Christoph Keller

A travelogue on the fringes of what can be said. Black and white images suggest the departure from the bridge of Manaus into the depth of Amazonia. But the photographs only appear for a very short time leaving behind an afterimage that pulls the viewer further into an intermittent written story, which is alternating with the images.

In “Small Survey on Nothingness”, the artist Christoph Keller investigates the relationship of nothingness to the ambivalent medium of ether in the context of art and science through a series of conversations. Exposed as a scientific fallacy, ether was banished from scientific research at the same time that the substance and its properties was discovered by the artistic avantgarde. The artist research film explores the traces of nothingness and ether, from Michelson’s experimentum crucis to the recent discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN.

Each subject seats him or herself in an office chair, breathes deeply, concentrates, each appearing somewhat nervous. Each then places a balloon to his or her lips and breathes into it; the balloon then expands and contracts with each inhalation and exhalation. Before long, something curious occurs: their faces relax noticeably. Several subjects begin laughing aloud. A few attempt to repress these outbursts of hilarity. Others appear mentally absent. Still others attempt to articulate their experiences verbally. The intensity of these emotional responses careens out of control, their hilarity is irrepressible. Their laughter is infectious, yet one observes that an element must be present which somehow enhances the potential for affect and empathy. For a moment, all of the lightness of the world seems no further away than a balloon – and yet remains nonetheless evanescent.

The video Tour Solaire begins by reversing the view: instead of measuring the remoteness of outer space, the view glides first from the observation platform of a disused observatory over Paris and then ultimately turns towards the interior of the tower. Overlaid by the soundtrack of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, the camera moves through the abandoned observatory and then lingers on a few lifeless flies. The video is determined by scenarios veering between the suggestion of distance, the observation of concrete spaces and their details, the shift between inside and outside, between objectification and psychological interiors. The observatory appears here like a mute, unreal monument of an alien culture, like the instrument of a science beset by its own fictionalisation.

Documentation of the artist being hypnotized, wandering around in an immaginary art museum and describing what he sees there. Keller took lessons from a professional hypnotist to prepare for the piece Visiting a Contemporary Art Museum under Hypnosis (2006), let himself be hypnotized, and he also hypnotized others. The two-part video depicts a hypnosis session in which Keller repairs to the corridor of an imaginary museum hypnotized and describes the works which he sees there.

The international scientific film project Encyclopaedia Cinematographica has been founded in the 1950s by the Institute for Scientific Film (IWF), Göttingen/Germany, instigated a. o. by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz. The archive comprises several thousand films, mostly of 2 minutes duration and organised in a kind of matrix, which were supposed to document the entire moving world. Christoph Keller pushes the idea of the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica further. He selected 40 entries and isolated their smallest possible sequence of movement, creating new cycles of movements arranged in 40 loops. The videos of the endlessly moving animals are presented on 40 monitors in the exhibition hall of the Kunst-Werke, which thus becomes a kind of walk-in archive. Keller’s work alludes to the idea of the archive as museum.

From the dawning of film history until the dismantling of its own Film Institute, the Berlin Charité hospital produced approximately 1000 educational medical films, expository films and experimental science films. There is no film history of the Charité itself.There are scraps: fragments in the form of notes, articles a few photos and a number of films that have remained. How can one tell a story that does not exist, that appears only intermittently in a context of images and documents full of gaps?

A film by Christoph Keller