THE WEMDINGEN TIME PYRAMID

Lecture by Kerstin Specht on the occasion of the 3rd stone setting

Stones fall from the sky here.
Not at all.
A giant crane is the controlled mover of ideas.
What is tattooed into the landscape here is an idea.
An idea made of concrete.
Concrete as a program of knowledge.
The Ries as a stage.
The sky supplies torn cloud gates.

SPACE

The artwork is still in its adolescence.
But one day, one day far away, it will be a pyramid.
The pyramid is the link between heaven and earth.
Of the seven wonders of the ancient world, only one remains, the Cheops pyramid.
Cairo was built with parts of its marble outer skin. The one below
exposed limestone will sooner or later shrink, and,—so in a million years, will
the pyramid have completely dissolved.

MAXIMAL ART

An art like this, which thinks in terms of such temporal magnitudes, is not minimal art,
but maximum art.
And it also needs a maximum building material.
Concrete doesn't mold like bread. But does concrete last forever? Given the
I don't want to hope for the ugliness of some satellite towns.
Erosion, spores, mold fungi, even earthquakes, everything works to break it down if people don't do it. Blow up, a term I know from photography, means the inflating of celluloid. But it is also applied to concrete.
That June, a man was driving his Harley down the freeway when the road suddenly piled up two feet in front of him. The heat has bent concrete slabs on German autobahns that have been intact for 80 years.

This build needs something permanent. And this is concrete.
Now I must insert a small digression, what I have read about this alchemical material.
UHPC, an ultra-high-strength concrete, was developed at the Technical University of Munich. Gravel is not used and silica dust, quartz flour and steel fibers are used instead, so that the concrete remains free of gas holes down to the nanometer range. A museum has just been built in Marseille with UHPC, but it is extremely expensive. But you can also provide normal concrete with self-healing powers.
To do this, you pepper it with glass capillaries, like a roast with garlic. These glass capillaries are filled with resin, and when the concrete bursts and cracks, the escaping resin reseals them. But the research goes further.
One experiments with microorganisms that live up to 200 years in the concrete able to sleep. If water penetrates, they are woken up and excrete a kind of lime that sticks the cracks.
This is not science fiction, but the current status, on the subject of self-repairing building materials, who knows what will be possible in 30 years and what in 300?

TIME

This work of art is a clock.
A new stone every ten years. 120 stones. Over 1200 years.
The view of the now virtual pyramid turns us into time travellers. She brings us news from an unknown world.
News from a wild world, or a hyper-ordered one?
Aristotle and Newton believed in absolute time, i.e. time always remains the same for them, whoever measures it. Assuming the clocks are right.
Einstein abolished the development of an absolute time. Time no longer exists separately from space, but combines with it to form an entity, space-time.
The American philosopher Jim Holt quotes scientists who claim that that time does not flow at all, but is static, 'like a frozen lake.'
All moments then happen simultaneously, whether they are in the past or in the future.
Science says that our perception of time is an illusion.

However, our daily experiences are different. we old - We're getting used to it. We accept it. We think, oh inside I'm only 20.
But if we only looked in the mirror every 10 weeks, it would be a shock.
We would see our decline so clearly that we would never leave the house.

This work of art is a clock.
When we're all gone tonight, it will tick very quietly. In this place we are reminded of our future.
What time truth is stored here?
How many blue Mondays, black Fridays, golden summers - or how many eternal returns do I still experience?
The stones don't make a face.
"The firmament blues forever and the earth will stand firm for a long time and bloom in spring - but you, man, how long do you live?" Gustav Mahler 'The Song of the Earth'.
Our end is certain and foreseeable, but how long will the earth 'stand firm'? We ourselves can poison or irradiate the planet, the sun can expand and burn the earth, space can expand and the sun can move too far from us, and an ice fjord could form here.
How did Henry Hudson see the island of Manhattan in 1609 when he arrived at the deer trail of cougars and hinds now called Broadway. Can this process that took place there also be reversed?
A few days ago, under the headline 'Fly By', the newspaper said: 'Big Asteroid named 1998 QE2 has passed Earth'. What if another happened to Earth? A great demolition expert landed here before.
What if the Nördlinger Ries cracks?
Cracks in the Nördlinger Ries
debris
death song
dig
counterworld
Black images
Could it be that this area will someday be depopulated by some event could it be that plants that we don't even know about threw their seeds in this place? Red-lacquered grass, blue trees that overgrow, entwine the perhaps completed pyramid? Could it be that this building will be rediscovered, like Maya pyramids in a jungle?
In general, this pyramid, when all 120 stones have been placed, is not reminiscent of Egyptian, but of Maya pyramids, which, like here, lack the top and instead have an upper platform for sacrificial rituals.
Could it be that the people of the future will then ask themselves which cosmological picture the mass 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.8m reflects?
Will they wonder what cult did they serve here?
Therefore: invent a KULT. Everyone for themselves, right now and let's celebrate!!
Hug, kiss, but please don't eat chicken or future archaeologists will suspect animal sacrifice and chicken worship. (The reality is worse, we sacrifice animals but we no longer worship them.)
There are quite a few people who think about a posthuman future, and against this, this work sets its utopian, limit-breaking power. It asserts itself in the whirlpool of entropy possibilities.
This art in its totality is a sign that we want to stay and that we are doing something for it.
I would like to thank Manfred Laber for that, who has the size to think so big and also makes these thoughts become reality.
Who was and is traveling the world (Berlin, Barcelona, ??Bavaria) but also (to quote Achternbusch) stayed in his homeland until you can see it, in the truest sense of the word.

TIME BECOMES SPACE HERE

and we, like little Parzivals, can be there and ask questions, questions of compassion to ourselves and to the world.
Thanks very much.