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Dance of the empty gowns: the aesthetics of the volatileChristoph Kivelitz
published: Pneuma Monoxyd, ISBN 978-3-938847-11
My camera records everyday scenes and I attempt to understand them, as if, by means of my inquiring gaze, I were able to penetrate their essence, as if there were one at all. Amongst other things, this involves a process of recognizing the way that time slips away at the very moment that it begins to slide out of our reach and to render it visible. At the same time as this moment becomes clearly visible, the layers of false time are removed, from our memories, too." (Thomas Köner)1
Thomas Köner illustrates time in its different dimensions, and as a parameter dependent on subjective feelings. He viewed even his earliest sound compositions as vessels or tools whose purpose was to observe time or rather to allow the latter to become visible and capable of being experienced in its flow. In retrospect, it appears consistent that for his first video works he used images from observation cameras.
As "found footage", this filmic material thus fulfils the requirements for a "neutral", i.e., non-subjective way of looking at things. It is the security camera and the WebCam that do the recording, without themselves being in a position to see and evaluate. They supply pictures for an "objective" process of setting forth evidence. Köner processes several hours of ready-made pictorial material, condensing them into a new continuum. In 2003 he produced his first three-part cycle constructed from video images taken from Internet surveillance cameras and WebCam pictures.
His video Banlieue du vide shows snow-covered, furrowed streets, without cars, without people. The other videos in this cycle are Nuuk (2004) and Suburbs of the Void (2004). What links these works is the idea of a cold, Nordic landscape. Cold appears – even in Köner’s memories – to put a damper on all activities, with the soundtrack reinforcing the almost hypnotic quality of the constantly ebbing and flowing images. Faced with absolute emptiness, the wall of sound coming from an indefinite distance is perceived like a memory that inserts itself almost imperceptibly into the flow of images, constantly opening up new spatio-temporal levels in the latter by association. The heterogeneity of the sound impressions circles a momentary experience that is concentrated to a point of extreme intensity by means of the delay in temporal progress. In all the sequences of Banlieue du vide an empty, snow-covered roadway is visible, leading into the picture at the bottom edge and leading out again at the upper edge of the picture. The basic structure of all pictures is identical, but in their details they are, after all, different. Only when we concentrate hard on what we are looking at do we understand that the images here that reference one another in their similarities are in fact interlinked, that they gradually merge into one another and then slowly reappear as different entities. All settings are blended together very gradually with the result that changes in the structure of the image only come to mind when we try to envision and remember earlier pictorial situations. The breathing rhythm at the root of this process of minimal change, adjustment and superimposition provokes the impression of a slow-motion replay. Because, normally, slow motion is used to highlight or focus on a particular event, a key situation – be it in sport or in a dramatic accident – this engenders in the viewer a state of expectation. The moment is somehow pregnant, and the viewer finds himself at the culminating point of a set of events. However, in what follows, his expectations come to nothing. They run into a void and he finds himself on infinite hold, in the film’s endless loop. Accordingly, the subject-matter is a latent feeling of pressure for something to happen that builds up as the images wash over that is then constantly deflated.
