Woven All of Dream and Error: Hallucinations and Remnants

Author: Harley Aussoleil
Date: September 2024
About the text: This 84-page book was published to accompany the exhibition Woven All of Dream and Error in September 2024. The full text of the book is given here.
About the author: Harley Aussoleil is a curator and artist, based in Berlin since 2012. She has been a member of Coven Berlin since 2016.
Related works: Woven All of Dream and Error: Hallucinations and Remnants

Woven All of Dream and Error: Hallucinations and Remnants

1. In the summer of 1918

In the summer of 1918, the Portuguese publishing house of Monteiro & Co published 35 Sonnets, a slim volume, bound in yellow-cloth hardback, by Fernando Pessoa. Sonnet 26 of the collection opens with these lines:

The world is woven all of dream and error
And but one sureness in our truth may lie —
That when we hold to aught our thinking’s mirror
We know it not by knowing it thereby.

The striking symbolism of the opening line, overlaying dream and error—hallucination and disaster—is one that encapsulates many of Pessoa’s recurring literary obsessions (ones that we will return to again below). Woven All of Dream and Error takes its title from Pessoa’s poem, and is an exhibition that undertakes another juxtaposition, overlaying machine-hallucinated sound and buried environmental traces, and drawing a thread of connection between eras. The films, images, and sounds that comprise the exhibition bring together two areas of technological history: the sites of abandoned railway lines, and the emergence of machine learning—or what has popularly come to be referred to as artificial intelligence.

In undertaking this combination, Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty are returning to thematic concerns that have been central to their work over the past decade. Prominent among these is a fascination with the ghostly or poetic presences that remain in the traces left by technology, both ancient and contemporary. Alongside this is a curiosity about memory and erasure, a fascination with the performative act of walking, and a willingness to allow the resulting work to be quiet, contemplative, and slow. Over a century after Pessoa wrote the lines of Sonnet 26, their exhibition attempts to consider what the dreams and errors of an emerging future might look like, and sound like.

Woven All of Dream and Error · Introductory overview video about the project

2. Walks, Errors, Iterations

Walks

Woven All of Dream and Error began through a process of walking. Over the course of four years, the artists undertook a series of walks along the paths of now-disused railway routes in Berlin and Brandenburg, which they filmed as they walked. In these walks, they also carried portable speakers, playing the sound of machine-learning-generated audio of invented trains: sound that has been hallucinated by contemporary computational technology.

All the works presented ultimately derive from this process of walking, carrying, and retracing. Materially, Woven All of Dream and Error comprises two sets of films, a series of image grids, and a series of lathe-cut records.

The films are explorations of traces left behind, cinematic studies of incisions in the land. They present two types of scenes. The first of these are forward-facing scenes, in constant motion, moving at a walking pace, following the traces of disappearing layers. The second are still, painterly scenes, in which a figure paces across the land, holding a speaker as they go, playing the strange and uncanny digitally-generated sounds.

In both of these sets of scenes, we are presented with places through which railway routes have once run. Some of the traces remain plainly visible: wooden sleeper ties or rusted rails remain present, as marks on the land. Others are invisible, or close to it: the routes have been altered or redeveloped, often multiple times over, since they were originally used as railways. In some cases, the erasure is essentially complete: either wild undergrowth has reclaimed the land, or else urban development has transformed it.

The films also present us with two kinds of sound. The first of these are the machine-learning-generated sounds, which are audible in the scenes where a speaker is physically carried across the screen. These sounds have been coaxed from a custom-made machine learning model, and they are an eerie, stuttering presence in these otherwise-serene scenes. These are the sounds of computer hallucinations of trains in motion, now overlaid on environmental remnants. (The fact that all machine-learning models are created by being “trained” on datasets of various kinds adds a touch of droll humour—these models were trained on trains.) In contrast, the second type of sound accompanies the forward-facing set of films. These are a series of slow drones, recorded by the artists on trumpet and guitar. These meditative and swelling tones lend these scenes a hypnotic and hypnagogic character.‡

_{‡ This text favours the term “machine learning” over the term “artificial intelligence.” Generally speaking, “artificial intelligence” is a helpful term when used to refer to the broad philosophical concept of allowing a system or machine to sense or reason in human-like ways. “Machine learning” is the narrower idea of machines undertaking a kind of educated guesswork: extracting knowledge from data, and then autonomously producing subsequent material through inference from these starting-points. The work discussed here is an application of this latter, narrower concept, and so uses the narrower term.}

Accompanying these films are a series of image grids, which present chrono- logical sequences of stills from the films. The grids present the process of time passing, segmented into a lattice of fragments. As such, they emphasise that the films themselves are primarily images, not stories—they do not have to be viewed from beginning to end, but are rather showing glimpses of a persisting present.

