Harun Farocki, Parallel III and IV

Bar Laika is very pleased to present Harun Farocki’s Parallel, screening parts I and II on Thursday, March 7, 9pm and parts III and IV on Thursday, April 4, 9pm.

Farocki’s four-part cycle Parallel deals with the image genre of computer animation. The series focuses on the construction, visual landscape, and inherent rules of computer-animated worlds.

“Computer animations are currently becoming a general model, surpassing film. In films, there is the wind that blows and the wind that is produced by a wind machine. Computer images do not have two kinds of wind.”

—Harun Farocki

Parallel III (7:21 minutes, 2014) seeks out the backdrops of game worlds and the nature of their digital objects. It reveals digital worlds which take the form of discs floating in the universe—reminiscent of pre-Hellenistic conceptions of the universe. The animated worlds appear as one-sided theater stages, flat backdrops revealed only by the movements of an omniscient camera. The objects in the worlds often do not react to “natural forces.” Each of their properties must be separately constructed and assigned to them.

Parallel IV (11:20 minutes, 2014) explores the actions of the heroes and protagonists of the video game world. These heroes have no parents or teachers; they must test their relationships with others and determine, of their own accord, the rules to follow. Farocki notes these characters are “homunculi, anthropomorphist beings, created by humans. Whoever plays with them has a share in the creator’s pride.”

Harun Farocki (1944–2014) was born in German annexed Czechoslovakia. From1966 to 1968 he attended the Deutsche Film- undFernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB). In addition to teaching posts inBerlin, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Manila, Munich and Stuttgart, hewas a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Farocki made close to 120 films, including feature films, essayfilms, and documentaries. He worked in collaboration with otherfilmmakers as a scriptwriter, actor, and producer. In 1976 hestaged Heiner Müller’s plays The Battle and Tractor together withHanns Zischler in Basel, Switzerland.
He wrote for numerous publications, and from 1974 to 1984 hewas editor and author of the magazine Filmkritik (München). Hiswork has been shown in many national and internationalexhibitions and installations in galleries and museums.

For more information, contact laika@e-flux.com.