Welcome to Canada, Mischa Kuball! I first met the acclaimed German video/light artist a few years back when he installed a piece of his for Toronto's Nuit Blanche, and followed his work ever since. He is now internationally touring an intriguing philosophical work, "Platon's Mirror", which we are happy to co-present with McMaster. And we are taking this chance to show a video work of his that plays with analog and digital at the Goethe (details).
Kuball on the role of the amateur film as home movie or “family cinema”:
A film amateur has multiple lives: A life for the camera and a daily life. With the camera, she or he captures the optimistic, happy moments: ordinary films, films shot on a Sunday, images that express a certain feeling or wishful thinking about one’s life. Through the viewfinder, the amateur also sees himself: as a protagonist and aficionado of his own life. His or her films document what was once important to him or her. The “poor” amateur cinema can afford the luxury of portraying one average person’s distinct characteristics.
The Super 8 films in my piece “Amateur Film” have all been given to me as gifts from people I know. From them, I created a small series of digital adaptations that all deal with the perception of media and their respective content by means of media transfer -- supposing that the knowledge about digitalisation is something different from the ‘watermark’ in the film that serves as a shadow and digital representation of the medium – in my work, the transfer is constitutive for the image. Meaning that the reference of analog media such as Super 8 is still visible, but the digital transfer has been taking over, so it will appear and strongly influence the seen image as such, as a constant shadow of its own media presence.
More at our Culture talks @ Goethe with Mischa Kuball in conversation with McMaster Museum Senior Curator Ihor Holubizky -- where you can win one of 10 of Mischa Kuball's latest book.
by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto
