Ideal Deficiency

This film is like a machine. Everything is in motion, humming, in restless rhythm. Recognizable in the beginning is an abstract composition: a luminous circle sliced by a black line, above it, drips of paint, a diagonal beam drifting upward. A nice picture reminiscent of modernism, of Moholy-Nagy, the constructivists. Below it is a painting of nondescript material, probably ash, in the background a blue rectangle that rises and falls. The composition as a whole evokes a computer window, but also sediments, deposits on the screen without any depth. "Control the rupture" is written. A screeching sound: "Split and scratch," the words and their sound penetrate into these smooth surfaces from which individual subjects fluctuate in rhythm: continual close-ups of vague body parts. A frenzied dance involving patterns that basically do not change as the formats somehow remain the same: An assembly line of images. Controls? Not for us who are thrown into this machine.

Ideal Deficiency deals with bodies and their subjectivization in an era of mechanized controls. From the technical euphoria of modernism through to the current ability to quantify algorithmically, the line is drawn clearly: they are all such beautiful patterns. There is no outside. Permanent variability of the same. And yet they are there: these strange superimpositions, these picture formats that do not simply glide seamlessly, but instead, are full of ruptures. Ideal Deficiency, the ideal deviation, can be programmed. But it also occurs as an uncontrolled effect of program errors and hardware crashes. Therefore, "ideal" is not the smooth marble or body, but something that will abruptly adjust it, that shows a tear in the image, like the black line that once again slices the circle. Or the ash that remains behind: in the first image and also the last. (Yvonne Volkart Schmidt)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt