Idea and realization:
Oliver Schwabe
Sound:
Dirk Specht
Production:
Oliver Schwabe and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne
1998, 4:40 min.
THE body does not exist.
There are just different concepts of the body. The more closely we approach these apparatuses and the more they permeate us, it becomes clear that at the boundary between human and machine a drama plays out.
Idea and realization:
Oliver Schwabe
Sound:
Dirk Specht
Production:
Oliver Schwabe and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne
This drama is about irreconcilabilities: the excessive, the delirious, the infatuated, the expectant, the addicted body in resistance to evaluation, resistance to appropriation by modes of time that go beyond as well as fall short of sensual perception, resistance to being shaped by laws, geometries, grammars, programs.
These are variations on the resistance of the real that Oliver Schwabe brings together in his installation. Here an airman appears to be taking part in a kind of preparatory training, his head hangs out of a plane, trying to resist the violent wind currents. Opposite is the head of an astronaut in a centrifuge, the effects of which seem to completely hollow out his body.
The heads appear on two black-and-white monitors placed on the floor facing up, separate from each other and both playing silently. They form a passage to a large-scale presentation in a separate room. On one side, a young man swims in a test pool against the current, without moving forward a centimeter. He is in a stillstand, despite maximum physical effort.
The deep frequencies of the sounds coming from the loud speakers throw this artificial space into vibrating oscillations. On the other side, a projection shows a paper lantern swinging back and forth in extreme temporal alienation against the bright light of awareness, the sun, as if commenting scornfully from time to time on all these entirely masculine efforts in resistance to these apparatuses.
Subjectivity is an experience in the first person, and indeed right on the border.
Text - Prof. Dr. Siegfried Zielinski
As an author, director, and cameraman,Oliver Schwabe has created feature films and documentaries for over 20 years for television and cinema. His work includes numerous TV documentaries (arte, NDR, WDR, rbb) and feature-length documentary films that deal with pop-culture themes, as well as a series of video diaries that he supervised and edited on a regular basis from 1998 to 2010 for the NDR in Hamburg.
In addition, he is interested in documentary-inspired hybrid forms and formats that sound out the boundaries of the genre, which he has realized for cinema as well as for television.
Schwabe studied at the KHM and is currently a part-time interim professor for television dramaturgy and creative television production.
