Former Pupils Kastanien Allee School Complex: 1900-1999
Academy of Art, Berlin-Weißensee, 2005

Student production directors: Peter Müller, Silvia Lorenz
Stage Design: Olf Kreisel
Collaboration with: Wolfgang Krause, Galerie o zwei

During the Open House of the Academy of Art in Berlin-Weißensee the project "First Congress and Archive: Former Pupils Kastanien Allee School Complex: 1900-1999" was presented in the Academy auditorium.

The performance-installation was a result of a one semester Seminar with Arnold Dreyblatt at the academy. The presentation involved a simulation of an actual Congress Event as well as an interactive presentation of the contents of the archive, gathered by the students and now inventoried in a digital databank. Former students of the school complex were invited to participate.

Participation: Art Students from Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weiensee in collaboration with Galerie Ozwei, Berlin

This workshop and Installation considered as basic material the personal archive of Peter Muller, one of the workshop participants. The archive contains documents, images and artifacts pertaining to the history of the Gustav-Eiffel-Schule and the surrounding historical school property. We were interested in developing an artistic form in which the last inhabitants (teachers, administrators and students) of the soon-to-be abandoned school would be confronted with memory of the surrounding school buildings and property, which has been used for educational purposes since 1867.

As an exhibition space, we had been given a now-empty vitrine (approx. 4 m x 1 m) permanently built into a wall in a prominent site on the first floor landing of the main school building. Rather than create a pure historical exhibition, I proposed to mix fact and ?ction in creating a pseudo-historical narrative which would be made plausible through the traditional methods of museum-like display, and which would reflect the complex emotions and expectations of both an east and west public as well as an east location.

The group decided on the theme of a school class which was reported to have completely disappeared, possibly for political reasons, in 1961. Great care was taken to support the narrative within the realm of plausibility, utilizing a great reserve of real and fabricated archival material from the time period. Possible resolutions of the narrative were imagined but left open to interpretation. In, December 2004, a small dedication ceremony was held as the work was permanently sealed behind an enormous glass window. Other than a reference to the installation as a result of a workshop under my direction, no indication was given as to the truth or falsity of the display. When the installation was on view during the art project ., a minority of outside visitors were greatly irritated by the imagination that a school class had actually disappeared in the DDR.

Participation: Art Students and Former Art Students from Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weisensee and HdK Saar, Saarbrucken

As a response to the rapidly disappearing traces of the Gustav-Eiffel-Schule and historical school area, I proposed the installation of a museum in a basement space normally utilized as a depot for schoolbooks which are stored in glass vitrines. As a initiating theme for the workshop, we discussed the historical tradition of the Wunderkammer and museum display. The permission to utilize the space necessitated the removal of thousands of schoolbooks, many of which were clearly outdated and originating from an earlier political regime, to another basement space, while maintaining the original order for eventual thematic reconstruction. Nearby basement rooms contained decaying scientific educational aids, many of which eventually found their way into vitrines in the Museum within a new context as art and scienti?c display. Each of the participating young artists created works which responded to the spatial and historical situation with varying media and themes, ranging from performance to media projection to image projection. Many used locally found materials and technologies. The exhibition was open to the public during the project Leerstelle.

As part of Prof. Inga Mahn's project, "haushalten", Dreyblatt programmed an exhibition project involving a number of former students from the Art Academy of Saarbrücken along with friends and collegues from Berlin.

The Program:

Arnold Dreyblatt:
Works from Friends and Students

17. 10. bis 21. 11. 03

Participating students and former students from HbK Saarbrücken:
Caroline Armand, Elvira Hufschmid, Ingeborg Knigge, Margit Schäfer, Janine Eggert, Gabriele Heller

Participating Artists from Berlin:
Lila Karbowska, Jan Faktor, Gusztav Hamos, Arnold Dreyblatt, Monika Lilleike, Konrad Sprenger, Tapeman

17. Oktober - 21.November
Lila Karbowska - "Spielbrett"
Intervention - Eine Arbeit im Prozess, die mit dem Ende der 'Spielzeit¯ erst ihren
Abschluss finden wird. Die Arbeit zitiert, aber zweckentfremdet die professionelle Spurensuche des Restaurators. Das Spielbrett fungiert als pars pro toto, dass erahnen lässt, dass sich in diesen Räumen verschiedene Lebensgeschichten abgespielt haben.