Finally, the two sources of sound—the machine-learning-generated trains and the trumpet and guitar drones—are brought together in the accompanying series of one-off, lathe-cut records. In these recordings, the two central sonic elements of the work are interwoven. The result is an eerie and unique series of compositions, which fuse an exceptional material form with a shimmering, hauntological musical approach.

Still from “We Know it not by Knowing it Thereby” (single-channel video, 29 mins), first presented as part of Woven All of Dream and Error, September 2024

Errors

In shaping the research which has led to the works in Woven All of Dream and Error, the artists have often invoked the ideas of the cultural theorist Paul Virilio (1932–2018). Virilio regularly wrote about speed, technology, disaster, and aftermath, and much of his worldview is epitomised in his renowned quip that “the invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.” In Virilio’s view, not only do all technologies become more obsolete over time, but all grand efforts accumulate possible errors, disasters, and misfortunes. All visions of the future also contain hints of their own further-future state of potential disuse and abandonment. All technologies tend towards generating what Virilio referred to as “integral accidents.”

It is in this context that the interplay between sound and environment in these films can perhaps best be understood. In the nineteenth century, the social and industrial innovation of railway infrastructure was the radical cutting-edge of human technology. However, it has had the time since then not only to become mature, but also to develop layers of ruins, disused remnants, and buried vestiges, both physical and social.

At the moment, machine learning is in the process of steadily becoming ubiquitous. This innovation has come to represent the forefront of current technological possibilities. However, these technologies contain their own inherent biases and flaws, and they are used and abused towards various ends. The possible future integral “shipwrecks” that these capacities possess are still largely unknown.

In parallel with Virilio, the ideas of Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) have informed the emergence of the work. This is in keeping with the importance of Oliveros’s perspectives to much of the previous work that Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty have undertaken to date.

In her score-based work Energy Changes (Meditation XIII) (part of the score series Sonic Meditations, first published in 1971), Oliveros begins by prompting participants to “listen to the environment as a drone,” before going on to describe methods to focus this listening in various ways. Much of what we see and hear in Woven All of Dream and Error can be considered as an iteration of this score. Accompany a drone as you pass through an environment. Carry a hallucinated environment through a material one. Listen to an invented environment.

One of the ambiguities that Oliveros presents us with is an enigmatic presentation of the idea of listening (and, of course, of deep listening) in which no particular distinction is made between material listening and poetic or metaphorical listening. A practical instruction to “listen to the group” (in Meditation XVI) can then be accompanied by one to “walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears” (in Meditation V). The enigmatic nature of these instructions mean that they embrace an openness to certain sorts of errors and accidents (though conceptually different to those that Virilio attempts to describe).

This ambiguity of language is an artistic choice on Oliveros’s behalf. The task of interpretation, the work of deciding when to prioritise the material or the poetic (or to prioritise both at once), is left to us.
There is an echo of this ambiguity in the discussion that has surrounded the emergence of machine learning (typified by “consumer AI” tools such as chatbots, text-to-image applications, and text-to-video tools). Our everyday terminology has not yet caught up to what these tools present us with. So, quite simply, we do not know how to talk about them.

What verb should we use to describe what these tools do? Do they hallucinate, or statistically generate, or churn, or dream, or react to prompting? Should we talk about them in poetic or concrete terms? Most likely, if these innovations become embedded in our lives, then more mundane modes of speech will emerge which will attempt to encapsulate them, in much the same way that we now speak of googling things or photoshopping things.

At least for now, however, the strangeness of the tools creates a situation where there is a certain poetry-of-necessity in even attempting a basic description of what they do. Many more attempts, many more accidents, and many more errors will occur before our language can catch up to our machines.

Walk 1 (Anhalter Bahnhof)

Iterations

We return, slowly, to the figure of Fernando Pessoa. His sonnet, where we began, places “dream and error” in relationship to each other, as twin forces shaping our reality. As such, his lines provide an apt poetic distillation of the themes that the works in the exhibition explore. Alongside this, the example of the figure of Pessoa himself is significant.

