After 10 years, the screening series “Phantom Horizons” comes to an end. More than 60 innovative artists from all over the world have been presented in the Window Display of Künstlerhaus Bethanien. To celebrate this diversity and potentials, I am pleased to present a double feature bridging the past and future of experimental moving image.
– Robert Seidel, Curator
Lillian Schwartz
Metamorphosis
8:14min
USA 1974
Lillian Schwartz was a seminal figure in the field of digital art, whose pioneering work at Bell Labs from the 1960s onwards had a profound impact on the convergence of technology and artistic expression. As one of the first women to engage extensively with computer graphics, she made significant contributions in a male-dominated technological field. Her 1974 film, “Metamorphosis,” represents a landmark work that exemplifies her visionary approach. Developing techniques that transformed mathematical algorithms into poetic explorations of colour, movement and form, she created a cinematographic vision that resonated with the work of earlier avant-garde filmmakers while foreshadowing the digital aesthetics that would define late 20th-century art.
Credit: Moving Image from the Collections of The Henry Ford
Phantom Horizons
The on-going screening series Phantom Horizons presents digital as well as analogue works that question the paradigm of linear perspective, seeking a new kind of “status perspective” [Bedeutungsperspektive]. The latter was a development of ancient and medieval painting, in which the size of figures is determined by their hierarchical significance. Extending this approach using the methodology of deconstruction and the possibilities of contemporary film creation, the presented works open up multifaceted, unseen horizons.