Image Making Fatigue

The transfer of Seidel's experimental films into physical space has been explored in many ways in recent years. Sculpture, architecture and even natural projection surfaces have been temporarily 'overpainted' with projections, lights or lasers. But with new advances in machine learning, there may be a kind of oversaturation, or even rigor mortis, when the moving image becomes fully part of the technical tool chain. In tech companies, universities and artists' studios, machines are working through and learning the history of humanity. Copyright dissolves; the distinction between original, imitation or inferior reproduction erodes. No origin, no responsibility, no clear direction - just a primordial soup that can be shaped into any form without challenging knowledge systems and hierarchies. In this silent but radical restructuring of entire industries, the artist becomes the template of a future digitally assembled from a multitude of fragments of the past. This artist talk addresses some of the implications of this singularity, in which history collapses to a single point in the present, and in which easy access to an infinite reworking of iconography may override the desire for a phenomenological experience...