INFERMENTAL - International - Fermentum - Mental

- ... currently exhibited at the ZKM medialounge is an overview of the archived material of this first international magazine on videocassettes which gets accompanied by an online database accessible at www.infermental.de.

‘Infermental’ was the first international videocassette magazine that published video artworks in part or whole, trailers, and reports (lasting 1-20 minutes) from around the world. Appearing annually with a total running time between four and six hours, each issue was compiled and edited in a different worldwide location. From the first issue (Berlin, 1982), which was publicized on a massive electronic billboard

during the Berlin Film Festival and co-edited by Astrid Heibach and Gábor Bódy, who in 1980 initiated the ‘international recorded imagery project), to the last issue (Skopje and Osnabrück, 1991), a total of 660 works were gathered together. ‘Infermental’ was conceived neither as festival nor gallery, but as a ‘running information memory’ (Oliver Hirschbiegel) that bundled together excerpts, documents and events according to thematic and intellectual context.
Following the death of Gábor Bódy, his wife Vera Bódy was responsible for co-ordinating the project. The complete magazine archive has been on permanent loan to the collection of the ZKM Karlsruhe since 1992. (link)

... between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. (Heterotopias, M.Foucault, 1967)