The Schauraum acts as receptacle for the fragmented screen that brings together the projected images as seen from a single point. In this setting Trickptych, a cel- and papercutting animation, creates new combinations through the multiple projections which become superimposed around room corners and across the implanted screens, inscribing the film into space and thus dissolving it.


Sabine Flach in: Renate Kordon Trickfilme | Animated Films...

At the Cave Exit of the Digital.
Reflections on the Work of Renate Kordon

It is the media, digital or analogical – in any case, techno- logical – that, according to Friedrich Kittler, determine our position; whether we encounter the magical fragmentation of optical perception presented by film, electronic streaming between two poles of opposite charge, the recording and editing of sounds and noise, or, finally, the coding of information according to its most basic components “on/off”: there seems to be no outside to the given totality. The progression of media discretion has presented a development from the 24 images per second evoking motion in film to the digital pace of three billion operations in a single second as found in the most recent computer generation (something so removed from human perception that an underneath can now only be spoken of meta- phorically). In spite of this, however, we can observe that the line’s flow, the drawing and its transformation resulting from animated film, and the animation of the figurative seem to allude to “something else”, a quality that transcends. The artist Renate Kordon has for a long time worked at the intersection of artistic and media-based expressive forms. In this respect, the spectrum of her work ranges from the drawing to animated trick films to large-scale architectural works integrated into the landscape such as Windspiel Spielfeld (1989/91) or Jahreszeiten­ sonnenuhr [Sundial of the Seasons] in Schottwien am Semmering (2009).

Renate Kordon’s animated films and installations are situated in the fourfold of electrical light and shadow, white cube and analogue user surface. The artist makes use of the media she employs in a special, meta-reflexive way by exposing graphic constants such as the line or simple forms like square or contour to the changing trans- formations of film, digital animation or the sculptural realisation in space. In distinction from classical animation, as part of which, as in film, the singular image disappears in the perception of simulated motion, in Renate Kordon’s work the singular motifs and elements retain a marked independent existence.
Given that the continuous transformations remain related to the line as foundational element and hence refuse the identification technologically linked to film’s imaginary, the animated works constitute inspiring examples of the possibility of inscribing non-imaginary perceptions into the imaginary medium of film. The imaginary mirror that Jacques Lacan discovers in photography and film is replaced by a window in which a cosmos becomes apparent. In this respect, the spectrum ranges from the transformation of figurative ciphers which become detached from the line as in a dream world (which, according to Freud is nothing more than a rebus, a picture puzzle), which is the case in Passepartout from 1983, a work which continually allows for new spaces and scenes to emerge from the drawing table, the white square, to cosmic visions as in Echo from 1988, in which, almost resembling the Medieval mystery play, the human figure is positioned as a reference point stood in contact with star formation, comet paths and cosmic order. The fact that the tellurian material of clay was used for this animation adds an even more substantial aspect to the work, initially hidden from sight. Thus Renate Kordon re-situates the “terminus technicus” animation in its original context of signification: the animation as the enlivening of the technological medium.

In another work, the installation Trickptychon [Trickptych] from 1987, Kordon undertakes a reflection of the film apparatus as such; the complicated alternating “illumination” of different film projectors renders these central to the installation. Without any imaginary projection, the “machine’s unconscious” (Henning Schmidgen) appears in the technology of imaging. In the thick network of lighting effects, figuration, equipment sounds and space, the projectors as such emerge as the material of art.
To take up Luhmann’s formulation, we may already be at the cave exit of the digital, something which renders such transcending on the part of the analogue even more haunting. The aspect of time as involved in all recording or editing forms a further constant of Renate Kordon’s artistic work. By means of the multi-fold effects her animations and sculptures trigger, she succeeds in “de-temporalizing” ostensibly “real” processes and consequently in moulding a new perceptual level. The animation/installation becomes the medium of a scenario expanded into the spatio-temporal as “filmic environments / expanded movies” (Renate Kordon) emerge.

Similar observations may be made in relation to other works by Kordon. The line as generator – and the history of science now also recognizes it as such, i.e., as one of the foundations of geometry and hence of a new post-digital materiality and constructivity – is integrated into Kordon’s work in multiple ways. That this renders a genuinely drawing-based approach the starting point of form-giving is emphatically demonstrated by Tanzplätze für Ariadne [Where Ariadne Dances] from 2016, a multi-media presentation/publication in which Ariadne’s thread threads together the spatial design. The implied relation to the myth of the labyrinth is reminiscent of the figurative qualities of space, qualities which can, indeed, appear as threatening aspects of architecture, as is the case in the story of the Minotaur or in Stanley Kubrick’s film Shining. “The line as decision”, as Renate Kordon puts it.
The artist herself has also introduced the term of dismantling dimensions. Against the backdrop of her work, this might refer to tracing the apparent multi-dimensionality of the media presentation to the creative constructivity of the white surface as generator – in the double sense of dismantling as a referring back to and uncovering of. >>>