DigiRex Audiofiles - E01

Hard cuts. Rough incisions. Hard blows. Tough changes with rapid changes of topic - nothing fits and yet everything belongs together. E01 is the podcast version of the first issue of the magalog " Cahiers d'étrange #Rogh Cuts " as DigiRex audio files . In addition to the texts of the Cahier, the episode contains free monologues on the history of the individual picture cycles and articles in the magazine.

Enjoy listening.

DigiRex Audio Files Episode 01: Transcript

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01 Editorial – Cahiers d'étrange N0. 01.20X9 – Rough cuts

Hard cuts. Rough incisions. Tough changes with rapid changes of subject matter - nothing fits and yet everything belongs together. Cahiers N0. 01 - that means the beginning and yet it is only a continuation of the constant struggle for the images. Hard blows. Sketchy storytelling using the means of digital image creation, supplemented by analogue revisions and reinterpretations.

I wish you deep cuts .
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The idea for the Cahiers came to me many, many decades ago. The Cahiers d'étrange, the strange booklets, are also a title in a foreign language that I am not as familiar with as my mother tongue. The topics that these booklets are supposed to contain are also very contradictory, very different. Some of them are things from the past, many things are of course from the present. And the title is of course also a bit of an homage to the Cahiers du Cinéma, the French cinema magazine, some of whose authors also gave rise to the Nouvelle Vague. And the other area is of course my countless sketchbooks or sketchbooks, because most of them are in A5 or A6 format and are more like scratch books that contain lots of scribbles, sketches, scraps of words, texts, text passages, title ideas, entire projects are in there, but on the most diverse topics of image production, for example. Painting, photography, video, drawing, risographs, a very, very broad spectrum created over many decades with lots of ideas and very different approaches. And that always goes in different directions. And that's what I wanted to reflect in the Cahiers, so that this diversity simply finds a home.
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02 DIGI-PIX-O-RAMA

On the ICE train to Neverland. New landscapes keep racing past. Our eyes recognize shapes, structures, surfaces and colors. Light and shadow. Bright and dark. Sharp blurs. The lens of the iPhone camera captures the panoramas over distance and time. Software stoically processes pixel by pixel - stringing image information after image information. There are always breaks, interruptions, gaps and errors in the system. Landscapes are compressed in space and time. The image extends over limited distances in its image format. One click becomes a 3,000-second photograph. Ten kilometers of train track are compressed to a forty centimeter image width - with a five-minute recording interval. Our photographer becomes the designer of coincidences.

Entropy as a compositional style. Repetitions become loops, cycles, recurring structures. Images made of chaotic pixel clouds. A staccato of densely packed information. Extremely compressed swaths of images, torn shapes and lines, with cracked surfaces - a landscape photograph that has gone off the rails. Digital pixel panoramas made of speed, time span and distance.
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When the first iPhone with a panorama function came out, I was of course really keen to try it out. But not in the traditional sense of course; I wanted to experiment with it a bit, play around. Just see where the limits of the technology are, or perhaps the limits of the motif of the composition. Normally, I move the iPhone in a certain direction and then the software calculates the panorama image. Or I turn my body and that creates a kind of panoramic pan, a 360-degree view. But you can of course also create that by moving yourself while holding the iPhone completely static. And then a picture composition and a picture motif are created. For example, I'm sitting in the ICE and I hold my iPhone out the window, at the window, and then I press record. Then the train moves forward and the panoramic image is created from the movement, so to speak. So the movement is no longer the rotation of the body or the panning of the camera, but in this case it is the train that moves forward and then creates the panorama. Of course, this causes errors in the system here and there, dropouts, fractals that form. So there is also an additional incentive that there is simply a random principle. You really don't know exactly what the end result will be. The exciting thing is of course that the image that is created afterwards doesn't actually exist. The landscape didn't look like that. The landscape in this 40-centimeter image is created from the movement in the train. That means I travel ten kilometers or five minutes, and in that time this image is created. And that is of course a super exciting thing. That means that the space is compressed, the landscape is compressed and a long stretch is compressed into just a few millimeters. And of course that results in very, very attractive image motifs that you really can't calculate. And you just have to be open to what really comes out in the end.
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03 Fragments - Now

Fragments - are neither half nor whole - and yet they contain everything. Bits, remains and what is left behind - abandoned places in a cosmos of elementary particles. Torn signs and palimpsests of our urban habitats. Ornaments of the gutters and gutters.

