multiplex fiction

Participating at this exhibition project at the Wienerwald forest, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

My contribution departs from the link the very concept of the biosphere has to to the city of Vienna.

The term was coined by Viennese geologist Eduard Suess in the 19th century before being further developed by Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. Eduard Suess was not only a highly influential geologist, hypothesizing the supercontinent Gondwana, and one of the earliest practitioners of ecology, but also a social and political figure of his times. His major local legacy, appreciated daily by everyone living in Vienna, was the construction of the Wiener Hochquellwasserleitung, providing the disease-plagued city with fresh Alpine water in 1873.

And then there was Suess’ grandson Hans Eduard, a nuclear physicist who in the 1950s noted a strange inaccuracy of radiocarbon dating. He tracked it down to fossil-fuel derived CO2 that has been blown into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. The discovery of this so-called Suess effect not only helped scientists to date bones of dinosaurs and humans or the Venus of Willendorf, but was also one of the earliest proofs of anthropogenic climate change, a clue to the Anthropocene.

Anyway, my work in the Wienerwald is a sort of probe to measure these various Suess effects. (To no avail.)

Friday morning the cube of fine Viennese water was 1x1x1m, you can gauge the block of ice yourself tomorrow or as long as it lasts.