Kugelkopf ext. 8:
LOK1000

The new version is called WEICHE – German for a railway switch, the place where a train can change direction while the track itself knows only one. Francis Picabia’s sentence “Our head is round so that thought can change direction” has accompanied the Kugelkopf for years; in the courtyard of a locomotive factory it gains a second floor: the sphere is the form that leaves the track.

In German, Kugelkopf is also the name of the IBM Selectric type ball (1961): 88 characters on a sphere that turns and tilts for every letter – a head that changes direction for every sign. The AV work takes this double meaning as its visual language: the film is typed. A rendered type ball writes the opening and closing titles line by line with a black-and-red ribbon; the afternoon’s footage becomes typewriter art, lines, and a tally of the 45 years.

The sphere heads themselves are collages of photographs of faces and eyes laminated onto papier-mâché – up close a moon with craters that look back. Chapter IV reads this surface as a celestial body and marks the stations of the cycle since 2010 as craters; Tracking Philae (2014/15) had already sent the Kugelkopf after a comet.

The material: 253 photographs and 25 4K videos from 3 October 2026 in the WUK courtyard, with their original sound. No generated images: type ball, typescript, line feed, lunar map and 3D model were written in Python, NumPy and ffmpeg for this work. The palette comes from the site and the tool: typescript paper, black and red ribbon, the dark signal-box desk, the yellow of the lit WUK doors.

The soundtrack follows the image stroke by stroke. The type ball is rebuilt synthetically: rotation, type strike (click, body, low thump), carriage return with ratchet, the bell at the end of the line, the 60 Hz hum of the motor. In the track diagram the rail joints count the distance, the switches throw, each signal has its tone.

The afternoon’s original sound – voices, children, the courtyard – is not replaced but processed: in the typescript through a ribbon comb, in the line feed time-shifted like the image lines (eight taps, left – centre – right like the triptych), on the lunar map spectrally frozen into a standing sound over which the craters light up as bells. In the standstill the courtyard sounds unprocessed; every stroke of the 45 years is a keystroke. Loudness −16 LUFS, true peak −2 dBFS.

In 1855 Georg Sigl builds his locomotive factory at Währinger Straße 59; by 1870 his works count their thousandth locomotive (built in Wiener Neustadt). After the 1873 stock-market crash the business changes direction: engineering, stage machinery for the Court Opera, iron structures for the Votivkirche.

In 1884 the Technologisches Gewerbemuseum (TGM) moves in and stays for almost a century. When it relocates in 1980, demolition or housing threatens. On 27 June 1981 the building is occupied; on 3 October 1981 the WUK opens – a self-managed, grassroots-democratic workshop and culture house with its own section for dance, theatre and performance.

The title LOK1000 continues the series’ machine names – after ext. 5: C64 (Volkstheater 2019) – and it lies on the track of this site. On 3 October 2026 at 3 pm, at the “45 Jahre WUK” festival, the sphere heads follow their own trajectory through the courtyard between staircase F, tent, pavilion and audience.

Video 3840 × 2160, 25 fps, H.264 High 5.1 (x264, CRF 20, max 40 Mbit/s, GOP 50), BT.709 · Sound AAC 256 kbit/s, 48 kHz, stereo, −16 LUFS · long version 4:38 = 6,950 frames, trailer 2:22 = 3,550 frames, 3D film 2:00 = 3,000 frames.

Methods Python/NumPy → ffmpeg; type ball rendered analytically (sphere with 88 mirrored types, relief, chrome environment); typescript from a Courier Prime glyph atlas with overstrikes and ribbon texture; line feed with a frame buffer per panel; lunar map from close-ups of the spheres as an equirectangular collage; 3D with an own numba rasterizer (G-buffer, shadow map, deferred shading).

3D glTF 2.0 binary (GLB), metres, Y up; nodes: buildings, paving, Gleis_Lokomotivfabrik_1855, Typenkugel_IBM_Kugelkopf, Geisterlok_Sigl_1855, Kugelkopf_1–3 (hips, legs, torso, arms, sphere head); animation “WUK_Hof_Zyklus_120s”. Web: three.js r169 local, no trackers.

Type Courier Prime (typescript) · IBM Plex Mono (signal box) – both OFL.