One of the many contributions that Pessoa made to literary modernism—and perhaps the one for which he is most well known—was the idea of the heteronym. Straightforwardly described, a Pessoan heteronym is a form of extended pseudonym. It is a writerly device that exists not so much as a mask for the writer, but more as a character in its own right—a developed entity with its own biography, its own inclinations, its own style and sensibility. These characters (if that is indeed the right word to use for these quasi-autonomous presences) were a recurring feature of Pessoa’s writing.

This mode of writing implies a kind of endlessness: a boundless profusion of roles, characters, perspectives, and disguises.

Any attempt to write in greater depth about Pessoan heteronyms involves a sort of denotative puzzle. When Pessoa speaks of these heteronyms, they are spoken of in comradely terms, as writerly peers or rivals, with their own inner lives. There is Alberto Caeiro, the rural poet who dies a tragic early death; Ricardo Reis, the pagan monarchist doctor; Maria José, the sickly letter-writer. But then, “when Pessoa speaks” is a construction that could be equally phrased as “when voices speak through Pessoa.” These presences are often something more akin to ghosts, to split personalities, or to religious visions. They represented a kind of authorial fragmentation or dissolution, an insistence on multiplicity and iterative profusion.

In a way, we can regard Pessoa’s writing as a kind of poetic metaphor for the contemporary situation of a seemingly endless abundance of viewpoints, a decentralisation or democratisation of authorship. The confident Whitmanesque authorial perspective—the central figure that can “contain multitudes”—is subjected to a modernist dialectical inversion by Pessoa, a logic of self-erasure and authorial trickiness. Multitudes bloom within me, or alongside me. Multitudes erase me. Multitudes exist. Multitudes propagate. In a metaphorically similar manner, contemporary technologies allow for an analogous computational endlessness. Infinite heteronyms on any theme can be summoned on command, in an unending perpetuity of repetitions and iterations, with future outcomes that are unknown and unknowable.

Woven All of Dream and Error holds out the prospect that Pessoa’s shape-shifting approach to modernity can still reflect our reality, decades after he wrote his lines. Pessoa’s voices imply infinite masks, or incessant surplus—or a landscape of endless buried traces and remnants.

Still from “And But One Sureness in our Truth may Lie (Part 1)” (single-channel video, 40 mins), first presented as part of Woven All of Dream and Error, September 2024

3. Datasets, Images, Traces

Datasets

Much contemporary commentary about the implications of machine learning has focused on the datasets underlying most machine learning models, and the inherent flaws and biases that these datasets inevitably contain, particularly in situations where the intended outcomes rely on a claim of neutrality or transparency.

Datasets of people’s faces, or employment records, or medical histories, for example, will be interpreted by machine-learning models in a way that reflects and reinforces the biases and presumptions of the programmers and decision-makers involved in their development—a point which has been emphasised by many commentators. This is how we get examples of algorithmic racism, automated gendered bias, computerised medical negligence, and other “integral accidents” emerging from supposedly-neutral electronic systems.

Alongside this, there are the “integral accidents” that emerge from machine- learning systems (and their associated datasets) that make no attempt to claim an abstract neutrality, and which are simply brutal by design. In this context, the idea of the “integral accident” is a concept that is open to misinterpretation. Virilio’s “accident” is not the result of an absence of intent, or lack of attention, or the presence of random happenstance. It is not an accident in the same way that a child falling off a bicycle is an accident. The “integral accident,” rather, is the catastrophic accompaniment to deliberate technological processes. When the Israeli army uses Lavender AI, a machine-learning model, to select people to kill from a dataset of the entire population of Gaza, the process is not accidental—it is criminal, but also coldly and ruthlessly rational. However, from the perspective of those on whose heads the bombs fall, the experience is arbitrary and unpredictable, which is part of what makes it so terrifying. These are the people experiencing the integral accident—the zone of chaos surrounding the material results of deliberate technological choices made elsewhere. In an era of universal machine-learning systems, we can expect to see more of these zones of chaos, accompanied by many more datasets of brutality.

Numerous artistic investigations of the implications of machine learning have thus begun by emphasising the dataset itself—and, in the case of datasets that make a claim of neutrality, by focusing on the submerged biases that emerge from its use. For example, ImageNet Roulette, an online work by Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford from 2019, used this approach to expose biases in how the ImageNet database identifies images of people. As a result of the publicity created by the work, ImageNet removed over 600,000 images from its datasets and training materials, claiming that this would mitigate the effects of bias in their products.

