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For the group show ABENTEUER FREUNDSCHAFT at KUNSTSAELE in Berlin we built a 4th version of CLIMATE CONTROL AND THE SUMMER OF LOVE - a deep-freeze room in which visitors can create frozen soap bubbles after having executed a series of exercises that enable them to do so. Most of the photos were made by Sebastian Eggler.

as if you could kill time without injuring eternity ( operation manual for visitors )

Hello, yes, hello,
I am glad you are here and I would like to make some propositions for the moments you'll spend here. Seated at the kitchen table, the most quiet place of the Kunstsaele at the moment.

We can start wherever we want to, the system isn't a closed one. I'd like you to think of what borders are, limits, of what control might be useful for and what the thing you call freedom feels like. I wonder if errors, irritations and failures mark the outlines of a system or if they constitute its core.

I'd like to invite you to prepare yourselves to create a soap bubble in a refrigerated environment and to watch its transformation into a spherical crystal.

There should be two of you in order to do this. If you are alone, please find someone to accompany you. It would be good if one of you read this text to the other.

It begins in 2008 with a sac of cement that Elena Villovich finds on the carpet of her living room in a suburb of Moscow. Almost simultaneously she also discovers a whole the size of 80 X 100 centimeters in the ceiling of her living-room and the roof above it. Looking for the origin of the holes and the sac of cement she soon got in contact with the Russian air-force, who - ahead of national holidays - disperse the charge of a dozen cargo planes – filled with silver iodide, liquid nitrogen and cement - into the skies to provoke rainfall and empty the air of its humidity. They said it was possible that this sac of cement was the first in thirty years of weather control in the capital region that failed to open and pulverize in high altitude and they proposed a compensation of 50.000 Rubel ( approximately 2.000 Euros ) for the reparation of the roof which Elena Villovich excepted saying that this wasn't her major problem. And that she would like to be compensated or cured from her new inability to leave her house without frightfully looking at the sky.

Let's start with the bubbles and so: let's start with the doors. Doors are important. The ideal temperature for the crystallization of a soap bubble is between -12 and -15° degrees Celsius. The exhibition space is probably somewhere above + 21°. The moment you open and close the doors to the cooled space is crucial. The door that resembles them the most is the one that leads to the kitchen.

Could you go there? And, once inside the kitchen, could both of you position yourselves next to it?

Could one of you open it for both of you and could both of you pass through it? Could you close it?

Could you now find the most fluid, the most elegant manner to do so?Could you open and close this door like Cary Grant carries a glass of milkup stairs, like Robert de Niro opens the door of a refrigerator, lights a cigarette or walks down a sidewalk?

Can you make it a perfect gesture, can you make it a perfect sequence of all the elements that this complex movement is composed of? Can you avoid all obstacles?
This might take some time. Opening a door, drinking a glass of water, sucking a candy.

Maybe you can accompany this by reading the following text by Friedrich Heubach:

The pursed lips pick up the candy, dismiss it awkwardly into the mouth, where it is finally received by the tongue with expectant twists. Sweetness develops, opens to a small, flattering O, and soon transforms the mouth into a sweet, sticky-greedy pulsing ball, which, expanding, becomes more and more possessive. One is becoming round oneself and ultimately exists only as the fine, ever more tense periphery of this sweet-ball; you close your eyes and finally you implode: assuming spherical characteristics yourself, you form one object with the world that has become round in sweetness.

An "outer" happening accompanies to this "inner" transformation: the emptied candy wrapper is smoothed and smoothed further until it forms a planar square, which is turned around the finger into a cylindrical tube and finally folded into smaller and smaller surfaces. And when the sweet-ball begins to lose its tension, begins to flatten and to collapse, the paper becomes increasingly messy, increasingly clumped, between your fingers; and then, when the sweetness is just the subtle consuming line of a withdrawal, it's finally squeezed into a small hard bead that you like to snap far away.

Carolina Parisi says that dreams have limits and that it's reality that is infinite.

You can go back to the exhibition space now. Maybe you wonder what the oranges are there for. You take one of them. Its size is important for you today. It's the model for the bubble that you will need to blow. You walk towards the object made of wood, black straws and cables linking ventilators and current regulation devices. On the back side of it there's a glass containing a slightly bluish liquid and an pink object that serves to facilitate the blowing of soap bubbles. You use it, you dip it into the liquid and take it out, hit it softly one or two times against the wall of the glass in order to get rid of the liquid that would otherwise drop off. This also serves to ensure that you always use a similar amount of soap-bubble liquid which will make it easier to control the weight of the bubbles you will blow. Please repeat this action before each bubble.

Try to make the bubbles float above the center of the black straws. The current of air produced by the ventilators makes it possible that bubbles of the desired volume and weight float for up to 2 minutes above the surface of the black straw. It would be good, if you managed to produce a bubble that does so for 30 seconds and it would be good if you managed to make two of them.

If the bubble flies up, it is either too light or too big. You can make it heavier by blowing more softly. You can control the size of the bubble by a sudden augmentation of the amount of air you blow, when it reaches the desired size. If I use this tool, my mouth is about 15 centimeters above and 15 centimeters away from the edge of the blackstraw. I blow slightly above the horizontal level in order to avoid a wall of air situated at the edge of the black straws that is slightly stronger than the current of air in the center.
This training has a big potential for failure. I think it might help to exchange roles and look how the other one of you does it and I would like you to read Franz Kafka while doing so.

