The desktop reminds one of a pupil’s desk or a  telephone table, where one scribbles unconsciously  or leaves notes intentionally such as crib sheets or telephone numbers. Only under close inspection is the secret disclosed. An important aspect of the work is the aleatoric combination of the plans. It is opposed to the methods of chance, which can be considered as a starting point of artistic creativity. Dali ‘s so-called paranoia-critic method for example does nothing else but what is done in a Rorschach-test. Nails are smashed into etching plates by an explosion. He then uses those plates as a ground layer for his compositions. By their haphazard structure, his own fantasy is inspired, and they tickle his sub-conscience. The process also happens, while watching the desktop of Manenti’s installation, already proven by the mentioned allusions of the tufts of lines as negative highlights of nocturnal infrastructure.

In aleatoricism, though, artistic structures are generated by chance operations and improvisation. It is a method which can be applied to art as well as literature and music. André Blanc-Lapierre and Robert Fortet have formulated this procedure in their Théorie des fonctions aléatoires in the 1950s.5  In music, especially John Cage has to be mentioned for the application of aleatoric methods. As well as, already in the 18th century the composer and music theoretician Johann Philipp Kirnberger, who invented the “musical dice game” – a compositorial system with dices as random generator.6 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart designed probably the best known game of that kind, with his instruction to compose waltzes with two dice […]“, in which the audience could jumble the bars of a waltz. 7

John Cage visualized the principle in his series Not Wanting To Say Anything About Marcel, which he made after the death of Marcel Duchamp on the 2nd of October, 1968.8 Eight printed slabs, each of transparent plastic, were mounted with gaps on a wooden base. The spectator can look through he different layers. The constellation of the printed objects changes randomly with the movement of the spectator.

The topic of transparency of various layers is broached by Nicolas Manenti through the layering of plans. In that context, the rustic, wooden desktop appears like an allusion to the wooden bases, Cage used for his so-called plexigrammes. With the title, John Cage refers to the famous Silence of Marcel Duchamps. The plexigrammes themselves aimed at their mutual method of involving the principle of contingency as a means of creation independent of artistic control. Marcel Duchamp applied the random principle in his work Trois stoppage étalon, 1913–14. In the experimental setup, Duchamp dropped three threads of one meter each, held horizontically, from a hight of one meter on a plane surface. There, he glued them, exactly the way they fell, on blue canvas strips and mounted them to glass panels. According to his own expression, he wanted to conserve chance.9 Later, Duchamp called the Trois stoppage étalon his most important work, since it marked the breach with traditional methods of expression most clearly.10

The idea of conserving chance was fixed literally by Daniel Spoerri in his Topographie Anécdotée du Hasard in 1962. It formulated the basic idea of his Tableaux pièges.11 In collaboration with Robert Filliou, Emmett Williams and Dieter Roth the German edition Anekdoten zur Topographie des Zufalls was published in 1969.12 On the 17th of October, 1961 at 15.45, Daniel Spoerri had started numbering and cataloguing meticulously all objects situated on his working table in the Hotel Carcassonne in Paris.13 The determining moment of the random analysis is the exact point of time, the 17th of October, 1961, 15.45, when Spoerri freezes the situation. Nicolas Manenti shows the change of Schwerin topography on a working desk of the 19th century in 2010, exactly 850 years after the foundation of the city (on the presumption that the date of foundation is the correct one …).