Losing my face

The camera is witness to the process by which Losing My Face is created, and yet it is unable to penetrate the space and to break it up into frames. From a frog's eye view, the camera focuses on the artist's head as his hair is tied back and attached to a rope hanging from the ceiling. All of a sudden, the head seems to be swept into motion, swinging back and forth from the rope like an imaginary pendulum. With the constant blurring of the focus on the filmed image, the face becomes distorted, taking on a steady series of new and flowing forms and transitions. The somnambulant pictorial aesthetic allows us to optically experience movement in space and time. The rhythmic soundtrack underscores the association with a pendulum.

This temporal and spatial movement is not actually being performed by the person shown, however, but is produced solely by the camera. The transition from stasis to motion is accomplished by a machine. With the help of technology, the human puts his intentions into practice and sets the world flowing. The face of the artist, standing here for the individual, is however lost in the current of technologically shaped time. In the process of machine-assisted creation, the world is divested of its original tangibility. For a brief moment, even the grimace of death seems to shine out from the amorphous images. (Johannes Schmidt)