TESTeLAB & Guests: Expanded Animation Worlds is a crossmedia interface project aimed at “experimenting with connecting the disconnected”.1 In this autobiographically driven examination of high and low culture against a sweeping backdrop of image and media history, traditional media are brought into the digital realm, subjecting them to a productive, artistic kind of hybridization. The panorama - one of the most popular phenomena of the pre-cinema age - is thereby revived, while supposedly obsolete media are also cultivated anew as part of a hybrid “future cinema”. This experimental exploration of the potential of movement, time, and sound also serves to enhance the cinematographic experience and questions the basic building blocks of film under new premises.
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The example-setting artistic research project VOYAGEUR DE L’IMAGE / WEGE ZUM BILD / TOWARDS THE IMAGE (work in progress), which is comparable to a dual symphony, is designed for a total of four movements or seasons: 1st movement TESTE SANS FIN: ALIAS YEDERBECK 2nd movement DSDKBM: UNTITLED Shot & Poetry 3rd movement FOOTNOTES: YEDERBECK’S Biopic 4th movement INTERFACE: TESTeLAB & Guests The hybrid audiovisual media transformation of the 1st movement TESTE SANS FIN: ALIAS YEDERBECK, Expanded Animation Cinema, with twelve panoramic sequences (Entertainer, Flaneur, Viewer, Actor, Resolution, Projection, Anima Techne, Transcendental Animation, Happy End, Doppelgänger, Reminder, The End) and the artist video QU’EST-CE QUE MONSIEUR TESTE? was a first milestone on the way to an artistic fusion of theory and practice.2 The author was supported in this large-scale cinematographic installation by a team of friends, graduates, and colleagues from the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF (formerly HFF “Konrad Wolf”).
The project was originally inspired by the legendary exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk (the propensity for the total work of art) organized by the exhibition maker Harald Szeemann. Here, for the first time, were gathered together European utopias since 1800 that do not restrict themselves to a purely aesthetic meaning, but rather aim at a transformation of social reality into a renewed society: “The most comprehensive work of art is of course the world,” says Joseph Beuys, but doesn’t leave it at theory. While Schlegel in the 116th Athenaeum fragment only demands that a “progressive”, i.e. never-completed “universal poetry” is supposed to “make life and society poetic”, Beuys attempts within the framework of a concept of art and science to bring about a real change that is also expanded to include nature and technology, “the Gesamtkunstwerk of a future society”.3 For Beuys, energy is a principle of form, is directly related to sculpture, and sculpture or plastic is synonymous with art. This highly topical “plastic” playing field between theory and practice with regard to an expanded hybrid “Future Cinema” opens up possibilities for reflection other than language or science: for artistic imagination, self-reflective art, and artistic research are to be understood as independent forms of thinking.4 Within this fascinating field of play between theory and practice, the way opens up for other areas, apart from language or science, that might be ripe for reflection; after all, artistic imagination, self-reflective art, and artistic research may be seen as autonomous forms of thought.
This form of aesthetic practice deals with the transfer of theory –
whose Greek etymology implies looking and contemplating – to
the medium of the image, which can be realized only in the
dialectic between theory and practice, in the sense of a
selfreflexive image that can serve as a model, or, as Jean-Luc Godard
expressed it almost panegyrically in his HISTOIRE(S) DU
CINEMA, by seeing cinema or art as forms that feel, see, and
think, telescoping out from the particular to the general in a kind
of improvisation.5 Art, nature, and theory are seen as an
inexhaustible pool of models for interaction, not through the
contrast between their different modes of representation, but
rather in the historical dialogue surrounding them. This form of
dialogue requires a “technique”, in the primordial sense of the
word. In Old Greek, téchne, meaning “ability, art, and
craftsmanship”, was understood as the practical application of
science for the production of goods. The original term téchne did
not distinguish between what we split today between the two
categories of art and technology. Instead, art and technology were
seen as a unified whole, as an “educated” or rather “gebildete”
practice – the German term would be more meaningful here – that
signaled both the process of “sich bilden” (educating oneself) and
state of “gebildet sein” (being educated). Moreover, this was the
only sense in which “Bildung” (education) was deemed to inform
“identity”. Today, BILDKUNST (Pictorial Art or Visual Arts)
constitutes the theory and practice of reinventing technology for
the study of art and nature, using all of the tools at one’s disposal.
It is more than just “technical practice”, as, like Richard Sennett,
it sees “craftsmanship” as “a basic human impulse, the desire to
do a job well for its own sake”. What is more, one has to
understand one’s craft, now that it is no longer self-evident
Extending the concept of animation, the project centers on an
animated cross-media studio archive and the mental image of
movement in sculpture, painting, drawing, and photography, so
that it comes into play at the point where language takes its leave.
