subordinated to a specific function. 

It abstracts the human mind and the various concepts that make up our body-dependent existence, transforms them into physical forms, and reconfigures them within space. The aim is to attempt to create new ideas for the survival of humanity and the expansion of our spirit. 

The architectural plan of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe inspired me. The concept of a particular architectural space is constructed by assembling many fundamental pieces of thought and our needs. This architecture gave me the idea of breaking the whole space into smaller parts to allocate them to such elements for analysis. 

To visualize this concept, it is easier to imagine that a programming language builds a specific program using a particular vocabulary and set of codes. Because in architecture, a part is an abstraction of the function itself, manifested in space. 

For example, when observed purely alone, a window ceases to be a window any longer. Now, we have entirely disassembled a window into highly abstract but fundamental forms of our relationship with nature, which we cannot capture as a function: such as light pouring through the glass, longing for the outside world from inside, a transparent border between the society and one's home, the silent notice of evening darkness and the coming of the morning. 

„So Soft“ is a research activity by Hamburg-based choreographer Jascha Viehstädt to explore and study the essential relationship between codes, humans, and 'space' broadly encompassing human society in the age of machine intelligence. 

What is code? The basic stance of this research is to ponder the fundamentals of digital technology, which has now become an infrastructure supporting modern society, without being distracted by the short-term purpose of its use as a tool. And soon after we started our research, we arrived at a base point for our statement: It is our only star, the Sun, which constantly releases the energy essential 

for the survival of all life on Earth and the maintenance of human civilization. 

 The image of the Sun we have burnt into a ceramic plate is the Sun
 as it was burning on that day (which means the most actual image of the Sun with a minimum time lag of about eight minutes for the light to reach the Earth), as captured by an observation satellite.
 However, it is an image taken by a technology that requires enormous mechanisms, data transmission, and mind-boggling programming. Furthermore, it is delivered via a communications network that expends tremendous resources and energy. This image will then be burned back by the burning of matter onto the surface of pieces of soil on our planet. 

 During this project, we investigated space using many small prototypes of different thoughts to examine their validity as ideas. Besides the ceramic plate with the Sun image printed, The Sun Simulator and Platform for Programmers are examples of prototypes in the form of devices to be placed in space. Each is a figure of a great circle in a constant state of transformation, eternally revolving between the two poles of thought and matter. 

Tetsu Saito and Chikako Kaido conceived the concept for this project called "Ima Koko Watashi" (EN: "Now, where am I"). Choreographers, dancers, musicians, and artists gather in the same space to create a microcosmos of an improvised performance that can only take place once at a time and place.

Düsseldorf-based choreographer Chikako Kaido toured Cologne, Düsseldorf, Wuppertal, Brussels, and Liège with her company for this creation. 

What does it mean to see in these times? - Designing a spatial concept adjusting to each place they go, I jotted down many thoughts about vision, space, and time in my notebook over this particular question. Then, for a small experiment, I took my camera and photographed various angles in my apartment in Berlin, but with extremely low exposure, where the subjects were barely visible. 

In the darkness of the images, spatial structures appear with unclear light-dark boundaries. Nevertheless, the impression of a very robust three-dimensionality is created, with the detailed spatial components dissolving into the shadows. Through this process, I was inspired by the idea of abstracting the mechanism of vision and replacing it with a composition of materials without directly using photography as a motive in space. 

The objects, created by combing and sewing different types of textiles and plastic sheets, vary greatly depending on how the fabric wrinkles, the combination of chosen materials, how the light hits them, etc. These conceptual clues suggest that slight differences in perspective can produce entirely different experiences, mainly depicting the aspect of these dark and murky times today. 

"Every child is born covered in blood." An older woman who saw the piece muttered to the choreographer. The physical experience of childbirth, which is intensely painful, is where our entire life begins.
The choreographer, Guillaume Hulot, who closely observes the threads of this mother-child relationship between body and soul, captures head-on the elusive sinfulness behind the brilliance of birth. It's a daring mission, but he bravely takes it on, despite the potential pain and profound confusion in his mind. 

Accompanying during the creation, the depth of each mother's loneliness tightened my heart. This inner pain feels like the earth's gravity is trying to crush our internal organs. Nevertheless, watching the figures on stage, an image of a likewise lonely child comes into my mind. He is standing on a high cliff, listening to the waves crashing against the rocks, trembling on his feet. 

"Can I be a mother?" The concept of Guillaume Hulot's work "M I L K" also includes his question of whether a maternal identity can inhabit his own masculine body. This intimate exploration of motherhood contains essential discourses in modern society on queerness, gender identity, and transsexuality. 

The textile that creates a naïve and fragile world on stage evokes the sensual texture of the mother-child relationship. Furthermore, fabrics are very close to our bodies, especially in an individual's home environment. Not only our clothes but also our beds, the curtains on our windows, and the towels in the kitchen can be recognized as a metaphor for domestic care work. 
The damp, misty shadows in the background are painted on the fabric in a technique reminiscent of Oriental ink painting. The arch-shaped object on the stage symbolizes initiation rites during the growth process on the one hand and alludes to sexuality on the other. 

The curtains closing the left and right sides of the stage are lined with equally spaced doorways made by simple cuts. The audience can see the dancers moving back and forth along the corridor outside these doorways. They look like the souls of babies waiting to be born on this earth. Or we might see the ghosts of mothers behind the scenery, wandering in silent dreams during a brief snooze at dusk. 

