“YOU DON’T MISS YOUR WATER,” the saying goes, “till your well runs dry.” True, I never thought I’d miss Hanne Darboven so much. That was my initial reaction to “Notation,” a vastly ambitious show on view last fall at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste that travels next month to the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany. Organized by image theoretician Hubertus von Amelunxen along with artists Dieter Appelt and Peter Weibel, the exhibition is billed as a broad overview of “sign systems [in] literature, music, painting, choreography, architecture, photography, film, and media

In his first film, Europa 54°54'–25°19', 1997, Deimantas Narkevičius sets out for the center of Europe—which, after a reestimation of the borders of the continent by geographers at the Parisian Institut Géographique National in 1989, is located at a spot in a village called Purnuškės, north of Vilnius (“One Friday morning I got the urge to go and see the center of Europe”). The artist can be heard off-screen explaining that he had previously disregarded the existence of this supposedly highly significant location in Lithuania, dismissing it as just another instance of the sort of ethnocentric