PROGRAM

GPC STREAMS (#3) - A Succession of Waves

In a 2014 lecture, Stefan Helmreich stated that waves are entities that “flicker between reality and representation.” Waves are arguably one of the most complicated objects that exist in the world: their scientific observation and measurement depends on a slippery amalgamation of recorded events, technological apparatuses, as well as mathematical computations and statistical calculations. This complexity, according to Helmreich, proves that waves are as much physical as cultural objects. It is in the wave where we can see how knowledge is always in-process, always only partial, and intrinsically influenced by prevailing politics and technologies.

A Succession of Waves embraces the impossibility of comprehending the inexhaustible swell by presenting three attempts to represent it through film. First, in Obholzer’s “2 days left”, the wave has been constructed artificially: an anthropogenic leisure trick captured through a rather abstract succession of moving images. In the second attempt, Wang’s “One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean”, a hasty succession of scenes becomes overwhelming, a flood that reminds us of infinite scrolls and latent threats. The last example, “The Ship is Sinking” by Stracke & Seibt, goes back to a moment of quietness, where the “The Raft of the Medusa”, a magnificent symbol of human’s wrecked horizon, is reenacted by collapsing two planes and materialities into one.

With works by Simona Obholzer, Clea Stracke & Verena Seibt, Yuyan Wang
Curated by Enar de Dios Rodríguez

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