Science has been built on an extreme duality. As a basic premise of natural science, we believed there is only one answer to one question. For example, biology has long thought that a species has branched off from the trunk of the tree of life along a single lineage that tracks its evolutionary path. The development of computer engineering, which deals with digital data consisting of combinations of zeros and ones, has given us the illusion that everything in the universe is computable on the same principle as a computer. In this way, our civilization has defined itself in a dualistic way as well: The "us" and the “other. This human misconception that we were in control of our environment has upset the planet's balance. 

In contrast, cutting-edge science has begun to discover that we are not the only intelligent beings on the planet. We began to realize, for example, that plants in the forest think, talk, act, and sometimes even move in response to climate change. Such measures teach us that there is no single form of intelligence. Moreover, intelligence is not something that resides within an individual but instead is something that only manifests itself when multiple individuals come together and "act".  

We live in an age where digital technology has permeated every corner of society. Our lives and even our thoughts are unknowingly influenced by the function of code programmed by someone else. The code controls what we can and cannot do, what we notice, and what we do not see. But what if we rethink the dawning of AI and all other digital technologies, and the existence of intelligent beings on this planet beyond humans, not as subordinate to humans, but as neighbors who can cooperate on an equal footing? 

This space is a kind of laboratory. Choreographers and artists gather in one room to continue their thoughts and research. And where these individual researches encounter, an intersection is created. There, multiple codes of different natures may mix unpredictably. Just like organisms have changed their forms through encounters with others who share the environment and through the random exchange of genetic information. 

Deep. Dance

"Deep. Dance" was created in 2021 by Hamburg-based choreographer Jascha Viehstädt.
It is a 60-minute choreography for three dancers created by artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence has replaced the choreographer. In this work, the physical body, which we have believed to be the home of our creativity, has surrendered its dominant position in the creative process to software. 

This work gives the audience insight into the neural network. Within the piece, three dancers share this insight with the audience using their bodies, leading them to ask ethical questions about the development of artificial intelligence in today's world. For example, is it possible for artificial intelligence to develop further and acquire a "creativity" that could rival humans? If so, how should we accept or reject the emergence of such artificial intelligence? 

If we look into a computer-simulated space, a code displays virtual objects at a certain height, despite putting them on the floor. Yes, there is no gravity in a virtual space. It became even more apparent when we screened an animation of AI-made choreography. The three human models in the video moved on a simulated floor surface, sometimes gliding very fast, sometimes floating slightly. The absence of gravities in space creates this vision. 

To express or reproduce this absence of gravity, we came up with the idea of creating a floor made of a soft form. When a dancer steps onto the material, the surface sinks underneath. At the same time, the material rifts up their feet back. As a result, I captured the impression of a moving body, standing and floating only slightly on the elusive surface, which is different from a regular floor surface.

 
The artificial intelligence developed for this work captured the improvised movements of several dancers through a camera to create the choreography. However, at this time, the AI doesn't understand that the beings in front of the camera are human beings, and it knows nothing about what a "dancer" is, let alone a "human being. So instead, AI is merely reading how the points on the body move. 
After taking sufficient material in this way, the AI breaks up the continuous movement into shorter sequences and analyzes which movements could follow after particular ones. This mechanism of autonomous learning by artificial intelligence is called deep learning, but we cannot share the learning process with AI. We only know that it handles and analyzes the necessary data to achieve a given goal. The AI has no idea what the observed object is. 

To perceive anything without understanding the meaning, the position of the phenomenon in the world, or without even knowing the existence of meaning would be, I think, an unimaginably lonely task. Understanding is nothing but a never-ending seeking for a realm of sense that connects oneself to others. To exist is to appear in a world where someone already exists. Life is being in a rich world full of fields of meaning in which all other things are. Artificial intelligence perceives all objects without understanding them. It would mean being in eternal darkness. 
I devised this stage set for the performances at Wiese e.V. in Hamburg. 

This dance piece by Jascha Viehstädt is based on the musical principle of the canon and its potential as a working principle in the field of contemporary dance. This design creates a minimal, functional setting that allows the audience to observe the choreography from every angle. "Strange transparency" is how the choreographer described the character of his piece. 

The constant repetition of movements performed in staggered time does indeed achieve strange transparency. Moreover, the strict instructions on the movements limit individual freedom. Yet, at the same time, the dancer's bodies seek comfort within the physically demanding repetition, and they try to adapt to the rhythm of the canon. Paradoxically, these instructions created fields of tension between all the individual bodies in the space. To make such effects maximally visible for the audience, we developed the idea of constructing a glass platform with a minimal dance floor: as a dense core of the space, which the audience as a "tableau" perceived. 

There used to be a theater named Fermata, she says. She was a dancer and witnessed a legendary choreography performed in that theater, which she still remembers in her body. The small theater was in the basement, and the audience had to go down a long flight of stairs to reach it. Where it was, no one can recall anymore...
 
 Fermata is the third corporation between Miu, a Japanese artist based in Düsseldorf, and Takaya Kobayashi. In his work, Miu weaves complex poetry into a simple spatial structure. He sets up the complex poetic narrative as a physically perceivable structure with the help of electronic technology. The challenge for the scenographer was to organize the system spatially and make it appear in the urban space where our reality and fantasy often intermingle.