Playground – in search of the dramatic prosperity of our world.
Or: how to implement abstract symbolizations into the texture of a concrete place.

An artistic interpretation by Jan Torpus and Vera Bühlmann, implemented in the St.Johann Park in Basel, Switzerland.

New technology confronts. With what exactly is hard to tell. Tor together with our capacity to imagine the truly unwonted, our language deserts us usually. Because of that, there is – at least at first sight – a certain awkwardness if one tries to do so anyway. This goes also and for the technologies we work with for lifeClipper2. Applying »Augmented Reality Tools« in order to add »virtual content« to the giveness of our presumably immediate surrounds, thereby »staging public space« in a way that allows for »audiovisual walking experiences« - all of these concepts have something tautological about them.

Tautological expressions are often regarded as a blunt fault of style. In rhetoric, a tautology is a repetition of meaning, using different words that effectively say the same thing twice as in a free gift. And in logics, a tautological argument is not considered an argument at all.

At the same time, tautological structures reveal subterranean shiftings, tensions, and pressures. Referring to a gift as free might indeed make perfectly sense in a culture where the language game of »gifts« has been operationalized in a proper economy of expectations, obligations, and commitments. In this sense, tautological structures are similar also to volcanic sources, effervescences springing from between the tectonic plates beneath the (common) ground. One way of opening up the poetic game of difference and repetition, they are also expressions of transformations within the realm of the symbolic.

Within the AR community, many people today are attempting to find or develop something like a »design language« for these technologies. With our scenario playground we suggest that such a »language« could be dealing with the specific qualities of tautological referentiality as its elements of composition.

We view playgrounds as the emblematic site for the productivity of self-referentiality. They allow kids (and us) to bodily and sensuously experience the basic physical constraints for our being in the world: physical forces, the gravity of objects, as well as the provisional »transcendence« of our more or less fine-tuned orientation. Swinging through the air, circling fast on a rotating wheel, by oneself or collectively in a group, stepping lightly on soft grounds after jumping form a wooden castle – playgrounds give grounds for our playing with how it might feel if we could juggle with our own weight.

Is it possible to surf the very constraints that put us down to earth? What if we dramatized the physical parameters of our habitual inertial systems in a way that allowed us to explore the seemingly paradoxical lightness of groundings? The scenario playground explores the potential of the lifeclipper2 technology to instantiate what we call »differential gravities«.

Basel November 17th, Vera Bühlmann

If you are interested in visiting this scenario please contact us. We can put you on the waiting list and contact you again as soon as we fixed new dates for visits or events.

Here you can download the current draft of the scenario: