summ( )n

Last Saturday we managed to get to the art gardens of the foundation Insel Hombroich Stiftung Insel Hombroich, near Dusseldorf. We’ve been there about a year ago, and ever since this time I wanted to revisit this magical place. In some sense the space they created is one big SUMMON (in our sense of the word, that is). It’s an amazing spatial experience, combining diverse natural landscape and exquisite art-scape; the park is a true blend of art and nature, and the experience of being their may well work as a real transformation.

Their website does not quite reflect all these beauties, which is a pity. But I wonder if any website would be any good for that place. One of those rare moments when my usual preference of everything digital surrender.

My only line of ‘constructive criticism’ would be in the area of ‘gameplay’ (or rather, lack of it there). I tend to think that it can be made richer; in some way I appreciate the zen-like
absence of it in the current re-incarnation of the park/space, but I also feel the experience can become even more powerful and memorable if people would be engaged into a meta-game of some sort, spreading across the whole environment there.

This is already famous installation called 3G International, by the Russian art group Electroboutique (Aristarkh Chernyshev, Alexei Shulgin in collaboration with Roman Minaev). It was a part of the Futurologia exhibition in the Russian center of contemporary art Garage in Moscow (I’ve see it there last year, but was not able to take a picture, so this one is not mine).

It is an allusion to another famous project, the Tatlin’s Tower, or the Monument to the Third International, designed by Russian architect Vladimir Tatlin (but it can also be read as a cleaver mockery of the ongoing efforts of the Russian leaders to somehow bend the technologies and subordinate them to their ever utopian ideas).

These things are here for different reasons, however. To all my surprise, the themes of ‘Russia’ and ‘future’ are increasingly often intersect with the path of Summ()n. The ‘future’ part per se is not such a news, Summ()n is all about the future(s), but I didn’t expect such an interest to what we do from various Russian companies and organizations. In fact, not only Russian – some of the companies here in Europe asked us to help them in exploring possible future developments of different areas in Russia.

Being a bit too busy with the ‘now’ part (we run a couple of large projects at the moment with more traditional ‘people research’ approach), I don’t always have a moment to write about these interesting and exciting opportunities and should really start doing it more often.