ABSTRACT
In their curricula vitae Giuseppe Lignano and Ada Toller humbly describe their presentations about their work as lectures – they are not. To attend a LOT-EK presentation is an event. You sit in the darkened auditorium (a little darker than usual – this should be a warning) and wait for the casual joke, the personal anecdote, at least a brief introduction. It doesn’t come. Instead a series of images begin to pass across the screen – each one intense and interesting yet there for only an instant. A voice is heard – Giuseppe’s or Ada’s – not sentences but words, not descriptions of what you are seeing but still . . . connected to it. The images are nearly exclusively of urban environments focusing on the things that we almost do not see, vehicles, hoardings, service gantries, road overpasses, bill boards, lighting poles, cable and pipe runs, television screens, advertisements again. Then you see a theme in the images and the words (which it becomes clear are in alphabetical order) become meaningful – aberrant, abnormal, abstruse, absurd, alien, anomaly – and begin to add information to what you are seeing. Suddenly there is a pause and the images are of a LOT-EK project and the words become sentences relating an absolutely straightforward description of what it is, what it does and how it was made. No theoretical wondering (or wandering). Then we are back into the images and words until the next project interjects.
