Petermfriess — Topography Without Coordinates

Project

Topography Without Coordinates is a collection of 23 “Freeze Frames” that map the moods and contradictions of life today. They pause the flow of distraction in our everyday life — from digital noise to ecological collapse, and the invisible presence of artificial intelligence that mediates how we say the world. Written in a condensed, rhythmic language that echoes social media captions and pop lyrics, the artwork aims not only to describe culture but to circulate within it.

The project draws on the restless energy of German poet Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, who once absorbed American pop culture into his German poetry. Here, that gesture is inverted: the Freeze Frames reflect the present back toward American pop culture itself, bending its clichés, reframing its images, and pressing its contradictions into sharper relief.

Topography Without Coordinates doesn’t offer a fixed map but brief snapshots that make the familiar look new. And AI works as an amplifier to test how far language can go when influenced by machine rules. The snapshots are meant to spread across media and to show a back-and-forth between human perception and algorithmic patterns. What’s left isn’t a final answer but a lasting tone: less a map than the ongoing process of losing and regaining your bearings.

(Afterimage of the Future (Fragment for a Lost Cartography) — FF01)

It is as if the world were speaking in a dialect we have not quite forgotten, yet no longer master. Between algorithms and waste heat, between cloud storage and collapsing ecosystems, wanders a consciousness that once thought itself autonomous. It is called Subject.

The streets are smoothed out, intelligent, empty. Surveillance is no longer a crime but a service. And the soul, if it ever existed, has changed its address — it now lives in interfaces, swipes right, likes the rain that no longer falls.

The human being, who once called ‘nature’ that which exceeded him, now calls ‘malfunction’ that which eludes his control. When the forest dies, the metaphor dies too. And what is a poem without trees?

In the digital echo chambers, silence and opinion roar against each other. Truth has become a frequency that only rarely breaks through the noise. And yet they sit there, night after night, dazzled by the blue light that is no longer fire.

The great acceleration is over. What remains is a circling. Around itself. Around a sun of data, around a hope that can be adjusted algorithmically.

But perhaps — perhaps — somewhere in the cold room of a server farm, there stands a verse, fleetingly coded, that says: “I was here. I have felt.”