What Woven All of Dream and Error presents is effectively an inversion of this logic—is it possible to start from an originating dataset which is itself somewhat banal? The artists have built their own dataset, on top of which they have trained their own machine-learning model, which generates the sound heard in the work. But the dataset comprises audio recordings of trains in motion—these are mechanical, repetitive sounds. They are not records of faces or voices or texts. They are not listings of targets to kill. This is not material that would seem to be particularly susceptible to perceptions of bias.‡

_{‡ It is worth noting, however, that most of the sources for this dataset are open-source recordings, and that most of these recordings have been made in the global south, due to the practical fact that these are where older railway rolling stock is still commonly in use. As such, there is still a certain north-south extractivist logic to how the dataset was formed. However, the sounds themselves are mostly straightforward and repetitive.}

On the one hand, this gestures towards the process of emergent mundanity that machine learning is currently undergoing. We are at the historical cusp where this particular contemporary technology is beginning its journey to ubiquity. It is becoming just one more piece of infrastructure in our lives, one more layer in a techno-industrial framework, alongside plumbing, electricity, masonry, wi-fi, databases, motorways. Yet another protocol of modernity.

Then, on the other hand, what this achieves is to return the attention of viewers and listeners to the strangeness of the result that can emerge from a mundane starting-point. We hear trains—or what our mind perceives as the sound of trains. However, we also hear the glitches and flaws that are present in these outcomes, and this inherently ghostly effect strikes us as unsettling.

Part of this unsettling effect results from a kind of inversion of Pauline Oliveros’s conceptual frame of deep listening (and it returns us to the questions outlined above, about our lack of appropriate terminology in discussing these effects). If we listen to computer-hallucinated train sounds, we are hearing something that tricks our ear. We know that it has emerged from the statistical churn of computational iteration, yet we find ourselves locating patterns in it as if it was a material recording. These are straightforward datasets that nonetheless create outcomes that we cannot yet comfortably make sense of.

Excerpt from the film And but one sureness in our truth may lie, showing part of the walk that is visible in the film stills shown in Walk 1 (Anhalter Bahnhof). Both works initially presented as part of the exhibition Woven All of Dream and Error at Hošek Contemporary, Berlin, September 2024.

Images

There is a paradoxical sensibility to the work presented in Woven All of Dream and Error. These works braid themselves around a core that is based in ideas related to sound. The works themselves, however, are richly visual. This is particularly the case in the scenes presented in the single-channel video work We know it not by knowing it thereby. The involvement of contemporary technology in producing the work is explicit—the sounds we hear (at least the ones that are brought into the frame by the artists) are sounds that have been hallucinated by neural networks prompted to imagine nonexistent trains. However, these sounds are ultimately a secondary element in the completed work.

The primary element is the pristine, tranquil imagery, recurring from scene to scene. These images evoke particular traditions of representation. Firstly, they evoke landscape painting (a connection made explicit by the artists in their method of choosing which routes to walk—see below for more). But secondly, and perhaps more immediately, these images evoke the approach of postwar Neue Sachlichkeit photographers working in the style of Bernd and Hilla Becher, and the downstream influence of this style on the slow cinema of minimalists such as Béla Tarr and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Into these images, sound is introduced through the recurring motif of a figure walking through the frame, carrying a speaker playing sound. The dry humour of this motif brings some levity to the contemplative setting—the focused repetition of this incongruous task lends the scenes an absurdist touch, owing perhaps as much to the Marx brothers or Buster Keaton as to traditions of landscape painting.

The sound we hear in this work is relatively thin and constant. But then, this arrangement reflects the reality of the current technology. “AI sound” is still an emerging medium. Practically, this means that there are limitations on what it can generate.

Much of how machine learning or artificial intelligence exists in public consciousness is in ways that are visual. Or, in Duchampian terms, retinal. The introduction and increasing sophistication of machine-learning-based text-to-im- age and text-to-video tools since 2020 typifies this hierarchy. What this has meant is that machine learning tools for audio have remained secondary. Sound is the neglected afterthought in this hyper-retinal arms race. Thus, sound that is generated through machine learning is still a predominantly lo-fi aesthetic medium. In 2024, “AI images” are lush, surreal, abundant, and extravagant (and thus, also, kitsch, cringe, vulgar, and boring).‡ “AI sound,” where it exists at all, is still mostly tinny and glitchy, simply through not yet being a technological priority — though this will no doubt change rapidly in the years to come.