Freitag, 17. 10. 03, 20 Uhr:
Präsentation: "INVENTAR" ein Projekt der hbk Saar,
Klasse Arnold Dreyblatt, 2002
und Arbeiten von Margit Schäfer und Caroline Armand

Freitag, 24. 10. 03, 20 Uhr:
Caroline Armand: Raumintervention und Vortrag
Margit Schäfer: "Leitkultur", Installation

Freitag, 31. 10. 03, 20 Uhr:
Halloween Konzert Abend mit TAPEMAN, Konrad Sprenger,
Arnold Dreyblatt, u.a.
Ingeborg Knigge (SB): "Hausnummern" Dia Performance
Janine Eggert: "Flecken", Installation
Monika Lilleike: Vortrag "Traditionelle Vocal- und Darstellungskunst aus Hawaii"

Freitag, 07. 11. 03, 20 Uhr:
Jan Faktor: Lesung
danach Gusztav Hamos: "Rush", Vortrag mit Film & Video
Arnold Dreyblatt: "My Fundus", Installation

Freitag, 14. 11. 03, 20 Uhr:
Elvira Hufschmid : "INTERMEDIATE FENG SHUI", Präsentation einer
Rauminstallation
Gabriele Heller: Video Installation

The development of a website art project was accomplished in a workshop which lasted over two years and which examined the navigation through a digital network of historical documentation. Students programmed, designed, edited and proofread documents in the realization of the final project.

Under the direction of Prof. Martin Warnke and Arnold Dreyblatt.

Project Website:
http://www.leuphana.de/tmail

A project by Arnold Dreyblatt
Produced in collaboration with students of the Department of Cultural Studies, Kulturinformatik, of the University of Lüneburg, Germany. T.Mail was developed and produced during a workshop from 2003 to 2005.


Content and Overall Concept: Arnold Dreyblatt
Technical Assistance, Hypertext: Carmen Wedemeyer
Flash: Olaf Krafft

Participants in the Development Group 2004-2005:
Jasmin Bodmann, Edith Schiele, Annette Gast, Verena Holz, Martina Mennerich, Beate Rullik, and many other students from earlier semesters.

The Software used in the production of this website was develped by Martin Warnke, Christian Terstegge, Carmen Wedemeyer at the University of Lüneburg in a research project on documentation methodologies for contemporary art which resulted in an XML-schema (PeTAL, Picture Text AnnotationLanguage), an editor (PictLinker), a Browser (Petal Reader) and an XLST conversion routine to the WWW.

A one semester project of the Class of Prof. Arnold Dreyblatt, Academy of Art (HbK Saar), Saarbrücken 2003.

Project Website
http://www.dreyblatt.de/Inventar/Index.html

My work as guest professor at the HBK Saar began as a discussion on the mechanisms of collection in the archive and museum and in the processes by which we chose to represent and understand the traces of the past as well as the preservation of local memory in the urban landscape.

As a result of our group inquiries, I proposed a site-specific project in an empty house in urban Saarbrucken. We would work with a house as an archive in itself: a repository of lived history. We would research the history of a given house, charting its changes over the years and of those who resided within it. We could uncover the traces of the former inhabitants, known or unknown. We planned an exhibition as a public presentation of our activities.

As fate would have it, we could not secure permission to work in one of the three chosen urban sites. Through the assistance of a Real Estate Agent in Saarbrucken, we were offered a very different yet unique alternative site:: an empty bauernhof in Rubenheim, a small village in Saarland in the Bliestal.

The farmhouse complex in Rubenheim has been inhabited for generations by the Meyer family and contains a millenry shop and tailor workshop which had been well integrated into the village infrastructure. Only recently, the last members of the family to live and work in this house had been forced to vacate because of illness. Artistic intervention could only take place within a temporary state during which existing traces of the past would shortly be destroyed. We therefore undertook the project with the knowledge that the house would soon be sold after which the orginal architectural context and interior contents would be forever lost.