Suburbs of the Void shows a crossroads in the metropolitan suburbs from a raised perspective. The anonymous quality of its high-rises makes it nigh-on impossible to allocate it an exact geographical location. More than 2.000 photos from a local surveillance camera have gone into this video work, images which Thomas Köner downloaded from the Internet as WebCam pictures over a period of several months and archived. Only comments by the artist reveal that this is a place in North Finland, close to the Arctic Circle, a location permanently covered in frost and, in the winter, almost constantly dark. Neither street signs nor billboards can be made out. Only the illuminated windows and traces of light on the street are indicative of human life. The filmic sequence is made up of individual images that have been spliced together or continually merged. The only noticeable changes are the various different types of light and atmospheric effects. At the beginning of the video, diffuse wafts of mist and a darkness broken up by only a few points of light convey to the viewer a feeling of disorientation and forlornness. The persistent, swelling noise looks to bring this unpleasant situation to a head. The threatening darkness gradually gives way to a clearly outlined image of a thoroughfare framed by high-rises. But scarcely have we made out the structures here when they begin to dissolve amorphously. Touches of color and the resultant pools of warmth mitigate the impression of cold and inhospitableness. Although the picture and sound change permanently the perspective remains constant. The street coming in from the bottom left and running horizontally through the center of the picture has been taken in a diagonal upward movement to the upper edge of the picture without touching the latter and thus indicating a continuation beyond this boundary. The dynamics associated with the street appeared to freeze here and, moreover, to relegate the viewer to an uneventful state. Reducing the flow of the images to minimal, almost imperceptible adjustments spawns a feeling of monotony in the viewer, a feeling, however, that, in the final analysis, is aimed at achieving a state of meditation. Köner creates a vibrating continuum of images and sounds where different levels of time and space are entwined on several levels so as to circle around and begin to get close to an area beyond spatio-temporal categories. Completely different times and utterly disparate locations are strung together because of structural similarities in order to put together impressions of standstill and change, identity and difference, in an image that is paradox and yet not one-dimensionally reduced. For Köner, this deceleration and reduction are a bonus. By eliminating the narrative components of the video he fosters an inexhaustible intensity of perception.
In a second cycle of videos dating from 2005, Köner stretches out the given passage of time. He extends a four-second sequence showing a street scene to make a 15-minute work. In this, he is, his own words, making an attempt to zoom out both himself and the images into an infinite dimension and, from this perspective, to envision the aesthetics of the inconstant, something inherent in each moment, however short it may be. Human figures come into view as if out of some spatio-temporal uncertainty. Köner splits the image and move it, figures and cars take on a transparent, almost picturesque or even graphic quality, like shadow beings between dream and reality. Energy accumulates and then dissipates against immediately.
The images for the three videos in the second cycle were recorded in Harare (Zimbabwe) Belgrade (Serbia) and Buenos Aires (Argentina). By allowing the appearance and disappearance of figures and things to convey a feeling of constant restlessness and detachment, Thomas Köner touches upon notions of the peripheral, the vagabond, in the knowledge that that the people in these countries have been forgotten, feel cut off from global developments. In Périphériques part 3 – Buenos Aires the figures clearly approach the viewer until they are in close view and yet they remain faceless and disembodied. Here, Thomas Köner wanted to show a moment, one that seems detached, free from any purpose, but, as an empty shape, desirous of being filled with content and ideas. The silhouettes of schoolchildren in a shanty town move towards the foreground, washed to the surface like memories of childhood whose billowing, blurred quality makes them almost impossible to identify. Gradually, these shadow beings become completely flat, scurrying like ghostly white rags across the loamy street without ever coming to rest in one place. These are images from which all traces of individuality and identity have been wiped away, something between a deception and a dream, fear and longing.
By extending time, Thomas Köner achieves a deceleration that borders on dissolution, a disintegration of temporal structures, by means of which, in the final analysis, the sensations of speed and slowness, particularly in respect of their usual oppositeness, are fundamentally cancelled out. Simultaneously, the relationship between inner and outer perception has become the real subject of this piece of work. By considerably stretching out the projection time of this film, Köner makes it more difficult for the viewer to relate this everyday street scene to his own experiences in his own environment. Unlike the case with the customary filmic experience, in this video time appears almost to stand still, caught in a circular movement, whilst our subjective experience of time and the media perception of the latter have been pushed to the forefront of our consciousness. Because the movement has been slowed down and the urban topography reduced to a minimum, the events in the image have been compressed into an intensity that goes beyond familiar impressions, qualifying for the field of the unusual and unknown and engendering an inward-looking, almost meditative mood. Our feelings of loneliness and forlornness are transformed – as we now pause for thought – into a visionary concept as an alternative to our practiced ways of looking at and experiencing the things of everyday life. The rhythms of the images as they burgeon and then close up once again refer the viewer to his presence in the here and now as well as, by contrast, taking away from him all fixed points in a system of spatio-temporal coordinates, thus engendering a feeling of restlessness and, by categorically transgressing established boundaries, revealing to him happenings that point to something beyond, something not constrained by spatio-temporal restrictions.
