As I described at the outset of our conversation, it was my encounter with an avant-garde film, and consequently with the genre, that awakened my deeper interest in film and the moving image. The three works that stand in the tradition of structural film—Preserving Cultural Traditions in a Period of Instability, Keynote, and In, Over & Out—the first two of which I made with Thomas Draschan under the moniker “Fordbrothers,” are very playful and anything but rigid, but still no less serious, I think. While the title Preserving Cultural Traditions in a Period of Instability was meant ironically, there is a seriousness to the film, an ambiguity, as is often the case with humorous works. In Keynote we reworked a keynote speech from Apple Inc. we streamed online into a sort of structural slapstick film. In this case we were also deeply interested in working with language, because we rearranged the found sound material into a new composition. Back then, Silicon Valley proclaimed the coming of a Digital Wonderland, but when that proclamation reached the other end of the line at Grüngasse in Vienna’s fifth district, all that was left of it were ruins and twitching, contorted, melted human beings, a collapsing world of pixels populated by zombielike figures. Like a broken promise or an evil, morbid premonition that this Promised Land also had its dark sides—with Steve Jobs as the sorcerer’s apprentice who conjured the spirits, probably during one of his LSD trips, which he is said to have classified as one of the three most important experiences of his life. Hearing myself describe Keynote like this, I now realize that this big promise that was doomed to fail from the get-go reappears in Movements of a Nearby Mountain.

In, Over & Out is also not overly rigid—in the sense that it’s actually a digital video that can only exist in this very form. Strictly speaking, there is no possibility to reconcile all these different formats, unless they are digitized and what’s actually digital is sold under the guise of being analog. I see a remarkable analogy between the technological developments from the analog to the digital image and the social developments toward today’s living and working realities. The Lumières put their workers on celluloid. In this moving-image process the single frame constitutes the smallest unit; to turn it into even smaller units, you would have to physically destroy it. (Peter Tscherkassky did this, metaphorically, in his Motion Picture [La Sortie des Ouvriers de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon] from 1984.) The Lumières’ workers are rendered as a collective in these images, a collective whose integrity, in my opinion, is a basic prerequisite for solidarity. The same year the Lumières made La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon (1895) saw the founding of the first French federation of trade unions. In contrast, the smallest unit of the digital moving image is not the single frame but the single pixel, which is why each individual frame can be split into a vast number of small particles, and therefore each frame, each image, is missing its integrity or is only loaned integrity by an algorithm. The workers of the digital precariat no longer enter and exit the factory together at the beginning or end of their shift but individually, autonomously, so to speak. Much like the analog film frame as the predominant image recording technology was replaced by a multitude of pixels, the organization of society has also become more fragmented and the social “strata” have come to show signs of dissolution. The basic requirement for solidarity has fallen by the wayside; from now on it’s every man or woman for him- or herself, dog-eat-dog. Self-determination and self-fulfillment have long lost their tone of a benevolent invitation and are now full-fledged neoliberal imperatives.

What my documentaries and experimental works share in common is above all a certain economy in the work: the claim to make films with comparatively limited means and a small team and, in exchange, with maximum control during the production process—a claim I think I have learned to implement more and more with each film.

If by turning to the inner workings you mean an exploration of the functions or the materiality of the media themselves, then yes, you are right, it’s there. But it’s also there in the documentaries, at least in And There We Are, in the Middle and in Movements of a Nearby Mountain, though with different intentions, not with regard to individual frames or pixels but in terms of possible narrative forms or forms of associative storytelling. There isn’t this dichotomy of interior and exterior view/gaze in my movies, at least not in their pure form but perhaps as partly larger, partly smaller intersectional sets. Such a clear dichotomy is not what I am aiming for.

In, Over & Out is a structural film because of the serial twelve-camera setup and the constant repetitions and variations of the same process; you could also read it as only that. The textures and materials of the various formats and the rattling of the heterogeneous moving images—all that seems as if the whole thing could come apart at any moment, there’s a very sensuous dimension to it, underscored by the driving rhythm of the soundtrack. In the movie theater, this is a very physical experience. You could also approach this film with the concept of bullet time, an effect we all know in its extremely slick form from Hollywood movies, as perfect and real as possible at the service of a cinema of illusion. We tinkered with all kinds of available cameras to create it in In, Over & Out, which accordingly resulted in a bumpy film. I take great joy in imperfection.

There is a short text at the end that gives the shooting location, delineates the historical cornerstones of the building, whose new building or superstructure was designed by Bernard Tschumi, by the way, who aspired to create an absolute architectural heterogeneity with this project—and making heterogeneity absolute, in my view, is one of those, well, let’s say, somewhat-too-grand gestures. Tschumi on several occasions pointed out that the building was inspired by prison architecture in order to boost the concentration of the artists working in it. You could feel that in there. What became very clear to me during those two years was how difficult it is to form communities of mutual solidarity in times of cognitive capitalism and immaterial work, precisely because people no longer work together under one roof. Tschumi put a huge roof over the building’s whole heterogeneity, with its old fabric, new structures, and various construction materials, thus summarizing the building. This works pretty well in architecture but can’t be transferred to the living realities of the people working in it. It would require a virtual, mobile roof, of which everyone had a part in his or her pocket to use whenever he or she worked on a project anywhere in this world or at home.