How Leo Came to Intensive Floating

Leo is happy to give you some information about his motivations and thinkings. He is a conceptual artist from Germany, based in Berlin. And he is a big floater. His work is all about floating. More precisely: Intensive Floating. What’s the story behind it?

Well, when Leo was young he earned a lot of money by sleeping during the day. In these days Germans normally work all day. So it was very unusual, you can say nearly impossible, to sleep during the day. The German body resisted it with every fibre. That was the reason why everybody wanted to see Leo’s outstanding sleeping skills. People payed almost every price to watch him sleeping during the day. (Of course these times are over now.)

Leo wanted to do something good with his easy made wealth. As the visionary he was Leo foresaw that floating in the future will become one of the crucial relaxation, liberation and mental survival techniques. So he decided to invest all his money in the floating research of a brilliant but as it later turned out quite unstable scientist. Unfortunately the more and more desperate scientist took the money and run away to live somewhere in a traditional lifestyle like people did before the emergence of floating. If it is true what Leo heard about this fugitive, the scientist went to the German no man’s land. People there worked very hard at daytime. In the evening they still practiced the rites of couch potatoes deifying their three tv channels brought to them via terrestrial reception. They used to know the flow of the television period very well (older generations maybe also knew the shock of the cinematic era) but not at all the floating phenomenon of the digital age.

Leo could not follow the scientist to get the money back. It was too dangerous. A contemporary artist like him with high degree of probability would never came back from a German hillbilly area at this time. As a consequence Leo quitted sleeping during the day and started his own studies on floating. But he did it as an artist not as a scientist. So he conducted his studies with artistic means. Therefore Leo started several artistic experiments to let things float in space and time. In so doing he developed very effective techniques driving different dimensions of floating, for example:

• Blurification for floating colors and forms.
• Deterritorialization for floating accepted spaces and borders.
• Deconstellationing for floating given relations and functions.
• Falsification for floating someones truth and propaganda.

As you can see floating means a set of soft, but very powerful forces. They may seem inconspicuous or harmless. In the end floating can initiate an unstoppable and endless transformation of your mind.

What Leo wants to achieve with his work is Intensive Floating. A project becomes an intensive floater when it takes the audience into a special floating mode reflecting itself: Feeling the floating thoughts and thinking the floating feelings. After all Intensive Floating is too big to be matched by your thoughts and feelings. Therefore it is an endless and incommensurable incident.

Join.

Have encounters with floating intensities.
Be yourself an intensive floater.
(And stay away from desperate scientists.)

A Little Bit More Background

Today Leo is a big and famous floater. Some people say he is the head of the world wide floating movement. So from today’s perspective one could think that his interest in the phenomenon of floating was the beginning of a predestined development of his character. But more critical spirits may wonder how he could imagine the huge powers of floating in this early period of their emergence.

Actually it is pretty remarkable that not legions of scientists and artists at the same time went on the floating way. You know that everything was liberated to float already. Everyone had read Baudrillard: “The orgy is over.” And so on. All sediments were blown up by pop culture, modern and postmodern art. Their elements were free to float. Pop culture and art were at the same level. Of course there are always people who want to build new sediments or cultivate old ones. Like nationalist, idealists and realists. But basically everyone and everything could float free.

However instead of using the floating materials for creating free lifes, people were looking after new bonds. Maybe to hold them on the ground in a world decomposing itself in millions of floaters again and again.

So people did not only subordinate new masters or rituals. What Leo noticed in the rare moments he was awake in his sleeping-during-the-day-phase was that a new super structure of power was evolving. People around him were more and more integrated in evolving action-reaction-networks. In a short time these networks became very powerful, because they organize and formate the way people relate and communicate to each other. Later some of them were called social networks. And their action-reaction-patterns were called posting, reposting, commenting, forwarding, sharing … you know all the other terms from your own user experience.

The rising quantity of action and reaction in networks made the phenomenon constitutive to everybody. The acceleration of the network impulses and our reactions to it achieved a level that makes it somehow invisible for us. It wasn’t like the shocks and interruptions in the early period of industrial media and mass entertainment. Today the stimuli were smaller and have a much higher frequency. We all are living in an unlimited continuum of accelerated stimuli streams powered by our own actions and reactions in the networks. We are accepting this artificial continuum as our natural environment.

Potentially everyone and everything could float. But in reality almost nobody does it. If some people float, they do it quite short and in order to use the gained experience for self promotion or payed purposes in the fast changing network. The own status in the network is essential to people. So they want to be useful for the other network members. Accepted interaction is the means to be useful.

By far the most of these interactions, the actions and reaction patterns, are irrelevant, boring and superfluous. Like most manifestations of human existence anyway. The networks of today celebrate the human existence in all its banality and the inability to admit it. Some people call it democratization of media. Some people are happy with it. Or they try to make themselves think pink about it.

But Leo does not. While his sleeping-during-the-day-period he of course dreamed a lot. The mode of dreaming, you need to know, is one of the oldest enemies of every working action-reaction-pattern. Because the dream isolates the dreamer from the world of real action in favor of dreamed action without other consequences than dreamed ones. Furthermore in our dreams the connections between all dreamed elements are loose. They are mixed in a wild and incalculable way. Dreams create strange situations and dysfunctional structures far away from our every day life functions in the network.

So came that Leo began to dream of a mode beyond action-reaction-networking. A mode that resists the accelerated continuum even in waking state. He began to dream of floating. Floating is the relaxed refusal of being integrated in the action-reaction-network. A floater does not act or react. He is drifting in the continuum, somehow moved and not moved by different streams – which often neutralize each other anyway. If a floater uses energy it is to change direction a little bit. He is free like all the other floaters around him. That’s it.

As a relaxation technique floating allows us to set out the demands of action-reaction-networks. As a liberation technique it sets free all elements, sediments and structures. As a mental survival technique it gives us a break from the endless processing of banality.

But notice: Somehow floating is always on the edge. On the edge to reflect the situation. Even to reflect the impulse continuum on a higher level. Warning! That’s nothing for weak minds. Leo calls this reflexion mode Intensive Floating. That is what he wants you to experience in his work. Feeling the floating thoughts and thinking the floating feelings. Than you are facing the banality of your existence to go beyond it. And beyond it there is … well, you will see.

Go float.