Walking barefoot | 2024

video still | 16:9 | colour and b&w | sound

 

 

 

"Do not just walk along a path. Talk with a path; dialogue with a path. Speak with your mouth, talk with your hands, and talk with your feet. Listen carefully with all of your body for its responses. See what it presents you with, what you find and what finds you. Seek to be found by what is visible and invisible to the human eye. And if you are healthy enough to walk it barefoot, feeling the soil with your soles, touching the rocks and tree bark with your hands, a truly tactile walk, learn through the nonverbal, learn through your skin, so that you experience the skin of the path."

 

Excerpt from Walking Art Practice: Reflections on Socially Engaged Paths, by

Ernesto Pujol.

 

 

 

 

The AlmResidency is an artist in residence in two huts below the Rechelkopf between Waakirchen and Lake Tegernsee in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. Every summer for the past eight years, it has invited four to five artists to the century-old “Ochsenhütte” and the slightly higher “Jagaheisl”. The artists live and work there for ten days and are in direct contact with nature every day. The wood stove is used to heat the room or the washing water, the water comes directly from the spring and the electricity from the solar panel on the roof, the cellar room serves as a refrigerator and you are woken up by the birds in the forest and the first rays of sunshine.

 

 

 

 

Wandering barefoot, ascending to the lofty embrace of

pine trees, I sought a divergent sense of time, engaging

in an empathic communion with the dwellers of the forest.

These were some of the thoughts I tried to develop

during my stay at Alm Residency.

 

Hiking the Bavarian foothills of the Alps, where

meadows, streams, and woodlands intertwine, I was

on a mission to find something, someone - maybe an

elusive other self.

 

But amidst the gentle and intermittent melodies of

distant cencerros, I couldn‘t help but feel a bit lost, a bit

incomplete. It was like nature was holding up a mirror,

showing me my vulnerabilities in this wild playground.

 

In the end, though, that‘s what made the journey

worthwhile. Embracing the uncertainty, and coming to

terms with the limitations of my human body—all added

up to a deeper connection with the nature around me.

 

 

 

Documentation of creative process

table in the main room of the Ochsenhütte hut, after an evening of conversations and exchange of experiences.

 

 

Documentation of creative process

 A workshop with the forester and hunter Leonhard Bendel provided first insights into forest and wildlife management

 

 

 

Erratic wandering | 2024

video still | 16:9 | 7'31" | colour | sound

 

 

 

Returning to the research subject at the Saari Residency (FI) in 2020, I use the “L”-shaped divining rods in the Waakirchen forest in a different sense. This time I am looking for an ideal path within so many uncertainties in life. The narrative unfolds in a dreamlike and fabulous way. The perception of time is reduced and hearing is amplified.

 

 

 

 

The notion that certain skilled individuals can discover underground water by using a mysterious talent known as "dowsing" (or "witching" or "divining") is widely regarded among serious scientists as no more than a superstitious relic from medieval times. No plausible physical or physiological mechanism has ever been proposed by which such detection might be possible. Nevertheless, the worldwide persistence of this practice through the centuries might lead open-minded people to wonder whether there could be a germ of truth behind the folklore. After all, valuable additions to the modern pharmacopoeia have sometimes been derived from folk medicine, thus proving that not all folklore is unmitigated superstition.

Planning an Experimental Study

Many dowsers in Germany think that the stimuli to which they claim to respond ("earthrays," said to be a subtle form of radiation not otherwise known to science) arc potentially hazardous to human health, perhaps even inducing cancer. Hence, in the middle 1980s, the German government brought together a committee to consider how a proper study might be conducted to investigate the possibility that dowsing is a genuine skill. If dowsers can indeed detect (dangerous?) radiation, perhaps they might be able to contribute to research in public health issues. The outcome of those deliberations was a grant of 400,000 German marks (about $250,000), in 1986, to university physicists in Munich. Generous funding assures a large-scale project, so that even weak effects might become evident; the reputation of university-based researchers for open-minded integrity means that their participation provides credibility that a project managed only by dowsers themselves would not have. For an open-minded test of claimed extraordinary abilities, the claimants deserve a lair opportunity for success by providing conditions they regard as suitable, and in this regard, the Munich researchers seem to have bent over backward. Experiments designed only by doubters might, of course, leave dowsers with convenient reasons to discount a disappointing outcome. Enthusiasts for dowsing were therefore involved in the planning sessions. When practitioners of various occult "skills" have, in the past, been unsuccessful under controlled testing, they have at times claimed that the research was conducted in a skeptical (by implication, hostile) atmosphere, which interfered with their performances and invalidated the studies. That potential problem did not arise in the Munich experiments because the principal investigators, from the University of Munich and the Technical University of Munich, had publicly gone on record as thinking that dowsing is probably a genuine phenomenon. No hostility there! Water dowsing ordinarily takes place out of doors, and this raises potential difficulties for meaningful experiments, because no two outdoor locations can be considered fully equivalent replicates; and the essence of proper scientific research is replicated testing to examine reproducibility. Most German dowsing practitioners, however, also claim to be able to dowse the location of water piping in a garden or within a structure, so indoor testing was decided upon. Another potential problem is that among those who think that they have dowsing skill, some may be mistaken or perhaps are even deliberate frauds. To avoid these potential pitfalls, some 500 candidate dowsers were recruited for preliminary testing. That group was winnowed down to forty-three individuals for the final, critical experiments: those who seemed to be most successful in the preliminary tests. Those dowsers all freely participated in the carefully controlled final experiments, which they accepted as suitable to their abilities. There could thus be no basis for subsequent claims that the test program was inappropriate or unfair.


