"Collapse, loveless boundary stones of the horizons! Appear, real distances!" (Oscar-Vladislas de Lubicz-Milosz, L'amoureuse initiation, 1910)

When, with the inventions of the microscope and the telescope the triumph of the 'immediate view' was initiated in the beginning of the 17th century, and coupled with the development of the scientific method to prove or disprove a thesis by use of experiments, humanity entered into the modern times of empiricism and ostensive evidence, and the concept of infinity which had accompanied scientific research was substituted with the concept of perfection.

Yet, the manner in which perfection is defined depends on fashion. Research has become contingent on what one could call as well, the efficiency of the market. The future is cut from the past and Milosz's 'country of childhood' burns on the stake of the present:

What words, what terribly old music Shuddering in me of your unreal presence, Somber dove of days far, mild, beautiful, What melodies in echo in the sleep?

It is the 'infallible substance which is present in us only as an ideal', it is the 'infinite', argues Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam in his novel 'L'Eve Future' (1886). The dreamer 'is conscious of the unspeakable space, whose mere figure is the visible space in which we are enclosed'. I come to you as a delegate of those borderless regions whose pale boundary the human being can only perceive weakly sometimes in between dream and sleep. There the times pass into each other; there is no space anymore! says Hadaly, Villiers' perfect electro-mechanical reproduction of a human being with a transcended soul. 'There is no space anymore!' Does infinity negate space? Does Villiers issue one suspect in his novel that later is issued by Henri Bergson, ie. that the technological replication of a concept leaves us without time and space? Bergson argued with Einstein, Leibniz with a friend of Newton. Where is the space, where is the truth? Where infinity? Infinity lies between. The rectangular room is painted in bright white. No window or door disturbs the continuity of the walls. However, there must be openings in the ceiling as natural light enters the room from above, along the walls, as funnel-shaped rays. I am ONE. I walk to be, ALWAYS THE LAST in my sequence. My memories are operators to my dreams says the girl in the virtual garden. This paper discusses variant concepts of infinity vis a vis concepts of perfection, truth, and their implications for the perception of space.



Author Bio
Claudia Westermann was born in 1971 in Heidelberg, Germany. She studied architecture at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, and the University of Tampere, Finland, and undertook additional postgraduate studies in the field of media art at the HfG in Karlsruhe and currently a PhD candidate with the Planetary Collegium. Her works have been presented widely at international festivals and conferences including the Venice Biennale for Architecture in Italy, the Moscow International Film Festival in Russia, ISEA 2002 in Nagoya , Japan, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany and the IFCT 2003 in New York, USA. The artist has her home site at http://www.ezaic.de E-mail: c@ezaic.de.