RG02 is the second of two reinventions of Klenke’s studio. In relation to RG01, it is rotated by thirty degrees on the stage. Its corresponding facade and balcony (RG03) are projected across the performance space so that the room intersects with this first, orthogonally oriented version. This time, the bed retains its full width but is shortened by one third, making space for a vertical element displaying a sliding facemask. The opposite end of the bed niche is reinvented as a seesaw mechanism holding a perforated steel screen, a second mask, and a pair of handlebars.
The RGs’ accumulative nature results not only from the layering of an indeterminate training practice, but also from the layered process of reconstructing the architectural framing of Klenke’s practice. In a first step, the studio room is digitally modelled based on historical photos and drawings (which themselves are of course already part of a pre-existing layered process of architectural representation and self-branding and are embedded in an ongoing hagiography of what is perceived as ‘the’ Bauhaus1). This digital model is then used for the simulation of historical environmental conditions, which become the basis for a series of drawings as well as animated simulations reconstructing Klenke’s movement sequences. When our field work takes us to the Dessau Bauhaus (in turn, of course, already a partial reconstruction based on the above-mentioned representations), we sleep and work in Klenke’s studio, where the performers physically re-enact the movement sequences. The movements, as well as the space containing them, are 3D Lidar scanned and are integrated into a master 3D digital model.
Yet how can this heterogeneous virtual-actual simultaneity be conveyed? A filmic documentation of the project titled Jakob K : A Reconstruction4 (see introduction page) overlays, merges, and conflates different elements like scans, rehearsals, re-enactments, historical photographs, simulations, identities, data, text, and drawings. It conveys the compound visuality of the project and contains a series of filmic hinges, through which the viewer can effortlessly shift between simultaneous states and collapsed tenses. The irony perhaps is that the film’s fluidity at crossing the intrinsic borders of these conditions is enabled precisely through imposing the extrinsic boundary of filmic framing and narrative linearity. So, while it might be effective at teaching the viewer about the ‘assemblageness’ and simultaneity of the project, it is less successful at effectively, as the aforementioned instruments did, engaging this viewer in its ongoing invention.
On stage, a series of devices are used as hinges linking between the simultaneous virtual and actual layers of this saturated space. The floor graphics, for example, don’t just mark the outlines of both intersecting versions of Klenke’s studio, but also trace the shadows of the steel window frames, which had been created in our early environmental simulations and had structured the performer’s first in-situ re-enactments. The space of virtual simulation not only saturates but also contaminates the actual space of performance. As such, it destabilises the notion of a single, homogeneous space of performance, inviting the audience to navigate and cohabit this heterogeneous space.5
Another hinge is formed by the large projection wall (F01), a perforated gauze screen on which footage and animations of 3D scans, previous reconstructions, and re-enactments are projected. The size, form, and proportions of the L-shaped screen refer to the glazed wall wrapping Gropius’s Bauhaus workshop (the same one as praised above by Giedion), and when dormant the screen receives still projections of Lidar scans of this facade.
A last device hinging between the various layers of the project’s simultaneity is attached to RG01. It is an eyepiece that allows the audience and the performers to explore the set as if seeing literally through the eyes of a Lidar scanner, experiencing the technological otherness of this non-human mode of vision. The cast silicon eyepiece connects to a 1.2-metre-long steel tube, which rotates around the upright part of the instrument and allows the viewer to experience only tiny islands of vision, akin to the collimated individual rays of the Lidar scanner. The set dissolves into a series of radial points, a horizontal slice of the scanner’s visual otherness. The instrument invites us to become one with the optical, spatial, and performative assemblage of heterogeneous components that make up the project.
RG02’s rotation and its overlap with the space of RG01 takes a direct cue from these Lidar scans in their pre-registered state: though each scan as such is precise to the millimetre, the scans, when loaded into the processing software, are not yet oriented in relation to each other. Multiple versions of identical architectural fragments overlap: a series of point clouds of the Prellerhaus compete for veracity while the iconic curtain facade of the workshop wing is fractured and self-intersects. We are reminded of Sigfried Giedion’s famous description of the very same workshop facade nearly eighty years earlier:
There is the hovering, vertical grouping of planes which satisfies our feeling of a relational space, and there is the extensive transparency that permits interior and exterior to be seen simultaneously, en face and en profile, like Picasso’s L’Arlesienne of 1911–12: a variety of levels of reference, or of points of reference, and simultaneity. (1957: 489)
It is tempting to indulge in this resonance – observing perhaps that the point cloud, lending an ‘extensive transparency’ to the entire building, also permits us to see, through the solid walls, which have dissolved into thin translucent skins, ‘interior and exterior simultaneously’, and hence ‘satisfies our feeling of relational space’ even more than the picture originally described. But there is arguably also a richer sense of simultaneity at play here.
This simultaneity is one that cannot be grasped purely visually – as is suggested by Giedion’s analogy with a painting2 – nor can it be described as just a simultaneity of multiple contradicting versions of one space (e.g., Jakob’s room), or multiple self-intersecting point clouds. Beyond these homogeneous simultaneities (the simultaneous components being of the same register), there is a heterogeneous simultaneity produced by the accumulating layers of our working process: the literal ‘layers’ in our modelling software (scans, drawings, photographs, simulations) and the linked files within the project’s file structure, but also the embodied, layered memories of our visits and re-enactments. All these virtual layers cohabit the synchronous, heterogeneous assemblage that is the project. The word ‘virtual’, in this context, is used not (only) in the sense of ‘digital’ or ‘computational’, but as opposed to (or rather underlying) the actual.3 The performance and the stage set are hence to be read as actualisations of this project-assemblage, which are saturated with its layered virtualities.
