Trautwein Herleth is pleased to present an exhibition of the four-video suite Parallele I–V by Harun Farocki, the final work completed by the pioneering artist before his death in 2014. This exhibition marks the first time in over a decade that the four-video cycle is shown in Berlin.
Farocki finished the first installment of Parallele in 2012. The double channel video charts the development of computer generated imagery from its inception to the present, while simultaneously unraveling outmoded narratives around representation in general. Early computer images, limitedby technology, rely on symbolic forms of depiction, while present day output trends towards a concretism of ever increasing fidelity to an idea of reality. Speculating on this further, Farocki considers whether digital images will eventually displace filmic images – marking a displacement of the indexical by the man-made idealization.
Parallele II and III expose the frameworks of game worlds, testing their inherent limitations. The borders of their territories, which are impossible to traverse within the game, are revealed as pixel thin and penetrable – virtual scrims that conceal the artifices of game worlds. It emerges that many of these worlds, like theater sets, take the form of flat stages floating in space – which Farocki aptly links to pre-Hellenistic conceptions of the world, connecting video games to millennia of visual history and human self-understanding.
Parallele IV, concerns itself with the protagonists of video games: anthropomorphous beings who learn the rules and limitations of the man-made, virtual worlds they inhabit not via teachers, parents or society, but unaccompanied exploration. What is explored in tandem is the relationship between a game developer’s system and a player‘s agency.
In Parallelle I–IV , Farocki identifies a new visual regime that has become increasingly ubiquitous in the 12 years since the series was completed, a life in which reality no longer inhibits the pervasiveness of illusions. Virtual images exaggerate certain traits as a technique of persuasion and immersion – in their ability to carry their makers’ agencies. As a series, Parallelle reflects on the socio-political implications of how this new type of imagery is conceptualized, deployed and consumed, analyzing its power in prescient ways.
"In films, there is the wind that blows and the wind that is produced by a wind machine. Computer images do not have two kinds of wind.” – Harun Farocki
Harun Farocki‘s (1944-2014) oeuvre comprises more than 100 experimental and documentary films, essay, short and feature films. However, his complete oeuvre goes far beyond that. Farocki left behind extensive works of film and media theory still to be discovered, and for decades worked as a lecturer. Beginning in the mid-1990s, he expanded his cinematic practice with video installations. Farocki was an ethnographer of capitalist living environments, which he dissected and analyzed. Vital to his approach is the examination of the meaning of images, their genesis, and, in particular, the power structures inscribed in them.
Solo exhibitions of Harun Farocki’s work have been staged at Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; MUMOK. Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz; MUAC, Museo Uni- versitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro; Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa; National Museum of Modern Contemporary Art, Seoul; among many others.
