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Abstract
This article explores the abstract space–time concept of ma through analysis and interpretation of Austrian artist Karl-Heinz Klopf’s film Tower House (2013). The film is based on an extraordinary house built in Tokyo in 1966 and designed by architect Takamitsu Azuma. Moving between film theory, Eastern mysticism, cognitive psychology, narrative theory, and the phenomenology and ontology of space and time, the main hypothesis is that Klopf uses special film techniques that demonstrate, augment and construct ma. It is argued that this process can also be understood through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophy as a space–time concept in a continuous process of becoming. How does Klopf augment a philosophy of living and logic of architectural space in the filmmaking methodology of Tower House based on the Eastern concept of ma? How can we further understand this using Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of becoming? Which new frameworks bring the annexation of Deleuzian and Guattarian philosophy to Klopf’s artistic visualization and interpretation of architecture and philosophy of living in Tower House? How do these help us understand a space of tolerance as an ontological concept?
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Acknowledgments
The first version of this article, under the title “Through the Western View: Karl-Heinz Klopf’s Tower House,” was presented at 9th International Deleuze Studies Conference Virtuality Becoming and Life at the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Visual Arts, University of Roma Tre, Rome, Italy, July 11–13, 2016. The author thanks Karl-Heinz Klopf, Arturo Silva, Senior Scientist Dr. Oliver Schürer, Mio Choki, Professor Dr. Darko Reba, Professor Dr. Radivoje Dinulović and two anonymous reviewers.
Notes
Notes
1 The ideogram ma (間) consists of two symbols: one that signifies “gate” or door, and the other that is inside the first symbol and which signifies “moon.” Together, these symbols depict “a delicate moment of moonlight streaming through a chink in the entrance way”; Günter Nitschke, “Ma – Place, Space, Void,” in From Shinto to Ando (London: Wiley, 1993), 48–62, at 49. The character ma is an integral part of many words in the Japanese language.
2 Arata Isozaki, Japan-ness in Architecture, ed. David B. Stewart, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 93.
3 Translation based on entry in Susumu Ōno et al., eds. Iwanami Kogo Jiten [Iwanami Dictionary of Old Japanese] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1982), cited in Isozaki, Japan-ness in Architecture, 94.
4 Isozaki, Japan-ness in Architecture, 94.
5 Ibid., 95.
6 Klopf received a special mention for Tower House at the 38th Duisburg Film Week in 2014 and at the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) Award for Film and Video in 2017.
7 Klopf’s first visit to Tokyo was in 1994, where his friend introduced him to the architect Takamitsu Azuma. On that occasion, Azuma guided him through the house and told him about his intentions related to the house (how and why he built in the center of Tokyo). One year later, Klopf returned to Tokyo for a longer residency (1995–96) during which the video Splace was made. Within this video, which consists of different individual stories related to the spatial experience of Tokyo, Tower House was also shown. Sixteen years later, in 2012, Klopf decided to make a film dedicated exclusively to Tower House; interview between Karl-Heinz Klopf and Željka Pješivac, November 11, 2018.
8 Naomi Pollock, Modern Japanese House (New York: Phaidon, 2005), 15 (with my correction of the title of the street).
9 Ibid.
10 Interview between Klopf and Pješivac.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 These techniques are further developed in Klopf’s next short film Testa (2018) on the National Library of Argentina. The horizontal, rectilinear, spiral motions of camera, in places accompanied by vertical, rectilinear, sliding of images, will be replaced in this film by simultaneous vertical and horizontal curvilinear, vertiginous camera motions. The space of the National Library of Argentina constructed in the film will be experienced as a labyrinthine space, where the reference to Jorge Luis Borges’s book Labyrinths, Selected Stories & Other Writings (eds. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: A New Directions Book, 1964)) will be more than suggestive. Interesting information is also that Borges was one of the directors of this library.
14 Anon., Tower House (Citation2013), available online: http://www.khklopf.at/video/tower-house/ (accessed June 17, 2015).
15 Ibid.
16 Rie Azuma, in Klopf, Tower House.
17 Pollock, Modern Japanese House, 17.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Azuma, in Klopf, Tower House.
21 Kisho Kurokawa, The Philosophy of Symbiosis (London: Academy Editions, 1994).
22 Barrie Shelton, Learning from the Japanese City: West meets East in Urban Design (London: E & FN Spon, 1999).
23 Ibid., 26.
24 According to Deleuze and Guattari, optic space is defined by requirements of a view directed toward remote distances, that is, by the constancy of orientation, invariant distances and constitution of a central perspective, while tactile or better haptic space is filled with orientations, landmarks and linkages that are in continuous variation; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]), 493–94. In opposition to optic space, haptic space has no background, plane or contour, but rather changes in direction and local linkages between parts; ibid., 496. Optic space sets up an interference between the planes, works with cubic or voluminous extensions, organizes perspective, and plays on relief and shadow, light and color; ibid., 495.
25 Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 8.
26 Nitschke, “Ma – Place, Space, Void,” 54.
27 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image [1983], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1986), 10.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Dynamism does not refer here, in an architectural context, to the form of compositional turmoil, but rather to the ability of the spatial organization and composition of the house to develop and change itself, embracing othernesses and differences without losing “the whole.”
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Željka Pješivac
Željka Pješivac M.Sc., M.A., Ph.D. is architect and theoretician of architecture and other arts. She is author of In/Expressible Space: Pre-textual, Textual and Post-textual Concepts of Space in Theory of Arts and Media (Belgrade: Orion Art, 2018).