June 12 – September 30
Installation (2013) (soundtrack by Karlheinz ESSL)
Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna

“A chance observation has led us, over a number of years, to investigate a great variety of different forms and symptoms of hysteria, with a view to discovering their precipitating cause – the event which provoked the first occurrence, often many years earlier, of the phenomenon in question.”

Josef Breuer / Sigmund Freud
ÜBER DEN PSYCHISCHEN MECHANISMUS
HYSTERISCHER PHÄNOMENE
1893


Message and Cause
The hand – one of our most important mediums of communication, a gesture, a signal: “stop“, “come closer“, “perhaps“ – all of those messages that we deliberately or involuntary convey with our hands are common and familiar. The hand in the video loop transports ambiguous information. It moves around fiercely and in an unmotivated fashion only to pause again and come to a complete rest. We perceive a message, but it seems to elude interpretation. The message stands for its own, we do not know what has caused the emphatic movement. Equally, the patient’s symptom eludes self-explanatory information. It mirrors with those symptoms whose causes and origins occupied Sigmund Freud.

Intellectual Property
The question as to the origin or source of a message and its creator, the originator of a work, has taken on a new dimension through the digital creation and global distribution of content, news, and products. Trademarks are defined through the “function of indicating origin”, meaning through their function of indicating the origin of the product or service from a certain source. They provide orientation in the abundance of similar offers. “Intellectual property” in the sense of copyright law can only exist and be enforced if the work can be assigned to a legal subject (originates from a creative person or derives from an individualised legal subject). The question of the source is of pivotal significance also legally.