Loch Netz – the black zone

Michael Kurzwelly

This hiking guide also serves as your manual. During your hike you will find that it is not easy to resist temptations and overcome your sense of curiosity purely because you are not allowed to enter the dark tunnels of the black zone. The challenge is to carefully observe yourself in relation to your environment. Because you are strictly prohibted from entering the zone, there is an opportunity for a completely new space to develop in your head which you can fill with your own ideas. While you are in constant contact with the zone within the light spaces and the space-time capsules, you will develop your own personal idea of the black zone, your own reality. But what is reality? Is it the sum of our observations by means of our senses in space and time? What you see is what you get? Or, rather what you want to see is what you get? What we experience with our senses we compare in our brain with a highly complex mental construct – our reality. This construct is the outcome of all our previous experiences and first- and secondhand knowledge. As long as the experience fits in perfectly with our constructed reality we react with a dreamlike certaintly to the observed phenomenon. However, there are phenomena that lead to questions about our world view. Sometimes this needs to be completely reconstructed and can put our ideas to the test and that we usually take for granted. Examples that have changed the world view dramatically are for instance when Galileo Galilei pronounced that the Earth revolved around the Sun and that our world was not the centre of the universe. Loch Netz is a grandiose experiment that puts into question our current experiences of space, time, and ourselves and our role between birth and death. I recommend that you pack a notepad and a pen. Take your time to note down ideas, images, sounds, smells or views that suddenly arise in your consciousness. Dive into the fine threads of communication that might spark off micro societies between two light points in the spacetime capsule. While exploring the Loch Netz, you are also gliding into yourself. The outside and the inside merge into one another. This is the ultimate experience that we can offer you when you tour through Loch Netz. All you need to do is activate the button in your head.

What is Loch Netz?

The black zone is not actually black, it is lit up through artificial light.

Most people fear the blackness of the zone, they experience extreme fear when they lose their orientation in the dark.

Therefore the structural system is particularly rigid in the black zone

Unfamiliar patterns of behavior are easily recognized in the background.

The other view

The black zone also teaches us that the experience in space is relative with regard to the experiences of the individual. The touristic experience is not so much created through the visual communication of outside images, but rather through the creation of a different angle. In this way a hitherto unknown reality invites us to an adventure holiday. An unbiased and focused view of human forms racing through the passages or being crammed into small spaces allows us to suddenly recognise systems, structures and rules quite clearly in our consciousness. And at the same time we also recognise the absurdity that imprisons us. The black zone can suddenly and simultaneously lead far into the innermost space as well as the outer space. We can dive into ourselves and thus make the outer space disappear or we can laugh at our own irrelevant being from a cosmic point of view. Waiting seems to be the actual character of the black zone and describes a paradox: Speed and standing still – the space itself is incidental.

The passages

These are thoroughfares. Those who arrive from the country can hardly keep up with the speed that is set by those who are used to the black zone. What must happen to direct attention to oneself? Only hunger, thirst, small and big needs, or magazines can help to escape the racing crowd. Only those who have dropped something or are strangers will stop. Humans move in pulsating waves, sometimes it goes all quiet until the next herd races in.

The space-time capsule

A type of space-time capsule connects the light points of the black zone. Fleeting, brief contacts are sometimes made in the railway carriages, just for the moment that separates two platforms. Shy and provocative glances, gentle and hard signs alternate. The capsule forces the users into a narrow passage that only allows an escape into the inside and then they might glance shyly but with curiosity around the corner.

The light space

This is filled and emptied in a rythm determined by the trains that arrive and depart. At first, just a few people may appear, the number may increase depending on the time of day and the platform, and may turn into a crescendo of crowds. When the black zone express arrives, there is a huge exchange. People stream out of the carriages and briefly brush past those entering the carriage only to disappear down the passages. It might first go quiet. The platforms are sometimes created more, sometimes less. Some are architectural and imaginative works of art. There are a few benches that invite us to stay a little while, and you might even find a kiosk.

Loch Netz

The black zone is structured by means of a system that manifests in the house rules. We can assume that only a few of the users know the house rules of the black zone. It is only human that we intuitively try to adapt to the prevailing systems in order to function optimally. Because of the blackness, the fear of losing control by the protection services in the black zone is particularly high. We are all familiar with the childhood nightmare where we get lost on our way from school and can’t find our house. We wake up in a sweat and check that our coordinate system is still in order. It is thus easy to understand that many fear nightmares in the black zone.

White zone – black zone

The black zone, like the white zone, is a tear in space. We thus recommend that you connect with people in our area as quickly as possible and start communicating as this immediately creates space and we are saved unless an attack on reality prevents this experience. The individual path is the escape into the space of a book or a magazine – sleeping also helps.

Boredom

It has been scientifically proven by psychologists that boredom is the mother of creativity. In the past we would use the positive term „idleness“. Let us thus wander sense-lessly through the black zone, inspiration happens by itself as long as we don’t force it.

Crisis

If the black zone has any goal at all, it is to provoke crises in you, the zone tourist. Only crises can confuse our fixed life patterns and force us to put our life back together in a new way.