We find fragmentary image compositions all the time and everywhere. They jump out at us, want to be captured. Fixed as individual, small image statements. Constantly abstract and always too real. Everything is brought to the point and yet no final statement is made. Always in flux, in constant reinterpretation. No finale in sight. Every beginning has the end in view and the end strives for a new beginning. Birth and rebirth. The death of things is ignored. Our afterlife is skipped over. Absolute presence in the smallest part. Fragments NOW and always, always, always - the view is clear, the goal is only a part of everything.
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The subject of fragments has actually occupied me for many decades, you could say. The constant attempt to find the perfect motif or the perfect painting always fails, because of course it doesn't exist, it's a fiction. And that's why you should - that was the idea - look for the whole in parts. So don't try to depict a whole, but rather many, many parts that later make up a whole. So small fragments, found objects, particles, elementary particles, very original components that you use as a compositional foundation, so to speak. And in this diversity lies the uniqueness.
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04 Deconvolution – The Unfolding of Space

Digital photos are compressed when saved so that the file takes up less space on a hard drive. Mathematically, the images are folded when compressed - layer upon layer - and placed on top of each other, thereby taking up less space. In functional analysis, a branch of mathematics, this process is known as folding, or convolution (from the Latin convolvere, "to roll up"). When a file is opened again, it is unfolded again. When it is closed, it is folded up again. Every time the file is unfolded and rolled up, it loses information - the pixel structures change dynamically.

The photo series “Deconvolution” approaches the topic of visualizing the unfolding of the urban space around us in an experimental way. Above, below – right and left – unfold into the picture plane.
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The idea for unfolding the space came to me in 2011 when I was working on a series of images in Salzburg that dealt with panoramas, with iPhone panoramas. Not just the classic landscape panorama from left to right, but also from bottom to top, and from left to right at different vertical heights. So the camera is panned from the point of view of your feet, where you are standing, up into the sky, creating a horizontal panorama, then a vertical panorama, and then you take the same thing again from left to right, adjusting the height of the whole thing again. So that the horizontal panoramas are in different vertical levels, so to speak. This then results in a completely different type of panorama, not a landscape panorama, but a spatial panorama. And when producing prints, you have to make sure that these images are hung appropriately for the room. So in the corners of the room and near the ceiling, so that the area that is more on the right, for example, is also on the wall to the right of the corner, and the other part is to the left of the corner. And what is above, what goes into the sky, also runs along the ceiling. So that these deductions are then perceived differently later in a room. So you stand in front of it and are then part of this recording area and can thus grasp it deeply in its entirety.
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05 Lost in the Crowd

Lost. Lost in the crowd. People everywhere. Individuals and groups. In front of you, next to you and behind you. You are in the middle of it all. Surrounded, enclosed and enclosed in the stream of people. All the people become a jumble of limbs, gestures, looks and voices. Our camera ignores the sounds and despairs of the subject. No focus. Without a fixed point, the focus wanders into the void. The whole thing becomes a thicket of movement and chaos.
In the middle of it all, the self in the mass.
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At a photography workshop with Stanley Green, we were given the task of going to the Hamburg fish market at four in the morning and thinking up a story there, because the workshop was about storytelling with photography. I was wandering around the fish market half asleep at that time and was surrounded by crowds of people and by all sorts of different impressions. The day was beginning, the sun was slowly rising, but it was still very dark and gloomy, but there was still a confused hustle and bustle of people who had stayed up all night, and people who had come very early in the morning. And it was hard to tell apart, all the sounds, noises, babble of voices, music, everything, it was a huge tangle, like a ball. And I really felt completely lost in this mass. And I was also a bit lost in the motifs, so what should I capture here? Because everything was so weaving, floating, raging. That's why my theme was Lost in the Crowd. And I moved through the crowd with my camera as I walked and automatically took photos, photo panoramas that were created by the movement and which then resulted in a wild, distorted result, namely the people who were streaming around me were partially depicted, compressed, stretched out, completely changed and alienated by fractals. And this feeling of being lost was thus brought to the point and visualized.
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06 Tracks – Paths & Trails

Places leave their marks. Traces of clues - from people for people. Cities are full of marks. Exposed - to wind, weather, sun and rain. They age over time. Change their shape and become free structures of light and dark.

Rot, decay, become unreadable, become outlines of themselves. The whole is lost in the detail and ignites the composition. Contrasts break lines and shapes.

They lie at our feet, in the gutter, they catch our eye as we walk past. Our attention is focused on looking straight ahead, not strolling with our senses. Our eyes see many things and miss everything.

The signs regulate traffic. Control our flow through the cities. They are always there and never gone. We set signs and create fragments of undiscovered worlds.

