GREGOR ELDARB

„The crystal and the liquid crystal come to be associated with life, or are seen as life forms, in one way or another. But the cystal, in its rigidity and in its precision, is also an emblem of death.” The sheer thematic scope of the phenomenon in question could hardly be expressed in more dramatic terms: crystal, on the one hand, as a fluid, multifarious force of life, and on the other, as something characterized by lethal exactitude and inflexibility. The quote is from the voice-over commentary to the film A Seed Is Planted (2024), which in turn is a taken from the book Liquid Crystals. The Science and Art of a Fluid Form by British writer and teacher of aesthetics Esther Leslie. Her study offers a thorough inquiry, engaging with a wide range of contributions to the discourse of liquid crystals both from a scientific as well as a cultural-historical perspective. The book touches on subjects as diverse as screen technology, morphing (in all its incarnations), science-fiction narratives, cyborgs, shape-shifters, cell membranes, chromosomes, dreams, entropy, and, finally, death, here conceptualized around the dichotomy of rigidity and decomposition. All this and more has to be taken into consideration by anyone trying to make sense of this paradoxical phenomenon – fluid, yet rigid; dead, yet alive – and the many ways in which it impinges on all of our lives. Choosing fluid crystals or crystalline fluidity (which provide something of a conceptual anchor to Donna Haraway’s idea of “naturecultures” as the starting point of a scientific-artistic experiment thus promises to yield valuable insights. 

    A Seed Is Planted harnesses these contradictions in order to find a form that is both solid and fluid. The experimental setting Eldarb has come up with to achieve this is completely analog and consists of nothing more than a wooden tub filled with ferro-fluids and strung with metal wires, plus a magnet required to activate this set-up. These deceptively simple devices hardly prepare one for the wealth of forms and shapes unfolding before one’s eyes as the film progresses. Experimenting with different framings, divisions of the image, reflections and occasional injections of various, sometimes eye-popping, colors, the film stages the drama of limited infinity. Limited, because everything we see is the result of a plain, straightforward, lab-like experimental setting: a dash of ferro-fluid here, a magnet (that remains invisible) there; add to this a drop of color (blood red or a poisonous shade of yellow) and the whole metamorphic process is primed to take its course. Infinite, because it is clear that this shape-shifting process can never arrive at a natural conclusion. No sooner do we see drops arrange themselves into ballet-like configurations than they begin to disperse again, and while everything keeps slipping, sliding and flowing, here and there small areas of great density or murkiness appear, which in turn become subject to the same recursive dynamics – and so on, ad infinitum. 

    This potential infinity is not only circumscribed by the horizon of its own “liminality”, as one might paradoxically put it, but is moreover modified by two, as it were external, correcting variables. First, there is the text spoken by the voice-over, a montage of quotes from the aforementioned book by Esther Leslie. The fact that these passages are spoken by an AI simulation of US beat poet Kenneth Patchen’s1 voice only reinforces the impression that what we are witnessing here is a dance in which life and death are locked in tight embrace. The voice, whose owner died in 1972, is brought back to artificial life with the help of with the help of the program “LOVO” and then fed fragments of a text from a completely different sphere of discourse (Leslie’s cross-disciplinary study was published in 2016 by the London based publisher Reaktion books). These text fragments are juxtaposed with imagery generated by yet another radically different method. All this imbues the verbal component of the film with a crystalline fluidity, transposing as it does to linguistic utterances the process by which existing materials are run through potentially endless permutations and put into new contexts. The use of the voice-over may initially trick the viewer into thinking that this is an instructional film, an impression that quickly vanishes, however, once the genesis of the spoken text (the voice of a dead man, digitally re-animated) is taken into account. As with the magnet needed to set the inert drops of ferro-fluid in motion and enable them to perform their dance of mutability and petrification, so the voice is being manipulated in a way that, in the final analysis, makes it quite impossible to say whether we are listening to a dead person speaking from the grave or rather to a voice that is very much alive and facing its own finitude. 

