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Vague Space Text 2017, November, with Stefan Schwabe
In order to investigate the threshold as an abstract phenomenon and to enhance a purposeful exploration within, we felt the urge to conceptualise and frame it. A threshold is something inconcrete, something vague, standing in contrast to everything else that is defined and concrete. In our everyday reality we can observe a tendency of favouring the concrete. Things mostly need to be explainable and efficient. They have to make sense. Those things we do not understand and which we struggle to put into words are often hard to integrate into economic contexts. Nevertheless, there is a vast and on-going dynamic between the vague and the concrete. We would like to investigate and better understand this dynamic and give space to the inconcrete. This led us to the conception of the Vague Space (Fig. 1). The Vague Space can be understood as a place of »thresholdness«, picturing a space of possibilities rather than a space of realities. The concrete is something we »know« and that is charecterised through the existence of terms and definitions1. One could picture this as a structure built from puzzle pieces, in which our language plays a major part in constructing and joining these single pieces. Nevertheless, there is a horizon of what we know and what we can put into words and therefore, what we can imagine. We all know the feeling of crossing this horizon, when words are missing to describe a thought, when gut feeling is leading the way or when things are in the air. This is where we catch a glimpse of the Vague Space. By investigating this vagueness, we hope to understand the dynamics of how one can approach, explore or examine the inconcrete that is located inside this space and how to contextualise it with the concrete. ...