"Kristall (What is money V/A)"

C-print (digital), cut out, mounted

What connects money and film? How do things change our bodies and our way of living together, how do the means of circulation and exchange change our human communication? Beyond the conditions of production and economies, there are other parallels that are worth a closer look, because both - money and film - are subject to current changes caused by virtualization and digitalization. Analogue cinema and film production on celluloid, the comprehensibility of image construction using cadres, cinema projection using light and non-light, are being replaced by digital cinema, as we have been following it for some time. The same applies to our relationship to money, the materiality of which has also changed: from coins and notes to data stored on credit and bank cards, as an app on the mobile phone, contactlessly at the supermarket checkout, when shopping on the Internet as a numerical code. The symbolic value of money, with which we at least still had haptic contact, which was accompanied by ritual gestures, has entered another, new sphere of virtuality. We are dealing with an abstraction that makes communicative and manual processes no longer physically comprehensible. It is true that there is a loss of gestures, or at least changes that go hand in hand with technological inventions. Both changes,- the materiality of cinema and that of money, concern one's own body, its relationship to things and their haptic contact, forms of communication, rituals and gestures. This is a critical reflection.
In my work as a visual artist, there is a predominant interest in found material in relation to the human body, its media image, body language and communication. Found Footage serves me as source material. My main tool is the practice of editing, collage and montage. Gestures often mark a state of suspension; -An in-between state of human communication in which meanings are not yet fixed, movement has no goal. "Cinema leads the images back to the home of the gesture", writes Giorgio Agamben in his text Notes on Gesture, describing on the one hand the beginning of an epoch that has lost control over its gestures and the disappearance of conspicuous gestures in the course of social standardization. What Agamben notes with regard to Aby Warburg's atlas and Gille Deleuze's treatises on cinema is that every image is a gesture that "points beyond itself, back to a whole of which it is part". The gesture is both carrier and event, "the making visible of a means as such. It makes the "being of man in a medium appear (...)". The gesture as a system of communication, as an expression of "not finding one's way around in language": gestures as event and act are not always controlled or intended. Hands are carriers of a visual vocabulary beyond words, mediators between thinking and a social and political outside. They take on the role of a mediality that, despite all attempts at readability and control, moves in the field of ambivalence. These open actions in seemingly closed systems are the focus of my work. The cut as practice interests me, because it deals with a border and a break. It is done consciously. It is practised on paper, in music, in film, in language.
Both "materials", film and money, are subject to current changes that are directly related to materiality, our haptic reference and the body itself. Digitalisation, virtualisation and technological changes influence communication, circulation and exchange, haptics and ultimately our bodies. Not only the fact that money determines the film or its production and a work about it is a representation of a closed circuit and includes the theme of circulation and transfer "images for money". Gille Deleuze sees an international conspiracy in the inward relationship between film and money. On the one hand, he refers to Wim Wenders, who describes money as the flip side of all images, the front side of which is shown in the cinema. Thus, films about money are "films in film or about film" (Wim Wenders).
"What the film expresses in the film is this infernal cycle between image and money, the inflation that has been put into exchange by time,(...). The film is movement, but the film in the film is money, time, (...) images for money, time for images (...), time, to transform the transparent side into money, the opaque side, just as one turns a spinning top upside down. The film will end when there is no more money...(Gille Deleuze, "The Time Crystals")
(Karin Fisslthaler, 2015)