Labyrinth – O.Nocolai & J.Wenzel Translated by Sadie Plant
I’ve been reading this book.
“The starting point for this transcript of four lectures, all held in Leipzig in 2010, is a public art work that Olaf Nicolai installed in Paris in 1998. By exploring and combining a broad spectrum of topics that relate to the theme of the labyrinth, this book serves as both, a reference system to Nicolai’s work as well as an independent source book dealing with labyrinthian matter ranging from the minotaur to the floorplans of IKEA. Published in collaboration with Rollo Press.”
https://spectorbooks.com/book/labyrinth-four-times-through-the-labyrinth
I found this book while searching in the library for aesthetic inspiration for my game, but found it much more helpful that that. I recognised the name of Sadie Plant on the front cover, who translated this work.
Here is a long list of parts I found inspiration in and is something of a labyrinth in itself:
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Shannon coined the term “bit” (binary digit) to define the smallest unit of information, when he started to work on computer game consoles at the end of the 1940s. In 1949 he developed “Caissac”, an algorithmic chess program which ran on a relay computer and was one of the very first digital games. Four years later he built the first console, the “3-Relay Kit, on which more than fifty games could be played.
Many of these computer games were basically orientation exercises in digital space, ways of learning how to move through the labyrinth of cyberspace. This is a theme to which I will return.
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There is no doubt that a labyrinth makes us aware of our entanglements with space, the importance of knowing where we are and what we’re heading for. We have to respond to the environment and at the same time feel that n can orientate ourselves, take control, and make the right decisions at difficult times.
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Not until the late Renaissance in Italy was there asht from the visual to the kinaesthetic. Paths now ran between high hedges that could no longer be scaled.
They were not then to be followed with the gaze alone, but to be explored with the whole body. And the shit from the labyrinths of the late Middle Ages, which had no forking paths, to mazes with branches and dead ends signified a new way of thinking too. Centre stage was no longer individuals guided solely by God, but subjects responsible for their own decisions.
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The dérive, developed by the Situationists in the 1950s, was a means of wandering without a plan in order to explore such connectivities. Guy Debord, one of the intellectual figures behind the Situationist movement, spoke of an “edu-cational labyrinth”. More on this later too.
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…to their later professional life. The fine arts bear the attributes of mathematical rationality: measuring instruments, a clock, and a book.
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In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, vast, flat labyrinths were laid out on the floors of several gothic churches in Italy and France. Pilgrims would follow the labyrinthine path, often while praying on their knees, to symbolise the perilous passage of the dead to paradise, the sinner’s path to salvation. For this reason some of these labyrinths were known as “Chemins de Jérusalem”, roads to Jerusalem.
As well as the contemplative, meditative practice of walking the labyrinth, the courses laid out on church floors in the Middle Ages were also used for dancing. According to Gernot Candolini, “labyrinths were paths on which to refert and dance floors too. Men and women, bishops, priests, and children prayed and danced on them in churches for some 300 years. In 1500, dancing in church labyrinths was brought to an end. Within just a few decades it would seem quite alien, even unthinkable.”
More than half of these gothic labyrinths were removed in the late eighteenth century. They were scraped away, dug out, or covered with white marble, and all for the same reason: it was considered too disturbing to see children having fun as they made their ways around the paths.
Play was regarded as a waste of time -one’s own time, and God’s time too-and such inconsequential ways of losing oneself were intolerable to the authorities, especially in a church.
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IKEA, the Swedish home furnishings store, lays out its stores as labyrinths, each with a single route to the exit on which choices nonetheless have to be constantly made.
These labyrinthine layouts are deliberate: customers move on a preordained zigzagging path which keeps sending them left and right so that they see as many new products as possible.
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It is a curious fact that in anatomy of the organs of the inner ear responsible for our sense of balance are abo thought of as a labyrinth: the complex cavity of the petrols bone is known as the bony labyrinth, from the Latin “Labyr rinthus osseus”
The labyrinth of the inner ear helps us to negotiate the labyrinths of the outside world. With this linguistic par allel, this homonym, the inside and the outside are turned inside out.
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The tower affords an impression of the space which is quite distinct from the view one had amongst the thick hedges of the maze. The setting has its own implicit drama: one has to complete the journey through the maze before one is rewarded with the tower’s overview. The promise is thar of knowledge itself.
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But the labyrinth is no empty space. On the contrary, it isa complex system of relations, full of accessible and inviting ways. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, coined the term “rela-tional order-space” (“relationaler Ordnungsraum”) to define such spaces in terms of the relationships between the things it contains: the order of coexistence produced, for example, by Theseus and the Minotaur.
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Does one’s sense of direction improve, the more one how Or is it even harder to find the way when one knows low easy it is to get lost?
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In “Man, Play and Games”, Roger Caillois writes that although we enter into games voluntarily, the particular choices we then make are determined by the nature of our thoughts about the ways in which our decisions are affected by internal impulses or external forces-ways of thinking that govern how we play.
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