HOW IT STARTED - SUMMER 2006

HOW IT STARTED - SUMMER 2006

Like every year the city libraries of Linz sold second hand former library books on a fleamarket. There it was, that the book 'Cat's Cradle' from Kurt Vonnegut was part of a whole pile of books which was acquired by b# this year. It happened to be the english version. It also happened, that b# gave this book to givan.
And then we met in the garden of Golo Föllmer in Berlin one day and there it was, that the idea of the 'Kurt Vonnegut Suite' was born.

The Kurt Vonnegut Suite should be a collection of materials by artists, who work together on one complex piece - the Suite. The pieces of the artists get uploaded on a database, where things can be exchanged. The database though should also fulfill the function of a working tool, which is 'playable'. so that it allows a as real time as possible playing of the database.
The common piece is happening along the lines of the book.

The content of the book, like in so many books of Vonnegut, are layers of stories that interwine with the story line and build up a complex story around politics, religion, war and personalities, that is not easy to explain in one sentence.
It starts with a book that should be written about the day the Hiroshima bomb fell and what people did on this day. Jonah - the narrator of the story - gets through his project involved with the children of Dr. Felix Hoenekker - father of the atomic bomb. In the course of this, it is revealed, that Hoenikker also invented something else - in the end far more dangerous - chemical substance: ice9, a substance that freezes everything that is liquid within it's surroundings.
Through several conincidents the three children of Hoenikker and Jonah end up on a carribean island called San Lorenzo, where two powers rule the natives of the island: the tyrann Papa Monzano and Bokonon, founder of the islands' relgion but prohibited by Papa Monzano.
What else happens in the book is better enjoyed by simply reading it.

Within the Suite we concentrate on the quotes out of the Book Of Bokonon - calypsos with religious sayings. Bokononism is a religion that is calling itself a big lie. But living along the lines of this advise....

So we started to contact the agent of Kurt Vonnegut, Mr. Donald C. Farber, to introduce the project and establish contact to Mr. Vonnegut himself. Maybe we could go and visit him.
With the book Cat's Cradle itself there seemed to be quite a copy right issue around it.
According to our research in fall 2006 we stumbled over a myth, that the rights of the book are sold to somebody else (no source available anymore?).
What turned out to be true was, that Leonardo di Caprios Production company Appian Way Productions has the rights on the material for the film version. The movie should come out in 2007 already. It seems to be at least still on the to-make list of Appian Ways:
http://www.themovieinsider.com/m2844/cats-cradle/
http://www.variety.com/profiles/Company/Year/2007/2014721/Appian+Way.htm...
http://www.film-releases.com/movies/search/studio/index.php?studio_keywo...

The thing with copyright was making us think about what we should do and decided to take legal advice on this issue and visited the lawyer Alfred Noll in Vienna.

Copyright in Austria - and pretty much in general - is in many cases very much depending on the interpretation of how (certain) material was used. Our original plan, to put all the quotes, connected with Bokononism - online for general sight and use, was altered by that. This is according to legal definition not a citation. A citation would be, if i take a smaller amount of text out of a book and place it within a text of mine. It also has to emphasize a point of what i wanted to say, explain something or serve as an example.
Taking from a book more quotes and just put one after the other is, according to definition, not citation and would therefore most likely be copyright infringement.

According to artworks it gets more complex as these things are aloud, when it can be proven, that it is satire.

Nevertheless we wanted to see Mr. Vonnegut anyway and thought at the same time to rename the project into karasssuite.
A Karass according to Cat's Cradle is:

We were still trying to get contact to Kurt Vonnegut himself, when he died on April 11 2007 in New York.
http://www.vonnegut.com/news.asp