films

Persephone am Tuniberg
Die Gaia-Hypothese bietet ein Gegenentwurf zum Narrativ des Überlebenskampfs in der klassischen Interpretation des Darwinismus; sie betont Symbiosen in der Natur. Das Konzept wurde u.a. von Lynn Margulis in der Mikrobiologie entwickelt. Die Frühlingsanfänge in der Natur zeigen, wie die Grenze zwischen Leben und Tod zugunsten des Lebendigen überwunden wird. Die existentielle Notwendigkeit der Symbiose wird anhand des Persephone-Mythos – gespielt von der Winzerfrau – im mythologischen Rahmen verortet. Der Umgang mit Mikroorganismen auf einem biodynamischen Weingut, erklärt durch den Winzer, zeigt, wie dadurch ein Ökosystem gut funktionieren kann. Die Präsenz und Verwandlungen nicht sichtbarer Mikroben, Chloroplasten und Mitochondrien wird durch neugestaltete naturwissenschaftliche Grafik dargestellt, verfremdet und in malerischen Bildsequenzen eingebunden.

Gaias Glückspilze
Die Gaia-Hypothese bietet ein Gegenentwurf zum Narrativ des Überlebenskampfs in der klassischen Interpretation des Darwinismus; sie betont Symbiosen in der Natur. In Munzingen, einem ländlich geprägten Dorf nahe Freiburg, impft ein Winzer Bäume mit Trüffelsporen. Die Trüffel teilen lebenswichtige Funktionen mit ihren „Kooperationspartnern“, den Bäumen. Verortet zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft untersucht der Film die symbiotischen Beziehungen in der Tier- und Pflanzenwelt und deren stofflichen Austausch. Das Winzerpaar erzählt, wie sie dadurch ohne Pestizide oder künstliche Düngemittel auskommen können. Die wundersamen Metamorphosen werden durch die digitalen Verwandlungen Zeichnungen und Objekten von Celia Brown gespiegelt.

Dee and Carroll’s Smoking Mirrors
Lewis Carroll’s looking-glass is a special kind of mirror: it dissolves into a kind of mist, allowing a human being to pass through. The mirror bears considerable similarity to an Aztec obsidian Smoking Mirror purportedly enabling communication with ‘other’ worlds. Carroll’s book collection shows that he was interested in ghost stories, astrology and spiritualist conundrums; was he familiar with John Dee’s smoking mirror, of Aztec origin, now in the British Museum? Elizabeth 1’s astrologer and consultant claimed he could make contact with supernatural beings he designated as ‘angels’ using this obsidian ‘shew-stone’ and thus scry into the future. Perhaps all the residents represent materializations of the long-deceased in history and myth, having also emerged through the mirror? Alice’s participation in a game of opposing chess pieces becomes an opportunity to hold up a spiritualist-scientific mirror to key historical debates about the nature of reality.

YouTube/Link zur Ansicht: Dee and Carroll’s Smoking Mirrors: A Lecture Performance by Celia Brown.

Mitochondrien sind kleine Kraftwerke. Sie befinden sich in allen lebenden Zellen und besitzen ihre eigene DNS. Celia Brown hat ihren Vortrag „Der Traum der Mitochondrien“ genannt, als ob Mitochondrien von ihrer Vergangenheit träumen könnten. Bildbeispiele, Schattenwürfe, Objekte, zwei Sprecher: Am Aufbau der Metamorphosen von Ovid angelehnt erleben die ZuschauerInnen die Mitochondrien durch eine Reise in 15 Teilen.

Alice im Spiegelland (Hg. Celia Brown & Marion Mangelsdorf) 2012

Alice in Mirrorland was conceived by scientists and artists within the context of a collective initiative entitled Science meets Arts meets Science and developed into a ‘total art work’. The topics – the six impossible things Alice thought before breakfast – are brought into focus in Lecture Performances, as we have called our presentations: mirror images and their asymmetry in current debates concerning nature – the body – and culture are addressed in a dialogue between cultural anthropologists, representatives of the arts – fine art, theatre, music and dance – the neuro- and molecular-sciences, informatics and physics.

The artist Celia Brown, for whom such adventures are an integral aspect of her art practice, collaborated with academics and other artists to launch this project at the 550 jubilee of the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg in 2007. Alice in Mirrorland was framed by an exhibition of the same name that took place at the municipal gallery of Freiburg Kunsthaus L6. Six Lecture Performances were presented in a lecture hall at the university parallel to the show, from 20 June to 25 July, and these formed the basis of the book Alice im Spiegelland eds. Celia Brown & Marion Mangelsdorf, Bielefeld:transcript 2012

Lewis Carroll: „Who are you?“ said the Caterpillar.

Alice enters the land of metamorphoses and shifts in perception. A scientific sketch of brainland conducted as a conversation on video between Sigrid Schmitz and Celia Brown is interrupted by dance interludes performed within an artificial brainland on stage. The collage is completed by quotations from the story of Alice in Wonderland delivered by Alice as a player in the performance.

Im Wald „in dem nichts einen Namen hat“ – in diesem Fall der Schwarzwald – verwandelt sich Alice in Rotkäppchen (Barbara Bausch) und trifft den Wolf. Ist der Wolf groß und böse, wird er sich als Rotkäppchens Oma verkleiden und sie auffressen? Nein, Alice bringt ihn als domestizierten Hund durch den Spiegel zurück.

In the wood ‘where nothing has a name’ Alice transforms into Little Red Riding Hood and meets a wolf. Is the wolf big and bad? Will it dress up as Red Riding-hood’s grandmother and eat her up? Not at all: Alice brings it back as a domesticated dog through the looking-glass.

Antimatter Alice dances in a chesspiecepiece as a quantum wave to a composition by George Chambers. The dancers take on the task of representing quantum states, travelling through space as a fluid group. The shape of this “wave” changes through time as the dancers make their own decisions about where to move. The physicist intervenes in order to demonstrate the result of a measurement on a quantum system. A Humpty Dumpty dance demonstrates why it should be impossible for time to go backwards in the quantum world. The dancers then separate into black and white chess pieces and make mirror image movements. When one figure meets its opposite, she or he lays down on the floor of the lecture hall. Finally, matter and antimatter cancel each other out leaving Alice and the scientist as the survivors.

Lewis Carroll: “Things flow about so here”
As the dancers move they represent the motion of the wave function which represents the probability of finding the particle rather than the motion of the particle itself. The process of measurement causes the wave function to collapse revealing the location of the particle. When matter and antimatter encounter one another, they annihilate in a burst of energy. The game of chess will be played to its ultimate conclusion: the creation of the Universe.

In “Mirrorland”, Britta Schinzel, Professor for Informatics, transforms into the Red Queen through the looking-glass and delivers her lecture in this role to the video camera. Armed with a chip-card and ruler, she marks out the squares of the chessboard. Alice moves across the squares and interprets the communication between head and a rebellious body-skeleton in a dance duet. Celia Brown and Sigrid Schmitz attempt to capture the meaning and interconnection of “I” and “Egg”. Meanwhile, Britta Schinzel and Constanze Kurz discover 6 impossible virtual things. Finally, the Red Queen sitting at her computer conducts the dance via a transponder which is apparently able to communicate with the RFID chip in the chip-card of the University of Freiburg.