Apartment

September 2001

by Marek Walczak & Martin Wattenberg & Jonathan Feinberg

Supported by Jerome Foundation

In Apartment you are confronted with a blinking cursor. As you type the room responds, engaging you in conversation, building a home around you. This dwelling is built of spatial image/text fragments, forming an equivalence between the space you inhabit and the mental space of your conversation. Over time the dwelling acquires a history, being a palimpsest of conversations with those that engaged with it. The scratches in the space are made up of images and texts derived from the dwellers’ inputs, web searches and translations, organized into clusters of spaces/ideas.

TAXONOMY

REQUIREMENTS

You can no longer see the 3D component as it has not functioned for many years. The other parts of the piece still work.

MEDIA & ACHIEVEMENTS

Marek Walczak & Martin Wattenberg – Apartment | p0es1s.digitale poesie – Kulturforum Potsdamer Platz, Berlin

Database Aesthetics » Martin Wattenberg & Marek Walczak – Apartment

Digital Imaging Done Easy- Artists- marek walczak & martin wattenberg, Apartment

evo1-Apartment

Martin Wattenberg- Apartment

Medialab Madrid – Apartment, 2001

Mobile Gaze #3 Walczak + Wattenberg, Apartment

Martin M. Wattenberg – publications:references

ADDITIONAL NOTES

The “apartments” created during the exhibition and on the Apartment website are clustered into cities according to their semantic relationships. The cities can be arranged according to semantic complexes such as ‘Art,’ ‘Body,’ ‘Work,’ ‘Truth’– the apartments with the highest occurrence of the respective theme will move to the center.

Apartment is inspired by the idea of the memory palace, a mnemonic technique from a pre-Post-it era. In the second century BCE, the Roman orator Cicero imagined inscribing the themes of a speech on a suite of rooms in a villa, and then delivering that speech by mentally walking from space to space. Establishing an equivalence between language and space, Apartment connects the written word with different forms of spatial configuration.