_{‡ The emergence of this new form of tawdry and garish imagery—often termed “AI slop”—has been helpfully examined by the artist Silvio Lorusso in his 2024 essay “Deepdreaming Willy Wonka: AI Weird as the New Kitsch.” This text asserts a categorisation that distinguishes between “normie weird” and “weirdo weird,” and attempts to outline an understanding of both terms, and where they might lead.}

What the artists emphasise in their discussions surrounding the work is an interest in a durational perspective on technology. They are curious about what media theorist Laurence A. Rickels has referred to as “epochal lag”—the sticky fluidity of overlapping epochs of the past and present, whether that be over the scale of months, years, or centuries. One of the ironies of the development of machine learning is that, despite its recency, it already contains certain points of internal “epochal lag.” One of these point of lag is the prioritisation of the visual.

Detail from “We Know it not by Knowing it Thereby” (single-channel video, 29 mins), first presented as part of Woven All of Dream and Error, September 2024

Traces

Woven All of Dream and Error is the most recent work in a series of projects that Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty have undertaken that have been concerned with the examination of ghostly traces, or signals that border on imperceptibility, in different forms. Since beginning to work together in 2011, this has been a recurring theme.

Their installation Signal Tide is perhaps emblematic of this approach, in that it takes radio signals from an abandoned satellite, the LES-1, and combines them with fragments of sacred harp choral singing. The conceptual frame of the work is one where the abandoned satellite is anthropomorphised as a weary traveller on an eternal journey, beaming its weak and wavering signal, and being serenaded by earthbound song.

A thematically similar strategy is used in the durational installation, Minute/Year. This ongoing work, which records a single minute of sound every day, relies on a process whereby each recording is layered over the previous day’s recording, forming a recurring acoustic palimpsest, which waxes and wanes over time.

Carried Bells and Harvest, their two works that use the sound of ringing church bells as a structural frame, are likewise concerned with recording and re-playing sound. However, the score in these works also involves walking while playing sound. As such, they use similar conceptual approaches to the films in Woven All of Dream and Error, though with a different emphasis: one which is more explicitly performative, and one which alludes to the history of walking as a ritualised activity, as in pilgrimages, marches, and ceremonies.

This curiosity about considering the vestiges and remainders of systems has continued in the body of work that forms Woven All of Dream and Error. In all of these works, there is a reliance on particular technologies and computational processes at certain points, but this has always previously been a practical task to arrive at a given outcome. Woven All of Dream and Error is the first of their works in which the technology involved is conceptually central, rather than simply practically necessary. However, the fascination with considering whispered traces endures.

4. Futures

One of the quirks of railway infrastructure—or more specifically, of the remains that are left behind by disused railway infrastructure—is that these remains are often left where they are because it is simply cheaper to leave them in situ than to remove them. As a result, a process emerges which leans towards creating ruins rather than removing them. Disused railways—and similar industrial remains, like disused bunkers, piers, mines, and furnaces—have a certain spectral strangeness to them in part because they are impersonal and humdrum. They are fragments of past industrialisation, and hint at past and current environmental degradation. They are not the exalted remains, the Acropolises and Colosseums, of western imagination, but rather the scars of state and capital on the land, the incisions of infrastructure. Railway routes are simply one subset of a larger collection of these remnants.

The structuring of Woven All of Dream and Error around these vestiges of abandoned railway routes is framed as a universalist gesture, at least aesthetically —a cinematic typology of gestural recursion, in a series of landscapes that flip from one to the next in a slow kaleidoscopic shuffling of fragments. These train lines could be anywhere.

But at the same time, every decision to build and use infrastructure is inherently a political and social decision, so it becomes critical to acknowledge that these traces of train routes are not anywhere, but rather that they are somewhere—specifically, that they are on the land of eastern Germany, with all of the historical weight of association that accompanies this land. The writer Jonathan Meades memorably concluded his 1994 film essay Jerry Building with the line that “a German railway track entering a wood will forever mean mass death.” No contemporary attempt to represent these lands can avoid engaging with this history. As a result, the aesthetic universalism of Woven All of Dream and Error is one that simultaneously acknowledges that these places are not nowhere. They are explicitly contextualised, situated, historicised. Accompanied by maps and details of their eras of operation, spanning the nineteenth century up to the present, and passing through the darkness of European history as they do so.‡

