Experimental short film
Film: Robert Seidel
Music: Oval
In tech companies, universities and artist studios, machines work through and learn the history of mankind. Copyright dissolves; distinctions between original, imitation or inferior reproduction erode. No origin, no responsibility, no clear bias - just a primordial soup that can be transformed into any form without questioning knowledge systems and hierarchies. In this silent, but radical restructuring of entire industries, the artist becomes a template of a future that is digitally assembled from a myriad of fragments of the past.
In the experimental film Hysteresis, Seidel’s analogue drawings and digital processing merge with the queer performance of Tsuki, whose movements improvise between Ballet, Butoh and Berlin club culture. In a fusion process, her image is recorded, fed back through Seidel’s devices and then projected onto her body. An expanding digital sphere beyond labels and identifications with gender, culminating in dehabitualised neural patterns and reconceived fabrics of intimacy beyond rational understanding. In a final step, the resulting sessions are edited and dissolved by machine-learning strategies into a constant flow of pulsating images and folded spatial configurations. The resulting Muybridgean silhouettes, baroque textures and bursting structures fluctuate between the second and third dimensions, unfolding free-floating gestures that unhinge the laws of nature. Meanwhile, delicate abrasions of the pictorial frame build bridges into contradictory concatenations of reality. The soundtrack by Oval (Markus Popp) incessantly corrodes this dense web of associations, threatening to dissolve the remaining fragile points of reference.
At a time when an overriding predictability is forced upon us all, the film celebrates the disruption of pattern recognition and the artistic corruption of results induced by artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning. With Hysteresis Seidel explores new grounds in his experimental practice and collaboration. Unveiling a frenetic, delicate and flamboyant visual language, that speaks to the hysteria and hysteresis in this historical moment. The artist wants to open a discourse about these unique modes of AI creation – with implications beyond the film and other media, to that singularity, where history collapses into a single point in the present.
HYSTERESIS was part of the Opening Night and of the shorts program 'Can Your Computer do This?' at InScience Film Festival 2023.