His most recent video piece – PNEUMA MONOXYD – achieves an even greater degree of abstraction. The footage was made in Dortmund and Belgrade. Out of a largely dark background, subtly structured in the center by grid structures, vaguely contoured figures emerge. They are evidently passers-by – filmed in downtown Dortmund – and discernible behind a veil as diaphanous structures only as shadows to completely eliminate parts of the image, and yet when moving to render the zones of light visible again. The geometrical formal frame from which they emerge remains unchanged but becomes gradually clearer and more spatial in effect, such that the film develops an almost narrative component and reveals a scenic setting. The hustle and bustle of a marketplace, taken in Belgrade, blends with the Dortmund shopping scenes to form a spatio-temporal synopsis that suddenly exposes the similarity of images, patterns of behavior and values on a global scale: "I can travel to the end of the world and yet all I can buy in the shacks there are Nike and Coca Cola. Everything is consumption and brainwashing, that is an immense loss and symbolic of great decay."2 In the final instance, this linkage strengthens the impression that we are witnessing somnambulist motions of creatures that can hardly be regarded as physical, and without any will of their own drift with a delay through the picture or are drawn through it as empty shells. In slow motion the bodies seem weightless, liberated from gravity. Different spatio-temporal levels are superimposed and in this melding form a new shape to reality that cannot be given a name, a concentration of brightness and contrasts, on the one hand, and of darkness, on the other, that only in the center of the pictorial field allow us to sense the outlines of an action. Time is manifested in this process as the struggle between darkness and light and by the process of superimposed levels of brightness, which in their constant contrast and merging finally open up a unique dimension of reality that is removed from lived practice.
In Thomas Köner’s video works we can to a certain extent see the expression of a meta-temporal notion of time. A notion of time structured on the category of progress and a rational concept of space are juxtaposed here to a spiral-shaped, perhaps indeed labyrinthine concept of time and space. Different concepts of reality are absorbed from different lived or experiential contexts, linked by things perceived in the inner and outside worlds, and assembled in a multi-layered process to form a lattice of images that can no longer be grasped in any linear sense. The matrix initially conveys the impressions of a shadow reality, evoking observer situations similar to that in Plato’s allegory of the cave. Yet what initially resembles the reflection and gleam of an ideal reality, gradually takes the form of an insight in which the copy and the original image, the idea and the notion fuse, becoming intertwined such as to be undistinguishable from each other. We cannot doubt the existence of the swaying, stuttering, freezing and then dissipating figures. Instead, what is important is to grasp the moment of their being as the mean of past and future, as the almost untenable, eminently fragile interface between the no-longer and the not-yet.
In the extreme condensation of temporality, the rhythmic flash of moments of motion, we can see the reflection of a dimension of infinity, to use Thomas Köner’s term. The artist’s topic is not "now", understood as the eye of the needle between past and present through which time flows, but the point in time that is abraded between past and future.
Thomas Köner is more interested in the moment in which past, present and future combine and in Kierkegaard’s sense time and eternity blend.3 By means of metamorphoses and the constant recurrence of the similar he creates a vibrant rhythm that enables viewers to immerse themselves aesthetically in the work. Ludwig Wittgenstein writes with reference to the desire to create such a moment outside time: "If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present."4 Thomas Köner ties the viewers of his videos into the situation of a permanently retarding holding loop in order (ever anew and never finally) to lead them to a "present fulfilled" in this way and thus convey an idea of an "aesthetics of the inconstant".
