Description
In modern times reality is a highly constructed body made up of many different ideas, desires and influences. The biggest reality producing machine, the media with all its different distribution channels, confronts us with a huge moving colourful mass made of countless pictures and sounds. The question about whether what we see is real or not is neither asked nor encouraged. The catchphrase of modernity is see it and believe it, a critical discourse is never held. While in ancient times, following Platon's ideas, reality to some is the dancing of shadows on a cave wall, for us it is the play of many differently coloured pixels on flat surfaces. Screens are our viewfinders to the wold. Our perception is created by artificial interfaces. The connection between reality and man is created by copper wires and silicium plates. A very fragile umbilical cord highly dependent on those who feed it thus holding the ultimate control.
Two movies dealing about the question of what is real, The Matrix (1999) by the Wachowski brothers and World on Wires (1973, orig. title Welt am Draht) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, are left to the electronic brain of a computer to create, with its countless circuits instructed by a programmer, a reality partly constructed partly real to explore reality and its constructed nature. The outcome is a formal critique of (mass-)media's reality.
Final Result
<videoflash type=vimeo>16170658|600|490</videoflash> The final result (21 minutes).
How it works
The mashups works by reordering the first movie's frames (Welt am Draht) so they match the optical flow of the second movie (The Matrix). The outcome is a third movie which exhibits properties of both, frames and sound of the first movie and rhythm of the second movie.
Links
References
- Bernhard Hopfengärtner: Tanzmaschine
- Sven König: sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!, aPpRoPiRaTe!
- Perry Bard: global remake project
- Beom Kim: Untitled (News), 2002
- Harun Farocki: Deep Play, 2007, Deep Play on Rhizome
- Purgand/Neumaier/Neupert: Tipp-Kick Spiel, 2004