When a VHS copy of Metropolen des Leichtsinns (2000) by Thomas Draschan and Ulrich Wiesner fell into my hands around the time I was finishing high school in my hometown of Gmunden, I couldn’t get it out of my head for a long time. I was immediately fascinated by the abstraction of so-called avant-garde films, by their exploration of the most fundamental cinematic building blocks, their power of association in contrast to the function and effect of narrative cinema. Something condensed in these “experimental” films in a way I never saw in “normal” movies or on TV—with the exception, perhaps, of the legendary Humanic ads, which aired well into the 1990s, like Edgar Honetschläger’s HCN Miau (1996). When several years later I heard Peter Kubelka formulate the thought during an event at the Austrian Film Museum that the sun rises and sets twelve times per second in his film Arnulf Rainer (1960), I was completely inspired. I only knew this feeling from music and poetry, although in my younger years I never or only rarely got into poetry in the classical sense, but I listened to a lot of rap instead. To find unexpected, associative, often abstract metaphors: that’s an essential part of rap culture, as is the use of language as material. And on top of it, I felt that I could make this kind of film too; I needed neither a big budget nor a huge crew. I also liked the scene’s “underground attitude,” repudiating the market and declaring insufficiencies a strength. I think that many of the most exciting artistic works were created out of this attitude.

In any case, this is how my first film, Preserving Cultural Traditions in a Period of Instability, was created, which I made together with Thomas Draschan under the name Fordbrothers and which I consider one of my, of our, best and lasting efforts, despite its short running time of three minutes. Thomas, who is one generation older than me and whose films were already celebrated at international festivals at the time, was a very generous mentor and ally. The defective digital found footage from which we created Preserving Cultural Traditions in a Period of Instability exposes the inner life of the kind of digital moving image that, due to its small data volume, today is omnipresent in the World Wide Web and beyond. The motion vectors of the compression algorithm, which doesn’t access individual images but entire sequences of images and tries to compress them in a way that saves storage space, go haywire and develop a kind of magical poetry and beauty that is hard to ignore.

The film documents, if you will, the creation myth as well as the fragility of digital moving images, which is where they distinguish themselves from their analog counterparts. The negative stance Stan Brakhage takes in the voiceover in terms of working with computers and the internet is both illustrated and refuted by the images in their collapse, because the algorithm’s failure unexpectedly creates something totally new and no less valuable. When we look at it this way, our film is also an homage to volatility, to the impermanence of the moment, to loss of control as an (artistic) opportunity. I like this film because of the humorous inconsistencies the interplay of images and Brakhage’s voiceover creates. I believe that working with unpredictability and trying (in vain) to get it under control, along with the (futile) struggle against the fleeting moment, are the basic themes of my documentary work.