“The difference between thinking clearly and confusion is the same difference that there is between repetition and insistence. A great many think that they know repetition when they see or hear it but do they. A great many think that they know confusion when they know or see it or hear it, but do they. A thing that seems to be very clear, seems very clear but is it. A thing that seems to be exactly the same thing may seem to be a repetition but is it.”
Gertrude Stein, Portraits and Repetition
Drawing
The individual drawing is realized through a strictly regimented process that I developed over a long period of time and in constant reference to the materiality of the drawing process.
With the help of this process and with a predetermined temporal and spatial distance to that which has been seen, I can gain a certain access to visual memory. This access shifts between the processes of perception (of a concrete constellation that can be found as much in a face as in an urban space) and memory (as the intentional (re-)activation of the perceived in the memory of the moment).
The core of many of my projects lies in the drawing as a building block and the method to develop it, not as an object, but rather as a memento that is as accurate as possible, point for point; the cartography of a visual impression.
The process of drawing from memory interests me less as an inscription of my subjective perception but rather as an experiment in which I confront the materiality of “memory.” What particularly interests me is the question of a reciprocal inscription of individual and collective memory-related practices and forms.
The following text is excerpted from a protocol in which I attempt to describe the exact course of my drawing practice and its access of the remembered:
“It is easy to say what recollection, which “draws attention” to itself, is not: It is certainly not (yet) image. It is not truly an object. It is also not language, if language is a notion. It is fluid, yet specific. It is often connected to a concrete perception (noise, odor, movement) without being identical to this. An impression that is thus linked to recollection – or rather, its indication – can be an association or a memory. Its quality is often associated more with a physical experience than with a description of a visual perception. It is never describable because it is fundamentally temporal. And yet – and this is the paradox of the process of remembering – it may be abstracted as a POINT in time, which may be spanned across the duration of the drawing. The concrete moment of recollection is not drawn, but becomes instrumental as a repeated update, a trigger mechanism for the reconstruction of visual perception.”
The process of reconstruction through drawing does not function as the reproduction of a remembered object. Instead it is the development and revision of this object as a visual constellation in the drawing.
The drawing method of a work point by point requires a continual comparison between the drawn visual surface and the remembered. Ultimately, the visual overwrites the memory itself, overtaking it and then completely replacing it in its capacity as representation. At the same time, it is only in this concrete process of inscription that memory can become accessible at all. This might seem to be a banal insight with regard to the creation of images in general. But this has far-reaching implications with regard to the link between representation and temporality in memory, such as for the notions of “past” and “present.”
The resulting drawings accumulate in series, these in series of series, and so on. Initially, the form of this continuous enhancement with new material is unstructured. The order of creation and certain process-related parameters (per series as applicable) are noted only if these are not apparent from the drawing itself.
The resulting pool of material assumes very different forms, which include: unfinished drawing series, grid-based drawing installations that extend throughout the exhibition architecture on the wall, floor and in the space, installations of drawings and films, pure film installations and/or film screenings.
Many of these works were realized in commission, per invitation and in response to a concrete context raising the urgent question concerning visibility and possible participation in a preexisting political and social order (see Bolzano/Italy 2008, Tirana/Albania 2009).
The work on drawings becomes interesting against the background of the evolved practice of the creation of visual spaces. Not in the sense of art about art, but as an activity that must constantly negotiate its place between the political, as the manifestation of that which is always excluded from the existing dominant order, and the police of every conceivable regime of representation.
Instead of the representation of a figure within the drawing as image, my focus thus lies on the activity of image production as a making-accessible of “reality” – to myself, and to a different yet comparable extent to the viewer.
Animation
The development from drawing to animation first started with reconstructions of a single image from memory, in which large groups of images in installations came together in serial patterns and visual surfaces according to various regulating principles. These led to the repeated reconstruction of the same image lined up as an animation of moving images “on the spot,” and finally to entire filmic sequences.
This path from individual drawing to film resulted organically from my ongoing confrontation with the potential of the interstice (in the image between two points/ in the installation between two pictures / in film between two frames – and in any case between image and viewer) as the space in which perception and recollection become fundamentally intertwined.
The work with filmic animation is driven by an investigation into how a procedural notion of imagery can be conceived with animation, and how, through the process of memory-based reconstruction, this can be perceived as such by the viewer, who observes not as recipient but rather as (re)-constructor.
I am interested in animation as a kind of imaging process, through which not only classical parameters of drawing such as “perspective” and “object” may be addressed and observed through drawing, but also something much more fundamental: their (and other) implementations within perception- and memory-processes as policies of reality construction.
What does that which is depicted beyond (I intentionally do not say in) a drawing have to do with its structure? Ultimately a certain constellation of marks on paper is always an indication of the many possible associations lying beyond it. However, the more the concrete materiality of the drawing retreats behind a purported closure of the image, the more impenetrable the drawing becomes to a viewer’s active gaze upon what lies “beyond.”
I do not work with the linear, classical animation film technique, frame-for-frame on transparency paper, where each image builds on the preceding one and continuity in movement is achieved by changing select visual elements. Instead, each frame is drawn anew from memory (of the perceived and of course automatically from the recollection of the drawing of the frame immediately preceding it).
An overall visual structure is guaranteed by the help of but a few (max. 5 per frame) "architectonic" orientation points, which are transferred from drawing to drawing in pencil.
Since the drawings are composed of dots and spotted structures and are not linearly composed, a general movement within the picture results from the combination of continuous position shifts of the numerous markings from sheet to sheet – since it is impossible to repeat the image structure from memory even with such great precision.
Just as the object becomes apparent between the points and only from a distance, the continuity of the filmic sequence is interrupted by the erratic shifts of continuous agitation: 12 times a second, since 12 individually reconstructed images are played per second. At the same time, it is this continuous discontinuity that portrays a process of linear movement in the film.