Introduction

How to remember a site, a place, a room, a workshop – when it is gone? The media artist returns to a site very important for him and realises that the feelings and moods related to that time in the 1950s are slipping away. He gets the idea of constructing the workshop space as a kind of model or sculpture and then transforming the sculpture into one or two photographs. That is the piece – and the outcome of the process of remembering using a transvisual method.

For the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the launch of the Sputnik in 1957 was an event “second in importance to no other.” The Sputnik meant that human beings had taken a real step toward actualizing a long wished for goal: to escape from earth. In Arendt’s telling of the story, earth alienation is part and parcel of the all-too-human dream of freeing ourselves from our humanity. The Sputnik’s launch thus signified not simply the lowering of humanity’s stature, but humanity's destruction of humanity itself.

In 1957 the media artist was on his way to becoming a teenager, a human being. What was he doing in the years before that significant event? He was living in a provincial town in Denmark far away from the metropolis. He was living with his mother and his often absent father in a tiny flat with two small room and a little kitchen. The toilet was placed at the entrance of the house and was shared by the four families living in the small house. Forced by the special circumstances and his drive for doing something with his hands, he found a room in the yard where he could have his own things and use the room as a workshop.