The Vanishing Operator

The video is composed of many looped film fragments from early non-fiction films (ca. 1895–1935), mainly industrial films related to coal or oil, microscopic images showing blood-cells and other micro-organisms and sequences with volcanic activity filmed during Dutch colonial expeditions. 

The installation contains two slide projectors that are synchronized with different rhythms. On one projector there are reproductions of deteriorated film-rolls from the film archive, that have solidified or pulverized and have become unwatchable and unpreservable. The other projector shows a text written by the artist describing scenes that she encountered during her archival research and which represent the beginning of a systematic violence towards all kind of bodies and an atomization that marks the beginning of modernity. 

The video is composed of imagery used by Industry 4.0 companies (robotics, intelligent factories, automatisation) for promotion purposes. The sequence of images and the accompanying voice narrating near death experiences create a seamless floating limbo and technological distopy. 

The 3 lightboxes show 3 sequential moments from the film Vom früheren und heutigen Rechnungswesen eines Werkes (1928), as seen on a VHS TV screen in the Krupp archives media room in Essen. We see an engineer disappear behind a Hollerith machine, which as the "first tabulating machine in Germany automatized book keeping and which was also used during the Holocaust. That disappearing trick that the engineer performs is unusual for a nonfiction film. It belongs to the realm of early magic fiction and marks a moment where invisible processes of automatision call for the use of magic in industrial films. 

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