Khôra I. Torun (PL)

VIDEOMAPPING

Concept and Visuals:
Dan Gregor ( initi.org )
Amar Mulabegović
Concept and music/sound composed:
Ondřej Skala ( soundcloud.com/jtnb )
2013

Very special thanks goes to our friend Andrej Boleslavsky for Kinect recording.

This work was chosen as an part of a great company and "best of" selection at Ars Electronica animation festival 2014.
http://www.aec.at/c/en/ars-electronica-animation-festival-2014/

Khôra (Khora or Chora; Ancient Greek: χώρα)
is a philosophical term described by Plato in Timaeus as a receptacle, a space, or an interval. It is neither being nor nonbeing but an interval between in which the “forms” were originally held. Khôra “gives space” and has maternal overtones (a womb, matrix). A formless and unnameable “it” that we cannot identify but only evoke with images of unidentifiable places, like a kind of dissolution into the tohu wa bohu* (waste and void), what Levinas calls the il y a** (the Other - a formless void; a frightening neutrality devoid of meaning), the elemental night.

* Biblical Hebrew phrase found in the Book of Genesis 1:2. It is usually translated “waste and void”, “formless and empty”, or some variation of the same. It describes the condition of the earth before God said, “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3). Precise translation of the phrase is difficult, as only the first word, “tohu,” appears to have any independent meaning.

** The idea of the other was formalized by Emmanuel Levinas, and later made popular by Edward Said in his well-known book Orientalism. Despite originally being a philosophical concept, othering has political, economic, social and psychological connotations and implications. The “Other”, as a general term in philosophy, can also be used to mean the unconscious, silence, insanity, the other of language (i.e., what it refers to and what is unsaid), etc.