_{‡ See the Routes section below.}

These realities also guided the process of selecting which routes to walk. There are, after all, many possible routes to choose from. Ultimately, each of the routes depicted in the exhibition is one that has been previously depicted in earlier representations—predominantly in German paintings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These historical depictions of place allow for a link to the past reality of these locations, while the films themselves remain lyrical and elegaic.‡‡

_{‡‡ See the final part of the Routes section, below.}

These walks draw a parallel between different eras of history and technology, presenting a durational perspective. In doing so, they emphasise what contemporary artificial intelligence researcher Dan McQuillan has referred to as the “sedimentation of the status quo” implicit in contemporary machine learning, and artificial intelligence more broadly, and their threads of connection to earlier eras of technology. Contemporary technologies reinforce existing social relations, and existing disparities of power. We do not know how exactly these capacities will be used in the coming decades, but we are already starting to see glimpses of the possible innovations, and the possible horrors, that may await us. In some cases, we are already receiving more than just glimpses. Lavender AI in Gaza, robot
dogs and facial recognition software as tools of urban police forces, drone swarms in Donbas: these are all part of our present, not our future. Whether our future will be nightmarish does not depend on the technology itself, which is ultimately merely a tool. It depends on our decisions now.

5. Routes

Route 1 · Anhalter Bahnhof, Berlin

Route 1 · Anhalter Bahnhof, Berlin

The various lines which once emerged from Anhalter Bahnhof have left an entire network of remains in the city, from routes that once spread south from Anhalter strasse, before crossing the Landwehrkanal, and then spreading out into the surrounding countryside and beyond. The Park am Gleisdreieck is largely formed from the site of the yards that once served these lines, which were first in use from 1841.

The Anhalter Bahnhof station was one of the core organisational locations of the Holocaust in Berlin. Approximately 10,000 deportees, the vast majority of them Jewish civilians, were transferred from Berlin to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia via the station between 1941 and 1945, from which they were sent on to other camps and murdered.

The station itself, and its associated lines, were heavily damaged in the war, and closed permanently in 1952.

Walk length: 1.87 km

Route 2 · Angermünde–Bad Freienwalde regional line, Brandenburg

The line that connected Angermünde and Bad Freienwalde was in active use from 1877 through until 1997, or from shortly after the establishment of the German Empire through until the aftermath of the Wende.

The route was used for a variety of purposes over its twelve decades of operation. It began as a freight line bringing Silesian coal to the Baltic sea, occasionally also serving as a military transport route. In the aftermath of the second world war, the rails from the entire line were removed and brought to the USSR as war reparations, but were then replaced by new rails in the early 1950s.

From the 1950s until the 1980s, the route was regarded as a strategic military asset, as parts of the line were now close to the border with Poland. In the aftermath of the Wende, the line declined, and all traffic had stopped by 1995. The line was officially closed in 1997.

Walk length: 10.45 km

Route 3 · M-Bahn, Berlin

The Berlin M-Bahn was one of the world’s earliest magnetic-levitation train routes. Construction on this line began in the centre of Berlin in 1983, and the line had just begun running test journeys in 1989 when the Berlin wall came down, effectively rendering the entire project obsolete overnight. In the end, the line only ran as an open part of the city’s transport network for a grand total of two weeks, in July 1991, before closing for good.

The area where the line ran has now been utterly transformed by the development of Potsdamer Platz and the surrounding streets over the subsequent three decades, and as a result there are no visible traces of the line today. Parts of the line are visible in the background of scenes in various films, perhaps most notably in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.

Walk length: 1.40 km

Route 4 · Brommystrasse, Berlin

The route that once ran through Brommystrasse and its connecting streets was part of the Berliner Verbindungsbahn, a precursor to today’s Ringbahn. This line was in use from the 1850s until 1871, and connected five of what were then the main stations of the city. The route walked (and thus indicated on the map) is only a small excerpt of the entire original route, on either side of the river Spree. Trains running this route originally ran over the Brommybrücke, the Brommy Bridge, to cross the river.
The bridge was destroyed by Nazi forces in April 1945, in an attempt to prevent the Red Army from crossing the river. The ruined pillars of the bridge are still visible in the river today.

Walk length: 1.17 km

Route 5 · Tempelhof, Berlin

On the grounds of the former airport at Tempelhof, there is a series of lengths of railway track, which are the remainders of the freight railway line that used to serve the airport, prior to the second world war. This line connected to what is now the Berlin Ringbahn, and it extended right around the perimeter of the airport’s renowned curved arrivals hall. The line passed right by the ends of the two main airport runways, allowing for smooth transfer of cargo between planes and trains.

