[NetBehaviour] stone bridges, QRRR and counter-Munich

Johannes Birringer Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk
Sun Jul 24 18:56:16 CEST 2016



Receiving a note from Alan Sondheim, on the road, he mentions a stone bridge where he 
created a piece "changing the bridge lighting to produce, 
sequentially, and on different lighting levels/apparatus, SOS, QRRR, and 
MAYDAY (QRRR is an old radio code for warning/danger/disaster); this 
alternative with flame-light images on the bridge side (invisible from the 
trains that run above it) representing burning crushed buildings and 
people....."

i am not sure why I think of the bridge, but a friend from Texas, after I told him
about the chaos in Europe, the shootings, the terror, the military putsches, purges,
and the new security measures, the increasingly heated debates on refugees
and migration, Islamism, fascism, and violence, well, he noted that the shootings
in Munich took place on the site of the former Olympic Park.

The Olympia shopping centre is a two-tiered glass-covered mall that was built on the site of the 1972 Olympics. 
The Munich Games were overshadowed by a terrorist attack in which 11 Israeli sportsmen and a German policeman were 
killed after being taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists.

Now we hear that the shooting last Friday was by a young "lone wolf" (and what exactly do they mean by lone wolf).



A Munich-based poet, the late Paul Wühr, once wrote about Die Wirklichkeit unter Beschuss (reality under shooting attack)

alles ist doch in Ordnung /
es geht weiter /
ich glaube /
ich glaube es geht weiter /
ja des glaub ich schon.


(translated)

everything's all right, no? /
life goes on /
I believe /
I believe life goes on /
yeah, I believe so /



that short QRRR, I tend to think, was meant as Wühr's satirical comment on "weltfromme Bekenntnisformeln" ,  pious liturgies that we tell ourselves, as we must repeat them and murmur them in the face of the all the constant flare ups.



Johannes Birringer 
c/o Interaktionslabor Göttelborn




More information about the NetBehaviour mailing list