Research Catalogue

Thomas Ballhausen's (author and philosopher) and Elena Peytchinska's (Institute of Fine Arts & Media Art – Stage and Film Design) contribution "Herbarium of Words: Literary Style at the Scale of a Street" artistically explores the interrelations of space, language, and literature and takes us on a walk through Vienna’s streets. The herbarium serves as a point of departure for historical observations, which is seen as a form of subjective and personal archiving of urban experiences by means of linguization. Their performative approach combines film stills, poetry, and theoretical backgrounds to transform the boundaries of text and bibliographic formats.

With Operative Fiction, we propose a practice of spatial storytelling that proceeds along the lingual dynamic of prepositions rather than verbs. The text body is embedded in the medial spatiality of a printed book, a digital interface, or a performance space. Thus, the site (of the text) becomes a constituent and inextricable part of the storytelling. Methods of spatial production invade the text's very texture; in turn, textual compositions influence the unfolding of space, place, and site. Not only the story (conveyed through the text) but the text itself, with its material and procedural potential, activates the site of its action; it entangles itself in the texture of the digital surface. Furthermore, our prepositional practice shifts the spatial (and textual) focus from “location“ to “position” and “positioning”, thus activating the relational potential of multiple textual and chrono-topical layers. We begin our exercise in Operative Fiction with Thomas Ballhausen’s “What the Probes Report” by transposing the text from the surface of a printed page (FLORA, 2020) into the digital interface of a Research Catalogue exposition. The non-human protagonist, evoked through and evolving throughout the text, disrupts a subject-centred mode of narration: it is entangled in the word- and landscape of its development, thus becoming—by means of its procedural logic and function—a constituent part of its staging. The line, speculatively re-enacting the machines' functions, is the same, drawing the digital landscape's topographic texture. Applying a drawing technique typically used in a performance design draft, we explore the friction between staging and spacing by deploying minimally visible images and textual suggestions of direction. The operational plasticity of the technical images enables the congregation of dramaturgical intensities (staging) while disseminating and dispersing the story through the technological means of the exposition into hyperlinked virtual spaces (spacing). In addition to a linear reading mode, following the initial chronology of the story, we also propose a contingent reading mode activated through time codes. Acting simultaneously as elements of the drawing and as hypertext, these timelines imply the duration of a staged terrain, sometimes congregating multiple time zones within a topographic entity. Timelines act as “more-than-texts”, creating a multiplicity of positions and neighbourhoods, intertwining temporal aspects of space with the speculative grammar of the story.

In our exploration of the spatiality of language and, specifically, the activation of the site where writing "makes" rather than takes place, we propose a multilayered experience of the book as an object, as well as a geometrical, topological, and especially performative space, which we understand as an "ecology of the book". Extending this practice beyond the book's margins, yet simultaneously embedding it within the material and technical affordances of the book’s medial articulations, we evoke a "new" ecology—one unfolding alongside the interaction-landscape and its actual and invented inhabitants, as well as the techniques of its production. Texts, drawings, figures, figurations, methods, and both human and non-human authors weave together the heterogeneous texture of the book’s "new" ecology. In our monographs, "Fauna. Language Arts and the New Order of Imaginary Animals" (2018), "Flora. Language Arts in the Age of Information" (2020), and "Fiction Fiction. Language Arts and the Practice of Spatial Storytelling" (2023, De Gruyter/Edition Angewandte), we explore and map the territory of language arts. This approach manifests, on the one hand, through the transgression of traditional scientific methodologies and a shift in models—from thinking-of-the-other toward thinking-with-the-other, and on the other hand, through the agency of our eponymous characters, Fauna and Flora, who not only title our books but also act as conceptual operators—figures that navigate, perform, and activate the very spaces our texts explore. Applying Michel Serres' methodology of thinking by inventing personae, these characters move within and percolate through the margins of text (written, figural) and space (concrete, fictional), reconfiguring the notion of authorship and placing literary texts and digital drawings within the frame(less) collective of more-than-human and more-than-organic actants.