Parallel, 2012
2-channel HD video installation, colour, sound, 17’
Photo: "Parallel" Harun Farocki 2010
Harun Farocki systematically draws our attention to the way in which images, technologies, and systems of representation define social and political space, consciousness, subjectivities, structures of feeling, and ideologies. In this new work, Farocki juxtaposes the history of computer-based animation with elements of art history. In only thirty years, computer-generated images and animations have evolved from simple symbolic forms into images that aspire to perfect simulation, and seem to desire, to outperform cinematographic and photographic representations, not merely of “static” reality, but increasingly of the dynamic aspects of life, as manifest in gestures or complex movement in general.
Parallel questions the notion of “progress” that underlies histories of art and representation based on a linear, evolutionary progression from imperfect representation (mimesis) to more accurate, complex, and perfect forms. Parallel is like an interrogation of possible other stories, evolutions, or reverse-evolutions of which the image-surfaces of digital animation and their underlying generative algorithms speak.
© Anselm Franke, 2012
Courtesy: Àngels Barcelona