The line was intermittently used after the war, but by the mid-1950s it was mostly unused. The remnants of this line have been left in situ ever since, and are now partly publicly accessible along with the rest of the Tempelhof park.

Walk length: 2.68 km

Route 6 · Johannisthal, Berlin

The rail lines that run through Johannisthal have been part of the Berlin transportation network since the mid-1800s, but this particular stretch gained additional prominence in the early 1900s, when it was the closest connection to the then-newly-opened Flugplatz Johannisthal (Johannisthal Air Field). The airfield, one of the earliest-built in the world, began operations in 1909.

The line has been in continuous use since it was first established, and now forms part of the S-Bahn and Regionalbahn network in Berlin and Brandenburg. The currently-active lines are accompanied by the remnants of many now-abandoned tracks, most of which were originally part of the network that served the airfield, which closed in 1952.

Walk length: 4.32 km

Route 7 · Stralau–Treptow Spreetunnel (Tunnelbahn), Berlin

The Stralau–Treptow Spreetunnel, often colloquially referred to as the Tunnelbahn, was a tunnel and transport connection for tram traffic, which formed the central point of the wider Berliner Ostbahnen network. The Tunnelbahn connected the Stralau peninsula to Treptow, close to the Insel der Jugend.
The process of building the tunnel was subject to a long series of negotiations and disputes among various local authorities and private interests, but it was finally opened to the public in 1899 (five years after the initially-planned opening date). The Berliner Ostbahn service ran successfully until the 1920s, but the tunnel was too narrow to serve the volume of traffic that would be needed for the growing city, and had begun to leak, and so it closed in February 1932. The tunnel is still present below the river, but is now flooded and inaccessible.

The task of retracing the route included rowing across the river above the path of the tunnel, as well as walking the connecting sections on either side.

Walk length: 4.39 km

6. Previous depictions

In the research that led to the exhibition, the routes walked are all locations that have been previously depicted in earlier representations—predominantly in German paintings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The specific representations that accompany each route are listed below, and are pictured below.

Hochbahnhof Bülowstrasse bei Nacht · Lesser Ury · 1922

Hochbahnhof Bülowstrasse bei Nacht · Lesser Ury · 1922
Anhalter Bahnhof, Berlin

Der Abend · Caspar David Friedrich · 1821
Angermünde–Bad Freienwalde regional line, Brandenburg

The Berlin-Potsdam Railway · Adolph Menzel · 1847
M-Bahn, Berlin

Berlin, 1945 · Wolfgang Frankenstein · 1986
Brommystrasse, Berlin

Sonntag auf dem Tempelhofer Feld · Hans Baluschek · 1907
Tempelhof, Berlin

Flugschau auf dem Flugplatz Johannisthal · Paul Paeschke · 1912
Johannisthal, Berlin

Spreeufer bei Stralau · Karl Friedrich Schinkel · 1817
Stralau–Treptow Spreetunnel (Tunnelbahn), Berlin

Credits

Woven All of Dream and Error: Hallucinations and Remnants was published by Estovers Editions, in collaboration with Soft Noise Acousmatics, to accompany the presentation of Woven All of Dream and Error at Hosek Contemporary, Berlin, in September 2024.

Woven All of Dream and Error at Hosek Contemporary was presented as part of Zeitgeist Irland 24, an initiative of Culture Ireland and the Embassy of Ireland in Germany.

ISBN: 978-3-00-080028-3

About the artist:

Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty have worked as a collaborative duo since 2011. Their work combines elements of durational and time-based art, minimalist movement, and electroacoustic music and sound. They are interested in processes, sounds, and movements that come close to imperceptibility, and the ways in which this material can be transformed through repetition, patterning, layering, and archiving.

They have exhibited and presented work at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Serralves Museum, Porto; National Museum of Contemporary Art (Chiado), Lisbon; Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin; Kunstkraftwerk, Leipzig; and Digital in Berlin’s Kiezsalon series, Berlin, among others. They have been recipients of... | Learn more »

Estovers Editions

Woven All of Dream and Error: Hallucinations and Remnants

1. In the summer of 1918

2. Walks, Errors, Iterations

3. Datasets, Images, Traces

4. Futures

5. Routes

6. Previous depictions

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