Some Point in a History of Quantification
Installation in public space
Wood
2019

Some Point in a History of Quantification is a site specific work at the confluence point – any intersection between a longitude and a latitude – of the 48th parallel north and the 17th meridian east, in a field between Gattendorf and Zurndorf, small villages in Austria. The lengths of the crossing wooden pieces correspond to the ratio of the lengths of these two geographic markers. Their crossing point corresponds to the position (48N, 17E) of this intervention, referring to the prime meridian and the equator, each represented through a thin black line in the middle of the laths. They are aligned northerly and easterly respectively. 

Therein, Some Point in a History of Quantification stages a superimposition and collision of a local landscape and a global system of coordination, that still plays an important role in the structuring and navigation of and within space. On the one hand, the title refers to the small scale quantification of agricultural production – the rasterization of the natural landscape into a mosaic of mostly rectangular areas of monocultural farming –, while on the other hand it points to the dynamic of capitalism to continuously produce spatialities, that are characterized by a „growing contradiction between lived experience and structure, or between a phenomenological description of the life of an individual and a more properly structural model of the conditions of existence of that experience“ (Fredric Jameson, „Cognitive Mapping“, 1988).