Alexander Kluge
My Virtual Camera (Warburgs Mnemosyne, With a Little Help from AI)

Description du projet par l’artiste :

With the algorithms of the Silicon Valley, all classic forms of expression are under threat. If you want to be a patriot of modernity and a patriot of film history at the same time, the only option is to work on a counter-algorithm. That means further developing the camera.

My classic film camera can only ever record what is objectively and presently in front of its lens. You can disguise actors or present historical images to the camera and thus evoke the past. Yet you’ll never be able to film the past itself.

For a couple of years now, I have been experimenting with a new, virtual camera. This camera, which is based on the computer-generated images created by STABLE DIFFUSION. What I’m most interested in, is what others deem to be the application’s flaws. In all these seeming errors, the image frees itself from the constraints of the indicative and opens up a new space: the space of the possible, the space of the subjunctive.

The term subjunctive corresponds to the art genre of the constellation. In iconography, a constellation places images in relation to one another. This happens in an exemplary way in the BILDERATLAS MNEMOSYNE by Aby Warburg. All the efforts of my work are aimed at continuing this impulse. Through commentary, by taking up and adding to what has been handed down and by connecting to the present. Today, the virtual camera called A.I. is gradually excavating fragments for the project of a BAUHAUS OF SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE (a “Bauhaus of feelings”).