After all, what is specifically filmic (what will be filmic in the
future) lies not only in movement, but rather in an “inarticulable
third meaning”, as Roland Barthes wrote of illustrated
broadsheets, comics, and fotonovelas
“Everything is a drawing. A sculpture is a drawing in
threedimensional space. A painting is a drawing with colours. You
could say, at least for me this is true, that everything is just a
drawing.” Alberto Giacometti: Departure to the Avant-garde,
Kunsthaus Zürich8
The “Expanded Animation Worlds” are also intended to provide a
starting point for further problematization of the relationship
between the classical and digital media and theoretical discourse.
The highly topical project deals with practical and epistemological
considerations and problems of synthetically generated visual
worlds and with the phenomenon of “time” in art and architecture
or installation, augmented and virtual reality, which can be seen as
a sequence of artworks with overlapping form problems. It is
about an aspect of time that is characterized by a comparative,
connecting, and assembling activity as a pictorial form of an “Ars
Combinatoria” unfolds. Under the new, expanded concept of film
as “plastic theory”, there is also a need to pinpoint where art,
entertainment, and science intersect. To this end, W.J.T.
Mitchell’s concept of the “metapicture” is helpful for exploring
the relationships between text, image, sound, and space
TESTeLAB & Guests sees itself, on the one hand, as an open workspace and, on the other, as a university-based “research satellite” and is attempting, in its extended form, to embrace an open laboratory principle in order to explore an experimental approach to material and media development for the very latest “Expanded Animation Worlds”. The result is a whole series of questions that have aesthetic, social, and political implications. How does our understanding of evidence and the status of images change overall if we are no longer able to distinguish between real and synthetically generated images? Where can we draw the line between fiction and reality if fictitious images, for instance in virtual reality, become part of our physically lived experience? What the future of the moving image holds and how it might feel is determined neither by the development of ever more cuttingedge production and receiving technology, nor by theory. The aesthetic experiences that are made possible by new types of image and sound must be explored using the methods of artistic research.
For this reason, the success of the experimental TESTeLAB is incumbent on inviting guests from Germany and further afield to take part in and to create “extraterrestrial” spaces that will enrich the institutional framework. A new, twelve-course panorama and full-dome menu, featuring an array of experiments, will be developed in the cross-media rehearsal theater, in conjunction with guests and groups.12 The multi-perspective nature of the TESTeLAB presupposes that the participants will draw upon their various experiences, skills, artistic languages and nationalities in an interdisciplinary manner. Peter Brook wrote about in his lecture-based classic work, The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre in the 1960s, describing it as the “immediate theatre”, which has recently found its way into a number of museum experiments and art scenarios.13 On this basis, the artistic project VOYAGEUR DE L’IMAGE / WEGE ZUM BILD / TOWARDS THE IMAGE will once again be “set up” in the mother ship of the university, so that it can continue to sow its seeds and forge connections, because we cannot dispense with either art or science: “This having to be based [Sicheinrichtenmüssen] in its own results as the ways and means of a progressing methodology, is the essence of the character of [artistic] research as constant activity.” (Missomelius 2006, p. 10)
“Leonardo da Vinci’s symbolic and constructively methodical
spirit becomes the model for the transgression and mutual
permeation of art and science in an ultimate spirit of
interdisciplinarity.” Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da
Vinci, Paul Valéry
The paradigm shift of the digital in new media aesthetics that is
arising from the interplay between art, science, and technology,
old and new, leads to the emergence of a new kind of media
culture: “The hybridization of media has done away with the strict
compartmentalization between media subsystems that science has
long maintained; it has merged them into complex artistic forms.
This finds expression in new approaches to research.”
“We have to try to understand the overall functioning of man. (...) A person sees, hears, and affects himself alone. Physics is purely anthropomorphic.” Cahiers, Paul Valéry As a place of production and reception, TESTeLAB & Guests constitutes a practical space for acquiring the free and unpredictable experiences and insights that are required on a foray into the future of the technological image. New visual worlds are opened up through the development of an interactive prototype for a 360° panorama and dome installation. The future of the moving image can be walked into and experienced in the “sphere installation” of the CIRCUS CONTAINER COLOSSEUM in a way that stimulates the audience to actively reflect on the aesthetic and technological transformation of our environment. Wholly in keeping with the spirit of the original union between research and teaching in a university setting, the “Expanded Animation Worlds” have taken on the mission of transporting audiovisual media into the future, in a quest to represent and describe how the digital transformation of 21st-century society is being shaped and moderated, in all of its aspects.