By virtue of the fact that in his videos standstill and movement, acceleration and deceleration slowly ebb and constantly regenerate themselves, Thomas Köner with a conscious insistence on the impossible re-presents Zeno’s paradox of the "flying arrow": "If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless."5
Dance of the empty gowns: the aesthetics of the volatileChristoph Kivelitz
published: Pneuma Monoxyd, ISBN 978-3-938847-11
My camera records everyday scenes and I attempt to understand them, as if, by means of my inquiring gaze, I were able to penetrate their essence, as if there were one at all. Amongst other things, this involves a process of recognizing the way that time slips away at the very moment that it begins to slide out of our reach and to render it visible. At the same time as this moment becomes clearly visible, the layers of false time are removed, from our memories, too." (Thomas Köner)1
Thomas Köner illustrates time in its different dimensions, and as a parameter dependent on subjective feelings. He viewed even his earliest sound compositions as vessels or tools whose purpose was to observe time or rather to allow the latter to become visible and capable of being experienced in its flow. In retrospect, it appears consistent that for his first video works he used images from observation cameras.
As "found footage", this filmic material thus fulfils the requirements for a "neutral", i.e., non-subjective way of looking at things. It is the security camera and the WebCam that do the recording, without themselves being in a position to see and evaluate. They supply pictures for an "objective" process of setting forth evidence. Köner processes several hours of ready-made pictorial material, condensing them into a new continuum. In 2003 he produced his first three-part cycle constructed from video images taken from Internet surveillance cameras and WebCam pictures.
His video Banlieue du vide shows snow-covered, furrowed streets, without cars, without people. The other videos in this cycle are Nuuk (2004) and Suburbs of the Void (2004). What links these works is the idea of a cold, Nordic landscape. Cold appears – even in Köner’s memories – to put a damper on all activities, with the soundtrack reinforcing the almost hypnotic quality of the constantly ebbing and flowing images. Faced with absolute emptiness, the wall of sound coming from an indefinite distance is perceived like a memory that inserts itself almost imperceptibly into the flow of images, constantly opening up new spatio-temporal levels in the latter by association. The heterogeneity of the sound impressions circles a momentary experience that is concentrated to a point of extreme intensity by means of the delay in temporal progress. In all the sequences of Banlieue du vide an empty, snow-covered roadway is visible, leading into the picture at the bottom edge and leading out again at the upper edge of the picture. The basic structure of all pictures is identical, but in their details they are, after all, different. Only when we concentrate hard on what we are looking at do we understand that the images here that reference one another in their similarities are in fact interlinked, that they gradually merge into one another and then slowly reappear as different entities. All settings are blended together very gradually with the result that changes in the structure of the image only come to mind when we try to envision and remember earlier pictorial situations. The breathing rhythm at the root of this process of minimal change, adjustment and superimposition provokes the impression of a slow-motion replay. Because, normally, slow motion is used to highlight or focus on a particular event, a key situation – be it in sport or in a dramatic accident – this engenders in the viewer a state of expectation. The moment is somehow pregnant, and the viewer finds himself at the culminating point of a set of events. However, in what follows, his expectations come to nothing. They run into a void and he finds himself on infinite hold, in the film’s endless loop. Accordingly, the subject-matter is a latent feeling of pressure for something to happen that builds up as the images wash over that is then constantly deflated.
