Coma vigile, also referred to as "waking coma" or "akinetic mutism": "A state of speechlessness with an intact speech organ’ as a result of a general inhibition of the motoric functions, including facial expression, gestures, speech. Speaking as well as movement do not occur spontaneously and, upon request, only delayed and slowly (...). Consciousness is retained completely, possibly there is amnesia."

(...) The patients retain consciousness, but are not able to communicate (de-efferent state), which can be verified via electrophysiological methods. In some cases residual functions of the optico-motoricity are still present, e.g. vertical movements of the eyeballs, which can be enlisted in elaborating a code toward communicating with the outside world.

The Website ‘locked-in.com’ is a central communications forum and a base for information for both participants of and visitors to the project l o g-i n / l o c k e d o u t. Each of the presentations will be accompanied by a site of its own which supports the current aspect being dealt with.

Above and beyond this, it is intended that the possibility exists to switch over to a ‘locked-in’ mode, whereby the symptom itself is simulated and transmitted onto the communication being carried out in Internet. This mode interrupts the normal interaction: themes will run their course in a continuous flow ? seeking paths of theirown ? without the usual navigational options within Internet.

What is expected of art today is not a certainty toward the future, but a sense of opportunity (Robert Musil), the providing of scenarios and "thought images" (Walter Benjamin) for solving the problems at hand. Artists and academic scientists could once again open up mutual fields of visualizing things, provide experimental formations (the title of many works of art in recent years) and thereby contribute toward society understanding itself.

While the scientist ascertains functional correlations, the artist addresses impressions in their own aesthetic formulations, which reach out beyond thew analysis of functions into the infinity of cosmic contexts. Each science is enveloped by a shadow of the irrational infinity which art addresses. By being conscious of this shadow, the roles of art and science alter themselves.

The National Gallery at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof and the Berlin Museum Educational Service are planning an exhibition with the preliminary working title "Art as Science ? Science as Art" which will be accompanied by discussions, symposia and series of lectures. This has given cause for a great deal of interest on our part in the initiatives proposed by the artist Gabriele Leidloff, who is planning a series of presentations linked with exhibits on her theme l o g-i n / l o c k e d o u t .

Cooperative efforts could begin in 1999 with non-public discussion forums (possibly within the action radius of the Hamburger Bahnhof or in one of Berlin’s scientific research centers), giving both scientists and artists the opportunity to evolve an understanding of the principles behind a dialogue between scientists and artists.

The Next Five Minutes conference in Amsterdam, taking place from March 12 to 14, 1999, will be one of the stations of the l o g-i n / l o c k e d o u t project by Gabriele Leidloff. The presentation will focus on the aspects of speech <-> narrative structure based on political, social and cultural patterns of networked communication.

In the age of the Network Society, it is tempting to no longer question the communication paradigm. We send and receive messages. In case of failure we are being notified. Lines are busy, fax paper is missing, server access is denied, a mailbox was switched off by mistake and the mobile phone is not able to connect to nearby stations.

The human-to-human misunderstandings reached an atavistic status of the left-behind wetware, are fighting in the back benches of the Techno Concerto, whilst producing little more than background noise.

Gone are the good old days of Post-Modernism. There is no time left for sophisticated studies on derailing exchanges, incomprehensive languages, stumbling discourses, the private universe of the local genius and refined sign systems - unable and unwilling of being converted to the universal standards of current technology.

The earlier advancements of self-referential systems disappear. Self-replicating differentiations turn into protected reservations, ready for commodification, victimized by the touristic, media-driven eyes of the spectators.

This is the time of interrelations. No more closed worlds. This even counts for Internet, which is hardwired to the reality of global capitalism. Escapism is becoming a luxury option for the well-offs, the cultural elites and the left-over aristocrats of vanished centuries. "Cyberspace is our land" now sounds like a romantic slogan of the marginalized cyberpunks, refusing to turn themselves into hippie entrepreneurs.

The "Business-as-usual attitude" has taken over and with it the need for interchangeable components, transparency, regulation and surveillance. The mystery of being sealed off has vanished and been transformed into a state of pitiful redundancy, ready to be pulled into the basket case of human tragedies.

Around 1630 René Descartes formulated a remarkable simile in his "Traité de l’homme": Those who have ever taken a close-up look at church organs know that the bellows press air into collective receptacles called wind chests and that this air moves from there into the pipes, some flowing into one, some toward another depending on how the organist moves his fingers along the keyboard. According to Descartes, one could now picture that the heart and arteries pumping the spiritus animales (spirit of life) into the cranial cavities are similar to the bellows of organs pressing air into the wind chests, while external objects such as the organist’s fingers caused the air to stream into particular pipes. The organ’s harmony is not dependent however in any way upon the externally visible arrangement of its pipes, wind chests or other parts. The functions of the brain would share this independence of a determining influence on the part of both external details observed by anatomists or by the shape of the cranial ventricles.

A few years later in "Discours de la méthode" Descartes came up with the idea of imaging, just for the sake of it, that he had no body and that there were neither a world nor a place where he was located. Nonetheless he chose not to attempt imaging that he himself did not exist.

Descartes never considered the possibility that one could be locked against one’s will into a defective body equipped with a faulty organ machinery of communication channels. Despite this, the scenarios of being mentally locked in or inapproachable, as diagnosed in modern medicine for example through the term "Locked-in Syndrome", can be derived directly from those images used by him.

Such verifiably existent extremes challenge both art and the neurological sciences to the same extent, not to take the conditions surrounding human psychopathology for granted. Reason enough to approach them in the profession and field-bridging project "l o g-i n / l o c k e d o u t" by Gabriele Leidloff. A forum for an exhibit and a symposium on "l o g-i n / l o c k e d o u t" is planned for the second half of 2001 in Hamburg in co-production with Karl Clausberg (art sciences) and Olaf Breitbach (biological, neurological sciences). A preliminary project to this event will begin in 1999 in the form of discussion forums and autopsies with the participants and institutions listed.

"As primary component, communication contains a com-" Latin for ‘with‘. Basically, this contains all of the questions and the problems: What goes with what, who goes together with whom, so that communication takes place? What does that WITH imply? Answer: the with is to be read temporally and does not imply synchronicity; instead it implies posteriority between (a) thinking and (b) speaking (c) speaker and (d) listener. Pure simultaneity would destroy communication. Thus one has to first form one, and then transmit it. Posteriority, however, contains the seed of information distortion. As such, a weak dilemma exists for communication: synchronicity would be too early (speaking cannot take place without thought and comes later; in the same vein, the listener has to wait for that which has been spoken and comprehends later), but posteriority contains the possibility of deformation through hearing wrongly, through a different expectation, through remembering.