In "L'INCANDESCENT", the human body metamorphoses into a technical medium, echoing the revolutions of electricity and computing. This dance navigates the digital realm, channeling a physiological aesthetic. Music and frequencies play pivotal roles, turning the dancer's body into a live circuit resonating with the spiritualism of the past. Invoking a trance-like state, the sonic waves activate profound neural patterns. It is journey from the tangible to the ethereal, uniting the ancient rituals of spiritism with the cadence of modern technology.
In collaboration with @alessia_snd
Performed by @kimstrobell
Photography by @dperez____ and @_corti.seba_
The Neo-Phoenico Alphabet opens an expansive frontier in the discourse around language and script, erasing the boundaries between temporal, cultural, and technological dichotomies. Born from the ashes of the Ugaritic and Phoenician alphabets—two ancient writing systems that laid the foundation for modern alphabets—this new linguistic architecture is forged by artificial intelligence. It is a dialectic of the past and present, echoing the biblical Tower of Babel in a world increasingly dominated by a simplified, global language known as "Globish."
The project emerges as a countermeasure to the homogenizing forces of digitality. In an age where binary codes form the backbone of nearly every mode of communication, the Neo-Phoenico Alphabet reintroduces deliberate complexity. Conceived as a counter-code, it offers an alternative syntax that integrates seamlessly into the digital language without sacrificing its intricacy. This intentional choice for diversity in the digital ecosystem is understood as "digital biodiversity," serving as a form of resistance against the standardizing nature of digital technology. It thereby preserves the human capacities for complex communication even amidst rapid technological changes.
Acherontic Waves (2020)
With the limbs, the Orphic traveller receives the sounds of the world: the murmur of the rivers and the spells of the oracles. Chaotic, aleatory, contingent. "Sense conceals what precedes it." From the stochastic signals, however, a melody sometimes emerges. Rhythms arise from the universality of noise. Ritornelli, fugues, counterpoints accompany the advent of algorithmic thought. Negentropy grows. Thus the Orphic traveller can escape the underworld, the chthonic stream, before he is torn into a thousand pieces by the maenads, as said, because he could not find the Fourier transform that would have harmonised their screams.
Covert art by @juhuuwae
Glitch.Mobb (2020) is a sound installation created for the exhibition @glitch.mobb in a house on the outskirts of Zurich that was about to be demolished.
Acoustic glitch that anticipated the sound of the building's demolition.
Hip-Hop Telemusik.
Cover Art by @studio.yang
/track/glitch-mobb
„Hardécor" (2022) consisted of a series of seven rooms in the historic Passhotel Furkablick, in which war material from the surrounding area, such as grenades and ammunition, was displayed.
The following publication aims to expand on this specific exhibition situation: each of the seven rooms is depicted on the following pages in the form of an ornament. And thus, unexpectedly, the bourgeois décor of the 19th century hotel and the corresponding war machinery of the West meet with the transformative power of the occult.
"Hardécor" explicitly refers to the catalogue of Marcel Broodthaer's last exhibition, "L'Angelus de Daumier". Furthermore, it is a reference to the rooms he staged at the end of his life under the name "Décor". His so-called Poliétique addressed the relationship between war and comfort, in particular the relationship between war and its accoutrements in the 19th and 20th century. For him, this was to a certain extent mainly about the "conquest of a space". With the "Ésprit décor", he pursued the goal of "giving the object or painting back its real function". Because decoration, according to Broodthaers, was not an end in itself. The germ of the idea of décor could accordingly be characterised as the idea of an object that regains a real function. This would mean that the object itself would not be regarded as a work of art, but would thereby regain a new weight of reality.
Special thanks to Alessia Bertini
Anagrams (2020)
Anagrams is a series of computer-generated dolls. It deals with the idea of language and its relationship to the body, or rather with the reciprocal relationship between the poetic anagram and the prosthetically enhanced techno-body. Hans Bellmer said that "the body is like a sentence that invites us to rearrange it so that its true meaning becomes clear through a series of endless anagrams". Dionysus Revisited.
Animal Locomotion (2022)
„Animal Locomotion“ is a short film documenting a pony’s first attempts at walking with its new prosthesis. The pony - half animal, half cyborg - is reminiscent of the donkey from Robert Bresson’s film „Au hasard Balthazar“. Cinema emerged at the end of the 19th century from the animation of animal movements (Muybridge) at a time when animals were gradually disappearing from the new urban environment. In this sense, one can ask what the hybridisation of animal and machine means for the film of the 21st century? Can cinema as animal-visual thinking replace the dualistic ontologies of modernity? Will the animal spirits haunt us again and accompany us into hypnagogic states?
Film & Music: Michel Kessler
Director of Photography: @davidoesch
Sound Design: @tobiaspreisig
Mixing: Martin Scheuter
Color Grading: Ralph Wetli
Mentoring: Béla Tarr
Pentheus (2017)
In a prophetic radio address in 1947 ("Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu"), Antonin Artaud called for the release of all drugs. He was sure that the US would once invade Afghanistan with tanks and missiles to tame the purple spirit of madness and adulterate heroin. In 2001, the time had come: the global technicised polis pushed with all its force into the mountains of Afghanistan, where the exuberances of the civilised world were unloaded in the form of missiles and bombs. The play "Pentheus" is the speculative transcription of Aeschylus' tragedy of the same name, which has not survived. In "Pentheus", the events surrounding the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in 2001 are short-circuited with the mythologem of Dionysus, especially since in both scenarios a mechanised state power decides to set out from the city into the mountains to fight the archaic energies of the Dionysian that operate beneath the rational. Afghanistan or rather Bactria is the place of origin of Dionysus and the largest opium producer in the world. This region, with its porous and uncontrollable borders, has always acted as an energetic drainpipe for geopolitics. In this respect, landscape is no longer simply the stage of events in this play; instead, it becomes an actor itself and emerges from the background as a contagious virus. The drones are the angels from the future and the forgotten mines the triggers of a new Sparagmos (dismemberment), Tora Bora and the Kithairon topologically equivalent, the field of poppies the terrestrial guarantee for altered states of consciousness. Thus, the ego dissolves in the most ancient geological layers.
With the exception of the choral sections, the text is entirely written in iambic trimeters.
Created as part of the "Dramenprozessor" 2015-2017. Staged readings performed at Theater Winkelwiese in Zurich and Lokremise in St. Gallen.
Code for „Numeric Chronozone. A Probability of Decay“ (2017)
Numerical oil as an algorithmic equivalent for the fat of the South, which Joseph Beuys used for his "Olivestones".
This code transforms five digitised stones by Beuys on the basis of a Markov chain. The "Numerical Oil" acts as an expansion of the information content of the data system.
Both decay and growth processes are defined, which develop by themselves after the setting. The stones are in a constant process and resemble a living organism. However, they are no longer subject to linear temporality and are no longer part of the world or a thermodynamic system.
Moreover, the particles of the stones are not involved in physical life and cannot be naturalised - their existence is purely intellectual. As if guided by a demon, the stone escapes the entropic end state that Romanticism so wistfully sought.
An intelligible ceremony of negentropy!
In collaboration with Lorenz Schmid und Livia Eggler
Published in: trans magazin, Hg. Reality: trans 33. Zürich: gta Verlag, 2018
Desert of the Real (2022)
Desert of the Real is a documentary film about the afterlife of the science fiction set of Star Wars in the desert of southern Tunisia. The film explores how architectures built for fiction affect reality and change the future of the place in question.
The remains of the set (buildings and artificial craters) for the desert city of Mos Espa from Star Wars still exist today. They look like an archaeological site from the future. The techno-futuristic sci-fi infrastructure left behind is now occupied by Imaziɣs on quad bikes - the indigenous people of North Africa - whose architecture and culture strongly influenced the aesthetics of Star Wars.
The film thus documents the intermingling of different time levels; in this place, which seems like a zone on another planet, the archaic exists simultaneously alongside the futuristic, the imaginary alongside the real everyday life of the local population, and the deep geological dimension of the place alongside the synthetic waste of our present. Two constantly overlapping poles thus unite in one scenery. But the film also shows real infrastructure projects near the set, such as the solar plants that look like something out of Blade Runner 2049 or the salt extraction plants that turn the water a mysterious pink.
However, Desert of the Real also deals with the interrelationship between fiction and reality. For films, especially science fiction films, are a suitable medium for depicting technologically created realities in a more desirable way than the real world can. Finally, the state in which the real and the fictional merge so seamlessly and physical reality is fully mixed with virtual reality is also called "hyperreality". The consciousness is thus unable to distinguish reality from a simulation. In film, a hyperreal experience is conveyed to the viewer by means of images. And the postmodern situation could perhaps actually be described as one in which the hyperreal has replaced our reality. The original has disappeared and we can only access the copy of the copy.
In collaboration with Pierre Musy
Technotransplant (2017)
Expanding the physiological boundaries of the body through prostheses is an old dream.
"Following the ‚xenotransplant' of animal organs, it is now on to the ‚technotransplant,' that mix of the technological and the living, organic heterogeneity no longer involving attaching a foreign body to the patient's own. Now what is attached is a foreign heartbeat that can make the body throb in time to the machine.“ (Virilio)
The body of Dionysus was segmented in the ritual of Sparagmos, i.e. broken down into a set of isolated individual symbols. His body was destroyed in its wholeness. He stands for dissolution, fragmentation and metamorphosis of the body. A restoration of the old body is not possible, the result is a new body that can only refer to the original form.
