Artist and filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt creates elaborately staged films that investigate the power of language and the conventions of cinema as an allegory for societal and individual behaviors. With the multi-channel film installation Euphoria he continues this examination by exploring capitalism, colonialism, and the influential effects of unlimited economic growth in society.
An apparently halfway normal family of three generations to live with: father, mother, their mother, and two quite grown-up children share a well-equipped and structured apartment. The living room has a dining table, sitting area and sofa, built a little further into the depths of the squat. There is also a cellar.
Going backstage and behind closed doors to chronicle the music of sex, drugs, and power struggles that were the fabric of the punk community. Adapted for stage by Mathieu Bauer. The punk era of Television, Richard Hell, Ramones, Iggy Pop...flirting with death, drowning in art, design and a new way of communicating.
The opera begins at the end. The woman has just experienced a terrible accident, a crash of both the computer and her brain to which the computer is connected. The first two parts take us through the reconstruction of her story, the use of her body, speech, memory and the data banks and central brain of the computer. She shares genetic, organic material with the computer as the computer replaces parts of her body with its cybernetic material. The relationship is unclear to both of them. Where reality exists is in a floating multi-layered network of hallucinations, fractured memories and her externalized inner life viewed on the computers screens, the film itself. She is physically present, witnessing and participating in the story on the stage, the computer, consisting of screens, sounds, musical icons and a glass central unit on which the woman performs her rituals of reconstruction. The story unfolds to her and to us simultaneously in a quest to understand what caused the accident...
