Schatten werfen keine Schatten
I wanted to build worlds inside my computer, one technique after another. Stacking every atom by hand. How many waves does the sea have — and how many sub-waves and refractions in each of them? What does dust actually look like, and how much of it do I need? Everything in 3D is clean and exact. So I read about techniques that reproduce real errors virtually — nothing looks real until it has flaws — and decided to make more mistakes in my virtual rooms.
"It allows people to see things, which only mathematicians could see before."
A Bell Laboratories researcher on the first graphics computer
The researcher in the white coat presses buttons on his graphics machine — in 1968, the first one in the world. "This will let people see things only mathematicians could see before," he says, and draws a picture in my head full of things I cannot see. That is the part that gets me: technologies everyone can look at, whose insides stay invisible behind their complexity — a second world next to the visible one, an extension of reality.
Background
In 2015 I built an installation out of old television machines — a tower of technology that assembled its own TV program on professional videotape recorders from the 1980s. I had a lot of fun with that project, but it carried the burden of the physical: the room set the limits, and kept the otherwise fairly unleashed machinery from inviting anyone to dream.
Six years later, this is the digital version. In the video, the TV tower stands in changing computer-animated landscapes, the center of both function and dramaturgy. It plays excerpts from "The Incredible Machine", a Bell Laboratories film from 1968 — shot in the same labs where the first computer that could produce graphics had just been built. The beginning of a promise of a new visual communication.
The same film contains a piece of computer-generated music, "Daisy Bell", which Stanley Kubrick borrowed for "2001 — A Space Odyssey": it is the last song the dying HAL 9000 sings. So while the computers of 1968 were just waking up, Kubrick was already killing them off in his films. Fifty years later, computers render photorealistic images and the illusion has few limits left — what limits it is less the machine than our patience for all the detail reality provides. And still we live with mystical machines that know how to keep their secrets, and dream ourselves into science-fiction worlds because they carry the promise of one day becoming real.
Credits
Thanks to my colleagues Rudi Ortner and Michael Troll for their help with the sound design, to Ian Hubert for inspiration and craft, and to Rainer Wölzl for his precise and generous artistic guidance. The title is borrowed from the Tocotronic song of the same name, written by Dirk von Lowtzow.