Experimental Design

The detailed test procedure was a very simple one. On the ground floor of a large vacant barn near Munich, a ten-meter test line was established, along which a small wagon could be moved; and atop the wagon was a short length of pipe, perpendicular to the line and connected by hoses to a pump that could provide circulating water. Circulating water was chosen rather than still water because the traditions of dowsers postulate that useful underground water supplies are mainly to be found as flowing streams that they refer to as "water arteries" and not just within extensive deposits of permeable sediment, as geologists would tell them.

 

 

 

 

 

The location of the pipe for each single test was to be determined by a computer-generated random number (although the settings actually used turned out to be decidedly nonrandomly located along the line). On the upper floor of the barn, directly above the experimental line, a ten-meter test line was established. For the critical final experiments, a dowser was re-admitted to the upperfloor arena each time that the pipe had been repositioned, and was required, with his or her witching stick (or pendulum or other tool of choice), to guess where the pipe on the ground floor was located. A given dowser was tested in a sequence of from 5 to 15 single tests (typically 10), which typically took about an hour. During the two-year program in the barn, the forty-three selected dowsers participated in 843 single tests, grouped into 104 test-scries of this sort. Some dowsers undertook only a single test series, selected others underwent more than ten test series. It would seem that such indoor testing should appreciably simplify the dowsers' task. Out of doors, the critical stimuli might be deflected or refracted by intervening layers of soil and rock, but in the barn, the only obstruction was the flooring between stories. Furthermore, in an outdoor setting, the detection of "water arteries," as dowsers envision them, should require remarkable precision. If, say, a 3-metcr-diamctcr stream of water were to be located at a depth of 100 meters, the dowser must achieve precision of less than 1° around the vertical in determining the point of maximal stimuli for drilling, and this apparently implies detection of minuscule changes in stimulus direction and/or intensity. Comparable 1 "-precision around the vertical in the barn, however, with the target only, say, about five meters away, would result in uncertainty of less than 10 centimeters around the pipe's actual location. Before the experiments began, a professional magician was brought in to inspect the entire arrangement for the potential for deception or cheating by the dowsers. As an additional precaution against cheating (such as peeking through cracks in the floor), an experimenter/observer was also present to supervise the dowsers' performances, and to record the guesses. Doubleblind procedures assured that neither the observer nor the dowser knew the pipe's location, even after a guess had been made; thus, no feedback was provided during the critical testing.
The study involved many thousands of preliminary tests, in which the careful controls of the final critical experiments were relaxed. Often, for example, feedback about success or failure was given in those preliminary tests. Sometimes the pipe was filled with fresh water, sometimes salt water, sometimes even empty; sometimes flow was turbulent, sometimes not; sometimes sand or gravel was mixed in with the water, and so on. The preliminary testing had two purposes: as indicated above, to eliminate those candidates whose trials showed no appreciable dowsing skill (more tiian 90 percent of the candidates!); and to choose for the selected participants those aspects of the preliminary tests (fluid, flow rate, etc.) that had led to their best initial results. Each individual's final critical testing could thus be based on his or her "optimal stimuli." Before a critical test series, each dowser was asked to determine whether there were any places along the test line (without pipe present) that seemed to provide stimuli that could be mistaken for the target (presumably indicating natural sources of "earth rays"). In quite a large number of cases, two or threesuch locations were reported along the 10-meter line. "Earth rays" are seemingly nearly everywhere! When such non-target stimuli were reported, the surrounding regions of the line (typically one meter wide) were then excluded for that dowser's test series as potential test locations. (A given dowser often reported different artifact locations on different days; natural sources of "earth-ray" stimuli are apparently transient.) An ideal experimental design was frequendy compromised, because two dowsers arrived at the barn at the same time. Instead of testing those individuals one after the other, the two dowsers were tested alternately, each pipe setting being used twice in succession. It was assumed that their guesses could be treated as independent because the two individual dowsers were not simultaneously present in the test arena. If a dowser felt that his or her concentration was waning during testing, the test series could be interrupted or terminated, which apparently happened quite often. Thus, it seems quite obvious that many accommodations were made to the wishes and whims of the dowsers and the experimenters. Nevertheless, many aspects of sound experimental design were built into the critical testing: double-blind protocol, no feedback about success or failure, randomized (well, sort of!) pipe settings, replicated testing of the same dowsers on different days, and a large-scale program (843 critical tests) so that small sets of "good" results would not deserve undue attention. It is conceivable that the noise of water turbulence (sometimes with gravel in the water) could have provided localized auditory information during the testing. Another concern is that the experimenter supervising the dowsers may not have been properly "blinded," when aware that identical pipe settings were being used for two dowsers in alternation. If truly remarkable dowsing success had been achieve in the experiments, such concerns would deserve careful attention. In fact, however, the overall negative outcome suggests that any residual defects in the experimental design usually had no important impact on the outcome.
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