More than Meets the Eye - Christoph Oeschger

Christoph Oeschger

More Than Meets the Eye: Capturing Invisible Flows and Processes: For my doctorate, I created four films and one photo-text installation that engage with invisibility in various ways. My research for the film "2°", which seeks the impact of human interaction with changing geographies, took me to an altitude of 3,500 meters above sea level. In my investigations, I traveled as far north as the 51st parallel to produce the film "In the Ice, Everything Leaves a Trace", and the photo series "The Other Side of Ice", examining the economic exploitation of the Arctic. My research also led me to a place where the wind is harnessed for filming, inspiring the creation of the film "Memories of a Past Future", and to a location where filming is no longer possible, yielding images used in the production of "Unlearning Flow". The decisive events of our time are often not visible. My research revolves around making this invisibility negotiable. These occurrences possess a fascinating duality, simultaneously feeling both familiar and foreign. While we are intimately connected to them, they represent global processes that escape complete comprehension. They are complex chains of causality that have become inscrutable to individual perception. Invisible events cannot be addressed through individual images or shots. Instead, it's the montage techniques of demontage, soft montage, and the productive gap that I employ. It is these working methods that allow me to approach the invisible, partially capture it, and make it negotiable. These forms of montage are also mirrored in the written part of my dissertation. The written section of the doctorate brings together various text elements that influence each other and create cross-references within the individual works. The the written part contains conversations with other artist researchers contextualize my work within my field but also to build a forum to negotioate my work.

Memories of a Past Future

There is something that reveals itself in the repetition.
The repetition as temporal shift of then, today, and tomorrow, the variation of the always-the-same, the recurring, that which renews itself again and again.

The wind was made straight,
it was furnished with smoke particles,
which can catch the light and be laid down in the photo emulsion.
In the hope that we might thus quantify the wind, take its measure.
The image – a way to picture how the wind behaves.

The subjects, the test objects, the things being studied were to be themselves,
so they would show their true selves in the image,
and their true self would inscribe itself on the film,
so that the findings would be safeguarded for the future.

The camera was to record what was seen,
to see in places where the eye does not suffice,
to see what the naked eye has no access to.

The camera knows the magic words to open up this universe and the future of the past that emerges from a mirrored sphere.

Title: Memories of a Past Future

Year: 2019

Length: 5’ 44”

Director: Christoph Oeschger

Camera: Florian Dombois, Christoph Oeschger

Editing: Christoph Oeschger

Voice: Irina Schönen

Sound Design / Music: Fabian Gutscher

Translation: Simon Cowper

Audio: Stereo

Format: three-channel HD video on three monitors,

onlineversion 4096 × 768

Acknowledgements: with videos from Florian Dombois, Christoph Oeschger, Fabian Gutscher (Research Focus Transdisciplinarity, ZHdK)

The film is also part of the Filmallmende Project:

https://filmallmende.net/

Installation views from the exhibition "Filme des Windes", Kunstraum of the Leuphana University of Luneburg (DE)

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