Robert Seidel: Hysteresis

About

In technology companies, universities and artist studios, machines process and internalize human history. In the process, copyright is dissolved and the distinctions between original, imitation or inferior reproduction disappear. No origin, no responsibility, no clear assignment - just a primordial soup that can be transformed into any form without questioning systems of knowledge and hierarchies. In this silent but radical restructuring of entire industries, artists become the template for a future digitally assembled from a multitude of fragments of the past.

In the experimental film Hysteresis, Seidel's analogue drawings and their digital processing merge with the performance of the queer dancer Tsuki, who improvises movements between ballet, butoh and Berlin club culture. In a fusion process, her image is recorded, played back by Seidel's devices and then projected onto her body. In a final step, the recordings are processed using different machine learning approaches and resolved into a constant flow of pulsating images and folded spatial configurations. The resulting Muybridge-esque silhouettes, baroque textures and bursting painterly structures fluctuate between the second and third dimensions, unfolding free-floating gestures that unhinge the laws of nature. At the same time, delicate abrasions at the edges of the picture allow a connection to reality that is not always free of contradictions. The Oval (Markus Popp) soundtrack constantly undermines this web of concrete associations and threatens to dissolve the remaining fragile reference points.

At a time when overwhelming predictability is being imposed on all of us, the film celebrates the disruption of pattern recognition and the artistic decomposition of the results brought about by artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning. With Hysteresis, Seidel breaks new ground in his experimental practice and collaboration. He unveils a frenetic, delicate and extravagant visual language that describes the hysteria and hysteresis of this historic moment. The artist wants to open a discourse on these unique possibilities of AI design - with implications beyond film and other media, to that singularity where history collapses to a single point in the present.

To the freedom of digital filmmaking beyond (commercial) hyperrealism!