    This voice-over technique is combined with another auditory component that strongly impacts on the way we perceive the film. Composed by Stefan Németh, the score of A Seed Is Planted hews close to the imagery while simultaneously remaining totally zonomous in terms of sound design. The score functions less as an acoustic illustration of what is being shown than as a switchboard, the swelling and ebbing drones of the sound track joining together, as it were, the imagery and the text. The mostly flat, occasionally rhythmic soundscape, to a certain extent, mirrors the metamorphic permutations of the ferro-fluids. At first, it provides a rather calm and pensive ambience for the text, but then spare string sounds coming from a guitar begin to soar, followed by whole chords which are then in turn distorted and run through various echo chambers. Here, too, a rather unruly “form of life” is taking shape, pointing to a sphere beyond itself without losing itself in a bad infinity. Music, voice-over and imagery are closely intertwined, responsible in equal parts for the strange, non-organic life emanating from the work. 

    How incredibly versatile this material fluidity (or should we rather speak of an ‘un-dead’ materiality?) actually is can be gleaned from the booklet that accompanies the film and in which, as he does for all of his films, Eldarb has gathered together a variety of source materials that are much more than mere references. For A Seed Is Planted, these include commercials for Shell and Chanel, visualizations of cell divisions done for medical purposes, examples of ‘luminist’ painting, and Nam June Paik’s magnetic experiments with TV images – all precursors of sorts, where the same paradoxical dynamics that are at work in Eldarb’s film have been utilized before in one way or another.

    With his previous film Turbulence In A Channel (2023), Eldarb had already been aiming for a similarly broad spectrum of resonances. The starting point was his interest in the flow analyses undertaken more than a hundred years ago by German physicist and zoologist Friedrich Ahlborn, whose seminal studies of various phenomena ranging from bird flight to the motion of waves provided valuable insights into aero- and hydrodynamic laws. As demonstrated in the booklet to the film, Eldarb combines2. Ahlborn’s photo-optically recorded experiments both with more recent studies of flow dynamics and with historical documents such as Thomas Alva Edison’s kinetoscopic recording of a sneezing reflex from 1894. Images of these are integrated into the setting by way of reflections projected onto the surface of the liquid. A diagram featured in the booklet shows how this is done: A tub filled with ink and silver pigment and fitted out with barriers of various kinds, is being manipulated by swinging and swaying it back and forth. On a monitor placed at an angle over the tub, footage of flowing processes is shown, which in turn is projected onto the surface of the liquid in the tub. Finally, mounted above the set-up, there is a camera recording the process. 

    Filmed in time lapse, it is an almost psychedelic drama which emerges from this experimental setting, with the color imagery supplied by the monitor contributing various iridescent effects. The borders of the tub as well as its built-in obstacles partially delimitate and restrict the profusion of shapes by “channeling” them – another key word in this context. The “channel” explored here, both visually and dynamically, can be interpreted in a number of different ways: as a body of water featuring barriers; as a conduit in which a certain flow is generated and stabilized; as a media dispositive modulating certain signals; as a mediator between different codes of communication, where one can never be sure if the codes of sender and receiver are even remotely compatible; and, finally, as the confluence of various discursive ingredients that may, as suggested by the title of the film, lead to disturbance, turbulence and irregularities.

    Here, once again, the wide range of possible interpretations is held together by the sound element. To achieve this, the score by musician Florian Schmeiser uses sounds that evoke the rushing, roaring, surging and breaking of waves, interspersed with occasional dramatic highpoints when, for example, we hear something spiraling upward or chafing against a wall. If turbulence, in its literal sense, is usually associated with dysfunctionality and murkiness3, then the film, united by the cleverly placed sound fragments, sets out to demonstrate clarity of a higher order, as though it were possible to use disturbance, imbalance and murkiness in order to achieve insights (or even some kind of psychedelic enlightenment?) on another level of reality. This is one more instance, then, of limitation and transgression being fused together in a way that is both paradoxical and expressive: With the ebb and flow as well as the cross-currents constantly giving rise to ever new patterns, the uncontainable vitality of all things liquid is demonstrated in an almost exemplary manner.