As we entered the house for the first time, we felt ourselves as if frozen in time. During the last years in which Maria and Konrad Meyer became increasingly isolated, rooms had been slowly abandoned, the store had closed for the last time, the bills had piled up. We were surrounded by an accumulation of historical objects much like layers of geological strata or the cabinets of religious relics. While some rooms had largely been emptied of their contents, the traces of daily life were overwhelmingly visible. Some rooms appeared to remain in a state of a last breakfast. Bags of documents and artifacts which had been collected and removed from the living quarters were deposited haphazardly in the barn. The last unsold items remained piled in the shop as the shelves remained bare.

In July, 2002 we spent five working days in the house as a preparation for an exhibition on the following weekend Our work was a process of finding, collecting, sorting, and re-constructing the traces of a past which seemed to be performing a process of gradual disapearance during our presence.. We responded with varying media and artistic forms, often experimenting with unconventional means of display. We created a specific labarynth-like pathway through the house, circumventing personal quarters which might make local residents and family members uncomfortable. Common to all individual works is an attempt to stimulate multiple responses to a memory lost, and a respect for the individual lives who passed through these spaces.

At the end of the Arbeitswoche we invited visitors from the HBK Saar, residents of Saarland and especially the inhabitants of Rubenheim to an open house and exhibition on Saturday afternoon. The Rubenheimers were informed of the action by posters in the former shop window, and by a notice in the local Gemeindeblatt. An article on our work had appeared in the Saarlandische Zeitung. We were quite unprepared as hundreds of local inhabitants attended the open house, engaging us in endless conversations relating to their memories of the past, stimulated by the student works and quite unaware as to their first contact with contemporary art. We sensed that our project had somehow unexpectedly crossed the boundaries of art and life, if only for a moment. This was an experience which we would not quickly forget.

Since our activities in summer, we continued to follow up the developments in Rubenheim. Maria Meyer and her handicaped brother Konrad, the last family members to inhabit the house, had been living in an Altesheim in Saarbland. At the end of 2002, Maria Meyer had died. The house was sold to a couple from a nearby village, and members of the Arbeitsgruppe visited the house for the last time. Other students made a series of interviews with Hilarius Meyer, brother of Maria and Konrad, and with his son, as well as with Gunter Altenkirch of a small private Museum in Rubenheim, who had been so helpful to us in establishing contact with the inhabitants of the village. - Arnold Dreyblatt, 2003

Arnold Dreyblatt, an instrument maker, acoustic theoretician and major contributor to American minimalism, held a series of workshops with MIT students on acoustic theory, tuning systems and musical instrument-building during the intersession program at MIT (IAP).
Their work culminated in a free concert on Wednesday, Jan. 31 at 7pm in Kresge Auditorium featuring Mr. Dreyblatt and his students performing on found object percussion and other instruments they've enhanced and created during the workshops.

Sponsor: Office of the Arts, MIT

Course Outline:
I. Listening to Recordings
a . North American/European:
b . Non-Western

II. Instrument Construction and Development
a . Instruments
b . Testing, Analysis

III. History
A. Early Minimalism: La Monte Young and Tony Conrad
B. Derivatives

IV. Extended Performance Techniques

V. Music Theory, Acoustics

VI. Additional Lectures and Concert

The Memory Arena and Who's Who in Central & East Europe 1933 have been both programmed as a hypertext interactive environment for a World Web Site on the Internet and as an installation within Dreyblatt's Memory Arena which took place in the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen in 1996. Students travelled to Copenhagen to participate in the installation after collaborating on the development and execution of the website.

The development of a website was accomplished in a two semester workshop in which we examined the navigation through a digital network of information. Students programmed, designed, edited and proofread documents and images in the realization of the final project.

Produced in collaboration with the Department of Cultural Studies of the University of Lüneburg, Germany; Martin Warnke, Director.

Who's Who in Central & East Europe 1933 programming by: Paul Siegert and Carmen Wedemeier

Memory Arena programming and web design by: Beatrix Brandes, Frank Derricks, Christian Hildebrandt, Eva Johach und Kristina Reichel