20. UNDER|DOX 09-15 OKT 2025

Licht, Spiel, Kunst

The history of moving images is a history of tools. From flip books, which require only flexible image carrier material, a pencil and natural light, to the utopia of a technological
singularity that independently creates time-based works without human intervention, there is a long and curious path to travel. What expectations and desires will this utopia fulfil? Who will be interested in it?
The appeal of the visual unconscious offered by the play of light is a familiar practice for us cinematographic natives. And yet we are constantly surprised and thrilled by films and media art that we encounter outside the culture industry in the form of screenings, installations or objects in gallery spaces:Historical constants in imagery, such as the horizon line, are as commonplace as they are fundamental. The mysticism of nature in landscape and fauna is explored in animations, field recordings and soundscapes. The incomprehensible buzzes in the tension between the conscious and the unconscious.
Human bodies act as linguistic-philosophical representatives and as objects of study in an enigmatic experiment about time and space. Women suffer, women cover their heads. Is that true? And if so, how?
It is political, like a philosophical video sculpture, a German home movie from 1943, a contemporary US panorama, or the question of responsibility in collective trauma. The latter is also the subject of a work that relates film and painting to each other.
On the eve of utopia, we already have information technology that can be addressed simply: “Hey XYZ, turn Cézanne’s art into a maximally awesome world of experience with moving images for young and old.” That’s okay. Except that it’s reactionary, an approximation of realities we know, an unfocused devotion to mere decor. In this, it is familiar to each and every one of us, moments of security that no one likes to do without.
In more alert moments of art, however, we are tempted by curiosity, by an approach to realities we do not know. The desire to concentrate on an isolated aspect, to engage with something new, genuinely created by human impulses. – Matthias von Tesmar