Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Gent, België

Een inkijk in de werknotities van Chris Kondek die hij maakte tijdens Hier ist der Apparat.

I first read Bercht’s Ozeanflug, a radio play about Lindbergh flying across the Atlantic and got hooked. I thought it was a perfect world for me to work in. Charles Lindbergh: a guy trapped in a little box, only able to deal with the world through his machines. I thought it was pretty much how I, and a lot of others spend their time.

And Brecht put a twist on it. He wove through Lindbergh’s techno-story a strange rather un-Brechtian fantasy world. The piece is filled with ghosts. The spirit of the fog talks to Lindbergh, the voice of sleep speaks to Lindbergh, he has a conversation with snow and sings a love song to his motor.

A combination world: Myth and technology. The movement back and forth between tech and dream seemed like the perfect vehicle for the media experiments I wanted to make. It turned out that it was more appropriate than I thought. Because Brecht thought of Ozeanflug itself as a media experiment: a way to test the boundaries of radio. And his experiment became the starting point for “Hier ist der Apparat.” We were making a media experiment about a media experiment.

Then the thinking went like this. How do we frame our media experiment. We won’t do a production of Ozeanflug, we’ll present it, somehow from outside. We’ll present Ozeanflug as a cultural artifact. We’ll present an imagined history of Ozeanflug. (The very first production of Ozeanflug was also just a presentation) And where will we present it? Why, of course. We’ll present it on TV. TV after all is the dominant transmitter of info. I thought it could be a theater piece made by people who had never seen one, who had only heard about theater, and for whom TV was their only example of Live Performance. A show called “Hier ist der Apparat”, conceived as a late night TV program about Bert Brecht’s Ozeanflug.

If you wander around reading media theory you’ll eventually, (or immediately), bump into the ’70’s media prophet Marshall Mcluhan. Mcluhan says you can’t understand one type of media until it becomes the content of another media. Re-mediation. And that seemed to fit. We decided that Marshall Mcluhan should be a guest on the show. We could have our own ghosts.

And so we started with a mytho-techno experimental media hero story which we would present on a stage disguised as a TV talk program that talks about a radio play with Marshall Mcluhan as a guest star.

It was a good start but then things got complicated.

In rehearsal you discover things. The ideas lead to other ideas, some mutate, some get dropped out. You discover that the original ideas maybe weren’t as clear or as good as you thought. Or not necessary. In the first weeks of rehearsal Astrid asked, “Why make a theater piece anyway? Let’s just make a good video and be done with it.”

What we ended up with is fragments, bits of thoughts, left-overs from different times, different rehearsal periods. New influences got layered in: an American TV show from the 70’s called Laugh-In, a documentary of a theater piece form the late 60’s, the collage films of Hans Richter from the 30’s, the experiences of our own hacker Victor who modified video games for us, the fake-real style of reality TV, among others. A level of confusion remains. Not everything fits with everything. Lindbergh sometimes got lost in the mix. Our guest star McLuhan says, “In the electric world it’s impossible to have a point of view.” We’re still working to tie everything together.

Playing with various media aesthetics became a way of working through a problem. The problem isn’t as clearly defined as when we started. And it’s one that is still being developed. (As I write this it is still two months before the premiere). But the field of questioning has become clearer: the Apparatus. Lindbergh’s problem was “How do I get this machine to Paris?” ours has become “How do we do get these machines to come alive for us”?

In rehearsal we spent a lot of time trying to find ways to play the technology. What could video do for us here? What could sound do for us there? What can we get out of the computer? Video, for example, has special qualities because it can go from being mere background to being the main carrier of information to being an uncanny double of the real in a split second. Looking for and taking advantage of these various media qualities and styles became an important part in the rehearsal process. Once a motif for a particular scene was found we could move on.

Our cast, which is made of equal number of performers and technicians, began to mutate; performers had to be technical, technicians had to emote. Both had to learn to deal with the spaghetti of cables and the INEVITABLE UNAVOIDABLE fact of machine failure. They had to deal with the ghost in the machine.

This brings us back to the spirit voices of Brecht’s Ozeanflug. I’m still quite hooked on the piece, and the strange fantasy in it. But Ozeanflug was written when it was still possible to believe, without question, in the positive spirit of technology. Brecht’s media experiment, and Marshall Mcluhan’s concept of “The Global Village” were intended to show how the machine was going to change the world. It is probably not possible to be so ambitious now, in any case, we are not so ambitious. We’re just happy if we can get the machines to work. Our project is not to show what the machine can do, but to show us trying to figure out what to do with the machine.