Suburbs of the Void shows a crossroads in the metropolitan suburbs from a raised perspective. The anonymous quality of its high-rises makes it nigh-on impossible to allocate it an exact geographical location. More than 2.000 photos from a local surveillance camera have gone into this video work, images which Thomas Köner downloaded from the Internet as WebCam pictures over a period of several months and archived. Only comments by the artist reveal that this is a place in North Finland, close to the Arctic Circle, a location permanently covered in frost and, in the winter, almost constantly dark. Neither street signs nor billboards can be made out. Only the illuminated windows and traces of light on the street are indicative of human life. The filmic sequence is made up of individual images that have been spliced together or continually merged. The only noticeable changes are the various different types of light and atmospheric effects. At the beginning of the video, diffuse wafts of mist and a darkness broken up by only a few points of light convey to the viewer a feeling of disorientation and forlornness. The persistent, swelling noise looks to bring this unpleasant situation to a head. The threatening darkness gradually gives way to a clearly outlined image of a thoroughfare framed by high-rises. But scarcely have we made out the structures here when they begin to dissolve amorphously. Touches of color and the resultant pools of warmth mitigate the impression of cold and inhospitableness. Although the picture and sound change permanently the perspective remains constant. The street coming in from the bottom left and running horizontally through the center of the picture has been taken in a diagonal upward movement to the upper edge of the picture without touching the latter and thus indicating a continuation beyond this boundary. The dynamics associated with the street appeared to freeze here and, moreover, to relegate the viewer to an uneventful state. Reducing the flow of the images to minimal, almost imperceptible adjustments spawns a feeling of monotony in the viewer, a feeling, however, that, in the final analysis, is aimed at achieving a state of meditation. Köner creates a vibrating continuum of images and sounds where different levels of time and space are entwined on several levels so as to circle around and begin to get close to an area beyond spatio-temporal categories. Completely different times and utterly disparate locations are strung together because of structural similarities in order to put together impressions of standstill and change, identity and difference, in an image that is paradox and yet not one-dimensionally reduced. For Köner, this deceleration and reduction are a bonus. By eliminating the narrative components of the video he fosters an inexhaustible intensity of perception.
In a second cycle of videos dating from 2005, Köner stretches out the given passage of time. He extends a four-second sequence showing a street scene to make a 15-minute work. In this, he is, his own words, making an attempt to zoom out both himself and the images into an infinite dimension and, from this perspective, to envision the aesthetics of the inconstant, something inherent in each moment, however short it may be. Human figures come into view as if out of some spatio-temporal uncertainty. Köner splits the image and move it, figures and cars take on a transparent, almost picturesque or even graphic quality, like shadow beings between dream and reality. Energy accumulates and then dissipates against immediately.
The images for the three videos in the second cycle were recorded in Harare (Zimbabwe) Belgrade (Serbia) and Buenos Aires (Argentina). By allowing the appearance and disappearance of figures and things to convey a feeling of constant restlessness and detachment, Thomas Köner touches upon notions of the peripheral, the vagabond, in the knowledge that that the people in these countries have been forgotten, feel cut off from global developments. In Périphériques part 3 – Buenos Aires the figures clearly approach the viewer until they are in close view and yet they remain faceless and disembodied. Here, Thomas Köner wanted to show a moment, one that seems detached, free from any purpose, but, as an empty shape, desirous of being filled with content and ideas. The silhouettes of schoolchildren in a shanty town move towards the foreground, washed to the surface like memories of childhood whose billowing, blurred quality makes them almost impossible to identify. Gradually, these shadow beings become completely flat, scurrying like ghostly white rags across the loamy street without ever coming to rest in one place. These are images from which all traces of individuality and identity have been wiped away, something between a deception and a dream, fear and longing.
By extending time, Thomas Köner achieves a deceleration that borders on dissolution, a disintegration of temporal structures, by means of which, in the final analysis, the sensations of speed and slowness, particularly in respect of their usual oppositeness, are fundamentally cancelled out. Simultaneously, the relationship between inner and outer perception has become the real subject of this piece of work. By considerably stretching out the projection time of this film, Köner makes it more difficult for the viewer to relate this everyday street scene to his own experiences in his own environment. Unlike the case with the customary filmic experience, in this video time appears almost to stand still, caught in a circular movement, whilst our subjective experience of time and the media perception of the latter have been pushed to the forefront of our consciousness. Because the movement has been slowed down and the urban topography reduced to a minimum, the events in the image have been compressed into an intensity that goes beyond familiar impressions, qualifying for the field of the unusual and unknown and engendering an inward-looking, almost meditative mood. Our feelings of loneliness and forlornness are transformed – as we now pause for thought – into a visionary concept as an alternative to our practiced ways of looking at and experiencing the things of everyday life. The rhythms of the images as they burgeon and then close up once again refer the viewer to his presence in the here and now as well as, by contrast, taking away from him all fixed points in a system of spatio-temporal coordinates, thus engendering a feeling of restlessness and, by categorically transgressing established boundaries, revealing to him happenings that point to something beyond, something not constrained by spatio-temporal restrictions.
