Germany/Hong Kong
Please give us a brief summary of your work, including, if possible, a description of your creative process (e.g., how your creative ideas first appear and take shape).
The basis of my work is animation, but it has close connections to painting, graphics, computing and music. It manifests itself as short films, video installations, VR works and audiovisual live performances that explore relationships between abstraction and figuration, aesthetics and politics, sound and image and precision and improvisation. The threads that hold my oeuvre together are synaesthetic experience, visual music, the use of temporal and visual loops and symmetries, the exploration of abstraction as a meaning-making device and resulting open-ended narratives. The creation process is similar from one work to the next: I tend to feel my way from a vague starting point to the final version through a discovery-led process of trial and error. I rarely have a clear picture of what I want to achieve, but instead have a combination of conceptual, technical, visual, sonic, kinetic or other cues from which to start, and then let the work lead me through iterations until a finishing point is reached. Since animation is a slow and laborious process, this keeps the making-process interesting and scary.
How would you define your animation practice in terms of its relation to fine art traditions, experimental animation or the (historical) avant-garde? Its relation to commercial industry? Who/what are your strongest influences?
I try to approach the moving image from an angle somewhere between non-objectivism and figurative representation, between narrative and non-narrative structuring, between sculpting in time and visual music. As such, the Absolute Film movement around Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling and Oskar Fischinger is an important reference point for me. Their rejection of cinematic conventions in favour of visual forms structured by musical principles is close to my own practice. The more spiritual-psychedelic semi-narrative elements of my work connect to West Coast avant-garde animators like Harry Smith, James Whitney and Jordan Belson. Often, my work aims to negotiate a dialogue between contemporary culture and historical influences ranging from pop to avant-garde, from religious to political: From El Lissitzky to László Moholy-Nagy in my works AANAATT (2008) and Shift (2012); from Busby Berkeley to Leni Riefenstahl in Spin (2010), from Islamic patterns to American quilts in Collision (2005) and Stop the Show (2013), from Buddhist mandalas in Sync (2010) to Augustin Lesage’s spiritualist paintings in Heaven and Hell (2010).
Why animation?
I came to animation through what for a long time I perceived as diverging interests, in visual arts, music and computing. As a child, I was always drawing and painting. Throughout my teens, I used computers to make electronic music. Animation allowed me to combine these interests into a unified expression. Animation not as cartoons but as an intricate and intimate approach to the spatio-temporal shaping of sound and image. For me, animation is about intensity and precision, and about the compression of time and meaning. About poetry rather than prose; about the creation of audio-visual worlds that take the viewer somewhere else, which can serve as an abstraction from, and critical reflection of, the real world.
Is material or media a particularly important component of your practice? How does it operate in your work?
I’m most comfortable with the notion of animation as a frame-by-frame approach to orchestrating time and movement. Guided by this principle, I work with different media, materials, techniques and technologies, depending on conceptual and budgetary constraints, level of adventurousness and so on. I often switch parameters from one work to the next, but then return to revisit old approaches again after some time, from a new perspective. Some works such as Nachtmaschine (2005), Model Starship: Unclear Proof (2014) or Shift (2012) are photography-based because conceptually they are about an abstraction from the everyday. Therefore, the source material needs to originate in the real world. Other works like Sync (2010) or Divisional Articulations (2017) are digitally created precisely because this removes every trace from the here and now, placing the work in a virtual space removed from recognisable reality. I am a media artist in the sense that my work investigates media and depends on technological components to function, but not in the materialist-structuralist sense. For me, the medium also always takes on a conceptual-narrative role; the work is never only about the medium.
What is your work’s relation to experimental form and technique? Is there something you want to articulate with your work that can’t be expressed through conventional narrative means? How do you see your work operating culturally? Politically?
In my work, I use audio-visual abstraction to create alternative spaces and experiences that aim to take the viewer outside of the everyday. Some works have a mesmerising, meditative quality, while others are compressed sensory assaults. Some more than others are ‘thinking spaces’ that offer narrative elements through which the viewer is invited to construct meaning. I would argue that abstraction-in-motion can enable a reflective position from which to comment back on reality. Shapes and textures can suggest meanings through movement, repetition, metamorphosis and juxtaposition, or through their combination with sound or figurative elements. All these aspects can work together to provide pointers in the reading of the work. Animation, employing the aesthetics of abstraction in this sense, exploits ambivalence and ambiguity in the construction of more open-ended narratives that engage the viewer in a different way. Not non-objectivism as a complete negation, but abstraction as a way of undermining, of injecting irony and of removing the viewer from the everyday, to enable a questioning of the perceived realities of human existence. In an environment oversaturated with the same media images, representing things in a more abstract sense, while giving hints of meaning that feed the viewer’s imagination, may be more engaging for some people by offering up an alternative view.
References
Hattler, Max. Collision. UK, 2005. Film.
_____. Nachtmaschine. UK, 2005. Film.
_____. AANAATT. Japan/Germany/ UK, 2008. Film.
_____. Divisional Articulations. Hong Kong, 2017. Film.
_____. Heaven and Hell. UK/Germany/Denmark, 2010. Film.
_____. Spin. France/Italy, 2010. Film.
_____. Shift. UK/Germany, 2012. Film.
_____. Sync. UK/Netherlands/Germany/Denmark, 2010. Film.
_____. Stop the Show. UK/Spain, 2013. Film.
_____. Model Starship: Unclear Proof. Germany/UK, 2014. Film.