Participants of Institut für Raumexperimente
Ideas are motion
Poster project, part 3
20 January - 11 April 2011
Video © Olafur Eliasson / Institut für Raumexperimente

"Without Destination - TRAIL", Reykjavik Art Museum - Hafnarhús
Ideas Are Motion: The Poster as an Experiment in Travel

The Institut für Raumexperimente [Institute for Spatial Experiments], directed by artist Olafur Eliasson, is an educational research facility at the Berlin University of the Arts. Attendees conduct experiments on spatial relations in buildings, urban environments, and landscapes. In summer 2010 a group from the institute went hiking with guide Ósk Vilhjálmsdóttir in the Icelandic interior. The upshot of that experience may be seen here in the form of placards posted around the museum. Museum guests are encouraged to take a specially-made map of Hafnarhús, showing the locations of the posters, and make their own expedition.

Institut für Raumexperimente supplies the following text as an accompaniment to their project:
Ideas Are Motion: The Poster as an Experiment in Travel is prismatically structured to reflect the making of a road trip: the making of an individual art project while travelling within the collective structure of a group. These trips range from urban cultural excursions in megacities to multiple-day walks outside any sense of an urban center, as was the case in Iceland. Ideas are motion, and participants in the Institut für Raumexperimente are invited to go on a road trip and reflect that trip in a poster as an art project, making the road trip into a round trip.
Posters are vehicles of urban communication, material systems mobilizing perception. Because posters have the ability to transport image and text information on a massive public scale, they are often exploited only in commercial markets as spatial flags for advertisements or announcements. But posters involve a precise set of relationships between the material conditions of the poster, the spatial constraints of the place, and the phenomenal conditions tuned and tuning how we experience the place through scale, speeds, perceptions, attention span, and distances of moving bodies around the posters. In this way, posters offer phenomenal opportunities without predetermining artistic content. They offer familiar and unfamiliar spatial structures, and the commercialized poster can be, and often has been, subverted and given an artistic thrust.

The trips represented in Ideas Are Motion are:
(1) Zagreb, Croatia (2) Japan (3) Iceland.

Informed by the particular artistic trajectory of each participant, the first half of the poster experiment involves asking each participant to design an individual project using a poster format. The parameters for the experiments were that content should be informed by the place, movement, space, and time particular to each road trip. Places are processes. Every point of view within a process is a distortion of what is going on across the whole. And while the participants in the Institute are reflected in the content of each poster as different changing points of view (some posters are sketches of ideas, or statements, or autonomous projects, or pitches for projects,...), the Institute of Raumexperimente as a place of experimental spatial processes is also reflected in the set of posters. The second half of the experiment is the organization of group poster exhibitions. The posters then travel back to the cities visited on the road trips. Curators and cultural institutions from the road tripped cities are engaged in an exchange to help develop public exhibitions. In this way the road trips are reflected in individual posters, and then the posters are reflected back into the dynamic place. The curating of the exhibition as a set of cultural relationships also reflects back into the experiment experienced as a process, as changing ideas in motion, giving each experiment a simultaneous sense of closure and explosion into the world. Each scale of reflection, from the individual to the group exhibitions to a publication series, demonstrates a process of thinking into a thought.

The Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments) is an educational research project directed by Professor Olafur Eliasson in affiliation with the College of Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), with support from the Berlin Senate for Education, Science and Research.