Silent as Spirit
with Joachim Koester, Robin Selk, Michael Loncaric and Dylan Godwin, 2013
Event, publication and collaborative installation
Following Joachim Koester’s exhibition HOWE at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Kadist, San Francisco, November 20–24, 2013
The exhibition HOWE at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts was followed by an event at Kadist SF, organized by Joachim Koester in conversation with Robin Selk, Michael Loncaric, Michelle Helene Mackenzie and Dylan Godwin. The event was accompanied by a publication and a collaborative installation, expanding on the works presented at YBCA.
The story is well documented: in 1894 the Lumière brothers, who have been trying to achieve motion projection for years, still can’t get their machine to blink. Their breakthrough comes with the ‘intermittent mechanism’ of Howe’s sewing machine. Grab-pull becomes light-dark becomes advance-pause-expose, and negatives are subjected to a rhythm that projects the fluidity of real life. But the transference from one frame to the next is also the transference of creative powers from the machine to the viewer. Just as the mechanism cannot help but project, the human eye discovers a seamless stream that can only appear continuous by illusion.
The reverse of remembering is hallucinating. We may remember that Joachim Koester’s Of Spirits and Empty Spaces takes as its focus the utopian efforts of John Murray Spear to reinvent Howe’s sewing machine through a combination of séance and trance athletics. What we watch, however, is a projection of lambent dust particles while subtitles recount the efforts of Spear’s supporters to summon Benjamin Franklin’s spirit. Like ghosts, dust is the medium-in-waiting of all that was and ever will be, but to witness this cosmological drift we need projections.
Erasure grows. By engaging with the archive, one is constantly negotiating the relation between active loss or erasure and recovery or remembrance. Yet the outlying, silent witness to this dialectic is the space of all that is lost and dead, all that exists beyond the horizon of the historical, conceptual or representational limit. Here the unanchored and digressive, beyond the point and beyond the grave, wanders against the horizon of the archive.