His most recent video piece – PNEUMA MONOXYD – achieves an even greater degree of abstraction. The footage was made in Dortmund and Belgrade. Out of a largely dark background, subtly structured in the center by grid structures, vaguely contoured figures emerge. They are evidently passers-by – filmed in downtown Dortmund – and discernible behind a veil as diaphanous structures only as shadows to completely eliminate parts of the image, and yet when moving to render the zones of light visible again. The geometrical formal frame from which they emerge remains unchanged but becomes gradually clearer and more spatial in effect, such that the film develops an almost narrative component and reveals a scenic setting. The hustle and bustle of a marketplace, taken in Belgrade, blends with the Dortmund shopping scenes to form a spatio-temporal synopsis that suddenly exposes the similarity of images, patterns of behavior and values on a global scale: "I can travel to the end of the world and yet all I can buy in the shacks there are Nike and Coca Cola. Everything is consumption and brainwashing, that is an immense loss and symbolic of great decay."2 In the final instance, this linkage strengthens the impression that we are witnessing somnambulist motions of creatures that can hardly be regarded as physical, and without any will of their own drift with a delay through the picture or are drawn through it as empty shells. In slow motion the bodies seem weightless, liberated from gravity. Different spatio-temporal levels are superimposed and in this melding form a new shape to reality that cannot be given a name, a concentration of brightness and contrasts, on the one hand, and of darkness, on the other, that only in the center of the pictorial field allow us to sense the outlines of an action. Time is manifested in this process as the struggle between darkness and light and by the process of superimposed levels of brightness, which in their constant contrast and merging finally open up a unique dimension of reality that is removed from lived practice.
In Thomas Köner’s video works we can to a certain extent see the expression of a meta-temporal notion of time. A notion of time structured on the category of progress and a rational concept of space are juxtaposed here to a spiral-shaped, perhaps indeed labyrinthine concept of time and space. Different concepts of reality are absorbed from different lived or experiential contexts, linked by things perceived in the inner and outside worlds, and assembled in a multi-layered process to form a lattice of images that can no longer be grasped in any linear sense. The matrix initially conveys the impressions of a shadow reality, evoking observer situations similar to that in Plato’s allegory of the cave. Yet what initially resembles the reflection and gleam of an ideal reality, gradually takes the form of an insight in which the copy and the original image, the idea and the notion fuse, becoming intertwined such as to be undistinguishable from each other. We cannot doubt the existence of the swaying, stuttering, freezing and then dissipating figures. Instead, what is important is to grasp the moment of their being as the mean of past and future, as the almost untenable, eminently fragile interface between the no-longer and the not-yet.
In the extreme condensation of temporality, the rhythmic flash of moments of motion, we can see the reflection of a dimension of infinity, to use Thomas Köner’s term. The artist’s topic is not "now", understood as the eye of the needle between past and present through which time flows, but the point in time that is abraded between past and future.
Thomas Köner is more interested in the moment in which past, present and future combine and in Kierkegaard’s sense time and eternity blend.3 By means of metamorphoses and the constant recurrence of the similar he creates a vibrant rhythm that enables viewers to immerse themselves aesthetically in the work. Ludwig Wittgenstein writes with reference to the desire to create such a moment outside time: "If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present."4 Thomas Köner ties the viewers of his videos into the situation of a permanently retarding holding loop in order (ever anew and never finally) to lead them to a "present fulfilled" in this way and thus convey an idea of an "aesthetics of the inconstant".
By virtue of the fact that in his videos standstill and movement, acceleration and deceleration slowly ebb and constantly regenerate themselves, Thomas Köner with a conscious insistence on the impossible re-presents Zeno’s paradox of the "flying arrow": "If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless."5
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