The audiovisual essay FROM ASSISI AFTER PADUA, a vivid demonstration of aesthetic, formal, structural, and imagetheoretical premises, together with their combined approaches, both opens up new pathways and closes off others. Bursting through conventional forms of representation and questioning established patterns of perception opens up new spaces of experience, which can amalgamate the personal, current, and virtual into time-based “meta-documentation”. The essay films made in this age of the intermingling and manipulation of analogue and digital will only become truly topical in the future, as it is ready to accommodate complex themes and the full range of genres. The essay introduces a conceptual and practice-based way of working as a form of discussion. In form and content, this approach creates a common starting point in theory and practice, as well as providing the foundation for interacting with new partners and building global friendships.
Down to EARTH SEEN FROM THE STUDIO is the leading theme of the rhizomatic SPHAERA model of an “animated knowledge” organization in the synthetic planetary system of the work TESTeLAB & Guests: Expanded Animation Worlds.
2 The project ALIAS YEDERBECK was comprehensively restaged in
various media forms of representation (installation, DVD edition, app,
VR, mobile model) and last but not least as ALIAS YEDERBECK
REDUX at the German Institute for Animation Film / DIAF in the
Technical Collections Dresden in a paracontextual exhibition with model
character: https://www.diaf.de/sonderausstellungen/vergangene-sonder
ausstellungen/panorama-vision-film-projekt-installation/ Accessed: 27
July 2019. ALIAS YEDERBECK could already be presented to the public
and conceptually described in the preproduction phase (cf.
4 The exhibition FUTURE CINEMA: THE IMAGINARY AFTER FILM (2003) built a bridge from early forms of cinematography to contemporary or future possibilities of media.
5 See Godard, J.-L., HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA (1998) as a book with audio CDs in French and as a video with a German language version on DVD (2009) and LE LIVRE D’IMAGE / BILDBUCH (2019). See also Alexander Kluge’s thesis in GESCHICHTEN VOM KINO (2007); he considers cinema to be immortal because it is older than cinematic art: “Even if the cinema projectors stop rattling, there will be something that works like cinema.”
6 On the ambiguity of craft in relation to art and authenticity in the field of digital animation production, see Ruddell & Ward 2019.
7 See André Malraux’s gigantic essay as a kind of “planetary art
history”, which produces multidimensional and multi-perspective thought
connections through surprising associations and leaps in time and space
8 Podcast on the occasion of the exhibition “Alberto Giacometti:
Departure to the Avant-Garde” at the Kunsthaus Zürich 2007:
https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/giacometti-alles-ist
zeichnung.1013.de.html?dram:article_id=166927 Accessed: 19 August
2019. In the essay “Alberto Giacometti and the Invention of Virtual
Space”, p. 214-219, in Alberto Giacometti: THE ORIGIN OF SPACE
2010, Brüderlin and Wallner presented the thesis that Giacometti was the
first to radically question Euclidean space with his art and to open up new
spaces, as well as “virtual space”, thus revolutionizing the “plastic concept
of space”. Cf. also
9 Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994). PICTURE THEORY: ESSAYS ON VERBAL AND VISUAL REPRESENTATION. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
11 Villém Flusser’s provocative thesis in the “Design-Fibel” VOM
STAND DER DINGE. EINE KLEINE PHILOSOPHIE DES DESIGN
12 The first guest of the TESTeLAB is Valencia James, a Barbadian performer who, as an artistic researcher, is interested in mediation between dance, theater, technology, and activism: https://valenciajames.com. The author is working with her on the piece QUADTRIANGLE: Based on Samuel Beckett's QUAD I + II for a dodecagon with motion capture technology (work in progress). As part of the collegiate research group CINEPOETICS: POETOLOGIES OF AUDIOVISUAL IMAGES under the direction of Hermann Kappelhoff and Michael Wedel, Tatiana Brandrup (director), Naum Kleiman (Eisenstein expert), Frank Geßner (concept art, background design), Alexej Tschernij (animation), Katrin Springer and Björn Stockleben (production) developed a virtual reality prototype, which will later be expanded into a platform for experiencing the artistic and theoretical work of the filmmaker Eisenstein. The VR design was presented for the first time at the workshop SERGEJ EISENSTEIN AND THE PLAY OF OBJECTS on the occasion of the 120th birthday and 70th anniversary of the death of Sergej Eisenstein, 22 to 24 November 2018, Brandenburg Centre for Media Studies / ZeM Potsdam.
13 Locations like the HKW / Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, which
work beyond the boundaries of specialist disciplines with a variety of
forms and media such as exhibitions, installations, conferences,
workshops, concerts, film screenings, and publications as “a kind of
Goethe Institute with a reversed sign” and the ZKM / Zentrum für Kunst
und Medien Karlsruhe, become “open fields of action”: Cf.