If you let your gaze wander, you will come across images of eternal moments, made of stones, mortar, concrete or tar, paints and protective varnishes. Metal on stone. Stone on metal. Paints on streaky traces. Protective railings lead us along paths to places of built structures made of statics and form. Past artifacts of urban happiness and hope.

The camera is lightning fast. It grabs the moment. It takes the time to linger for a thousandth. It autofocuses the photographer's view, becoming the observer of his perception. It zooms into his sensitivity to subjects. It clicks all light into bits and bytes. It balances the white against the black of the night. It draws the depth of field into the souls of the observer.
The person behind the lens is the viewfinder in the darkness of infinity. He looks for the glitter in the asphalt. He is the catcher of light and shadow. He draws his soft focus of gentleness over conflicts of contrast and sharpness. He shifts the levels with an artist's hand. He sets accents, shifts the center and loses himself in the perspectives.

Digital finds as material for subjective imagery, perception as self-experiment. Meditation of the senses. Urban flow of power and silent decay.

At the end is the beginning - what always was and never is.
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Yes, Paths & Trails are also found objects. That is, things that you notice or simply discover while strolling through town, you are, I don't know, on your way to the bookshop, you want to shop, whatever, you just go with the flow. And in the process you find these objets trouvé, things that make you say: Hey! That's a motif. And you just record it, because nowadays you always have your camera with you. Thanks to smartphones, you can of course also simply collect these pictures and then they arise over weeks, months, the whole year, very, very different things. And these finds have now been summarized here in one chapter, and this is a selection, a current selection from the last few months.
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07 Fountains of the Past: 1985

In the beginning there is the thought. The first fleeting idea. The sketch is the first attempt to visualize this vision. To fix it visually, to make it tangible and comprehensible. For others - for the viewers and readers of these scraps of thought.

Scribbles are already fragments of a later whole - the fragments of the composition of the work in progress. Memory aids, cornerstones of ideas and visual frameworks of thought - against the forgetting and disappearance of images.

Designs can anticipate an entire painting or photographic object and preserve it for years and decades. The artist could immediately continue working where the design left off.

Sketches are memories of the old and inspiration for the new. This makes them the most valuable artistic asset. They should always be preserved so that the development of visual works has a fixed starting point. And their interpretations remain transparent and open to all sides.

"The well of the past is deep. Shouldn't we call it unfathomable?" Thomas Mann
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Since I have been keeping sketchbooks, idea books and scratch pads for over 30 years, there is of course a huge archive. Part of the Cahiers should also represent the processing of this past, because there are a lot of projects in the past that are still open, but some of which are of course related to the first edition of the Cahier. That is why I looked at the year 1985, which is the first sketchbook I still have. A small A6 book that is really full of lots of scribbles, ideas, lots of sequences of scraps of words, passages of text, fragments of titles. And the first image ideas and series that came about here were recorded in it. And the quote from Thomas Mann, the well of the past, I thought that was a really nice title here. It should then appear again and again in the editions of the Cahier as a permanent feature.
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08 Squarewalks – Always around the square, fidibum, fidibum...

Clockwise, anti-clockwise - with sense and without sense. The mind gets dizzy anyway. One foot in front of the next. The path outlines the steps - but despite progress, you remain in the same place.

Like a ritual, the camera follows our walk on the ground. We leave our prints in the photographs. Toes tiptoe across the image formats. Movement turns at every corner. It goes left. Once, twice, three times and the fourth time completes our run.

Always trotting, but no distance is covered. No distance is overcome. Standing still. Stopping quickly. Staying still for a long time. Lots of action without any results. Constant effort, struggle, kicking, fidgeting - the discipline of the mind drives us on endlessly. But we only move on the spot. Standing still as a means of locomotion. If you stand still long enough, you will make progress.
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The square walks were created in Ireland for the very first time. I didn't walk in circles there, I walked in a square and made panoramas of my gait, of my walking. So you can see the tips of my feet and the places where I change direction, i.e. go left and then straight on, then left again, and keep doing that until the square is closed, so to speak. And I repeated that in many, many places, in Versailles the stairs and so on, in the subway, in the metro in Paris or even in Frankfurt at the airport, repeatedly walking along the platform of the regional train station, always to capture these footprints in both senses of the word. And so lines emerge which then, when mounted on top of each other, form intersections at the corners, overlap and are copied into each other. And these squares then have an empty space in the middle, which is usually filled with gray. So they enclose a certain emptiness or something uncertain, nothing white, nothing black, just the mixture, the grey, the undefined.
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