At first all the arrangements for building the Tower of Babel were characterized by fairly good order; indeed the order was perhaps too perfect, too much thought was taken for guides, interpreters, accommodation for the workmen, and roads of communication, as if there were centuries before one to do the work in. In fact the general opinion at that time was that one simply could not build too slowly; a very little insistence on this would have sufficed to make one hesitate to lay the foundations at all. People argued in this way: The essential thing in the whole business is the idea of building a tower that will reach to heaven. In comparison with that idea everything else is secondary. The idea, once seized in its magnitude, can never vanish again; as long as there are men on the earth there will be also the irresistible desire to complete the building. That being so, however, one need have no anxiety about the future; on the contrary, human knowledge is increasing, the art of building has made progress and will make further progress, a piece of work which takes us a year may perhaps be done in half the time in another hundred years, and better done, too, more enduring. So why exert oneself to the extreme limit of one's present powers? There would be some sense in doing that only if it were likely that the tower could be completed in one generation. But that is beyond all hope. It is far more likely that the next generation with their perfected knowledge will find the work of their predecessors bad, and tear down what has been built so as to begin anew. Such thoughts paralyzed people's powers, and so they troubled less about the tower than the construction of a city for the workmen. Every nationality wanted the finest quarters for itself, and this gave rise to disputes, which developed into bloody conflicts. These conflicts never came to an end; to the leaders they were a new proof that, in the absence of the necessary unity, the building of the tower must be done very slowly, or indeed preferably postponed until universal peace was declared. But the time was spent not only in conflict; the town was embellished in the intervals, and this evoked fresh envy and fresh conflict. In this fashion the age of the first generation went past, but none of the succeeding ones showed any difference; except that technical skill increased and with it occasion for conflict. To this must be added that the second or third generation had already recognized the senselessness of building a heaven-reaching tower; but by that time everybody was too deeply involved to leave the city. All the legends and songs that came to birth in that city are filled with longing for a prophesied day when the city would be destroyed by five successive blows from a gigantic fist. It is for that reason too that the city has a closed fist on its coat of arms.

you won't be hungry
you won't be thirsty
you know what you are doing

you won't hurt yourself

you will always be loved

for the things you do

for the way you think

the way you feel

for how you smell

for each one of your movements

for all of your pauses

if you fall you fall softly

you won't feel death

no-one has everything

Now, please take one of the gray PVC–tubes, connect the battery and find a way to comfortably hold it in one hand, the ventilator facing down, the straws up.

Take a pink container of soap bubble liquid and blow a bubble into the air above the tube.

You can now keep the bubble in suspension by directing it with the weak current of air that flows out of the top of the tube.

If your fingers cover the holes on the side of the tube, the current becomes stronger, if you cover the ventilator it becomes even weaker.

I wish you'd manage to keep the bubble floating until its membrane becomes as fine as to implode.

Some bodies dance to accompany the rising of the sun, some do so at sunset and others dance and sing to attract rainfall. Just after the solstice a young man
sets fire to the prairie. He represents - he is - the god of fire. His body is covered with yellow mud, there are others that watch him from a distance. They are
covered in the same yellow mud, but instead of a burning torch they hold a living turtle in their hands. As soon as the prairie is in flames, the Zuni begin a dance
that will last until the rain arrives.

In principle the Zuni do the same thing as the Russian air-force.

We are on a beach. There are some 1 to 2000 birds, seagulls, sitting in a distance of 200 meters from the place where we are now. They are relaxing.
We have two options. One is to try to see them all fly away at the same time: If we run towards them fast enough, the air above us will be more crowded
with seagulls than the air above Piazza San Marco in Venice is with pigeons if a tourist takes out a gun and shoots in the air. Our other option is to try to get
into the center of this relaxing colony without causing any of them to fly up.
You don't need these tubes any longer, you will find others in the interior.
Could you disconnect the batteries and put them back where you found them, please?
And please, each of you, take one of the head torches.
You can put them on by pressing for two seconds on the soft button that is on the right side of the lamp. By pressing for a short duration you can change the torches' luminosity. I think that the 2^nd or 3^rd least bright level is the best for our purpose.
It is cold in the interior of the stack of straw. You don't need to wear a scarf and cap, but take one, if you feel like it.
Think of closing the doors behind you as soon as you will have entered. But don't go there yet, please.
There are two rooms, at the end of the first one, you will find two thermometers on your left side, if the temperatures that you read on the upper parts of them are not in between minus 12 and minus 16 degrees, the engine has to keep turning and you will have to wait for some more time.
To your right hand side or on the doorstep of the second door in the first room, you will find cooled PVC-tubes and cooled soap bubble liquid. Connect the batteries and decide who of you will blow the bubble and who will keep it floating. Before entering through the second door, please knock twice on the outside door and make sure, someone turns off the engine ( by pressing on the green button ). Remember putting it on again, after you leave.

The formation of the crystals is best seen if you stand face to face and make the bubble float between your eyes.
( you can turn the head torches up or down in order to have better lights )
Try to move slowly and to not breathe onto the bubble that floats between the two of you.; Make it fall and melt in your hand, as soon as you have seen everything.; Good luck!

Maybe it's good to say, that time feels somehow different in the refrigerated space, it's good to leave as soon as you become cold or too warm.