    A similar strain of non-organic life is also featured in the film Thinner Than Two Ten-Thousandths Of A Millimeter (2020). While both the experimental setting and the arrangement of the lighting bear some resemblance to Turbulence in a Channel, the horizontal orientation seen in Turbulence has been transposed into the vertical here. A metal frame placed before a black background is repeatedly coated with a soapy liquid. Diagonally opposite to this, a monitor is mounted on which different footage relating to soap suds, soap bubbles and all things soap is being run, which in turn is reflected by the metal-frame soap-screen; finally, at an even steeper angle, there is the camera, which, from a vantage point outside the setting, records the short-lived drama of the reflections on the monitor (cf. the diagram featured in the booklet to the film). The experiments conducted by architect Frei Otto with soapy liquids in the 1960s and documented in his Modeling with Soap Films4, were a major source of inspiration. Frei Otto, among whose credits is the famous roof of the Olympiastadion in Munich, was interested in exploring “self-generating processes”, processes, that is, which arise spontaneously in living and non-living nature and which helped him develop his own decidedly ecological approach to building. 

    Mixed into the bubbly, iridescent projections of Thinner Than Two Ten-Thousandths Of A Millimeter are images from Edouard Manet, Man Ray and Buckminster Fuller that explore the phenomenon of soap bubbles with painterly, photographic and cinematographic means, respectively. Images of puddles, concrete walls or color palettes, which are being reflected on the soap screen, further underline the metamorphic ambience of the overall set-up, which is congenially complemented by the amorphous, suspenseful soundscape designed by Florian Schmeiser. The borders separating the different aggregate states of matter – solid, liquid, gaseous – are constantly being crossed, both intentionally and as the result of a self-regulating process. Despite all of the constructive restrictions in place, there is a process of autopoesis at work here that manifests itself in the endless succession of newly born shapes, the superimposition of various forms, and the interferences of different colors that sometimes produce iridescent rainbow effects which are gone almost the moment they have appeared. The finite infinity expressed here is given shape by a newly invented medium. 

    For his piece Noon Forever (2018), Eldarb has come up with a strikingly inventive configuration of media. While the basic set-up is not unlike that of his later films, the constructional principles underlying this piece are of an even higher order of complexity. On a rotating disc a monitor is mounted, on which footage from what has survived of Peter Berg and Kelly Hart’s 1968 movie Nowsreal 5 is run. The rotating images, which show actions of the “diggers”, a well-known

San Francisco-based counter culture group who activated for free housing and food banks, are reflected in two glass plates leaning at an angle against a black wall functioning as backdrop. The camera, positioned to the side and above, records the reflections of the images, which seem to emerge from a dark void, then briefly to expand, only to vanish back into the darkness. Color patterns and geometric abstractions are also fed into the rotating projection setting and mixed in with the historical footage of the diggers. The result is a constantly changing, analogously morphing tableau composed of figurative and abstract double images (double because of the two plates of glass.) 

    This hybrid visual form, whose idiosyncracy arises from the specific construction of the filming apparatus, is further complicated by the inclusion of extremely enlarged dot matrices that keep expanding and contracting. While the resulting visual circuitry is grounded to some extent by the original sound of the diggers’ movies, the historicity of these movies (1968, counter-culture, hippies, etc.) is simultaneously slyly subverted by the cyclical format of the imagery. The work radiates a dynamic vitality suggestive of a form of life arising from (but not reducible to) the experimental setting. Like a merry-go-round, this endlessly rotating procession of images defies the linearity of media and history, establishing instead its own sense of a time that knows neither directedness nor transience. In this way, Noon Forever, like all of Eldarb’s films, explores the dialectics of limits and the potentially infinite variety contained by them. In their singular manner, these films seem to hold out the promise that it might be just possible to evade or outwit the dichotomy of life and death – if only through art.

 

 

1. The original voice can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVJVMcJ8vR0 bzw. https://www.youtube.com

playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kmkq4RdrqAvf7qMCXK8jUMCBayaxAyC_g

2. See also, Inge Hinterwaldner, Model building with wind and water: Friedrich Ahlborn’s photo-optical flow analysis, in: Studies in History

and Philosophy of Science 49 (2015), S. 1–17.

3. Cf. the contributions in Mathias Denecke, Holger Kuhn, Milan Stürmer (eds.), Liquidity, Flows, Circulation. The Cultural Logic of

Environmentalization. Zurich 2022, especially Esther Leslie, In Turbid Environments, pp. 165-179.

4. See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IW7o25NmeA

5. See also https://archive.org/details/Nowsreal