ARTEFAKT 72: Noordung's Technodispositifes

"At least three elementary reasons may be detected as for why project Noordung is established as a 50-year process:

Firstly, due to theatrical demonstration of break with traditional model of theatre, which depends upon dramatic text, in particular through its processual suspension (dead actors’ speech shall be replaced by music).

Secondly, due to theatrical representation of an instable relationship between contemporary subject/body and technology, in particular through processual substitution of dead actors’ bodies with technological substitutes. 

Thirdly, and that is the deepest and essential meaning of the work, due to theatrical representation of time itself. It is not about a simple representation of linear time, passing from the past into the future (the actors die – time passes) but is in some way a theatrical representation of Nietzsche's idea of eternal return (the actors die, but nonetheless, we are performing the very same theatrical piece again and again – the time thus stands still, or to be more precise, the time returns). 

This mysterious idea of Nietzsche – as shown by Deleuze in his most significant work – is based on the notions of difference and repetition; in other words and more precisely, on repetition which is the only means of creating a difference and can thus contribute to the creation of something new. This is also the principal starting point of project Noordung and its concept. This is rendered possible for, as Žižek puts it, 'what repetition repeats is not the way the past ‘effectively was’ but the virtuality inherent to the past and betrayed by its past actualization. In this precise sense, the emergence of the New changes not the actual past – we are not in science fiction – but the balance between actuality and virtuality of the past.'"