Kurt Ralske, Faceness

Kurt Ralske uses digital distortions to question the inner foundations of our process of visual perception and historical memory. In an interview on the occasion of Rediscovering German Futurist Cinema—a live audio-visual performance and lecture/demonstration at Roulette’s Manhattan location in 2011—he detailed the inspiration behind his project, noting a couple of references that shed light on the works in the exhibition.

The first is a core idea in Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1896): we can only be truly present if we descend into the past. The second stems from Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project (1927-40): “It is not that the past casts its light on the present, or the present casts its light on the past: rather an image is that in which the Then and the Now come into a constellation like a flash of lightning.”

Ralske’s fluid black-and-white video works have a muted, lightning-like allure, reminiscent of the natural phenomenon. Beginning in the 1980s and lasting until the start of the new millennium, he had a career in music. He played guitar with musicians of New York’s vibrant free jazz and No Wave scenes. In 1987, he started Ultra Vivid Scene, an alternative rock band that released three albums and toured in the US, the UK and in Europe.

Later he composed film scores and worked as a record producer. Afterwards, his focus shifted to audio-visual performance and art in general, an evolution rooted in his desire to improvise. As a musician, he began using computers to see if they could simplify things. He developed methods to work with audio files and discovered that you could apply them to any type of data. He’s explored the possibilities of the (moving) image with self-written software ever since.

In the past, he made video art by analysing, decomposing and recomposing film classics, such as Yasujirô Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and James Cameron’s Avatar (2009). In recent years, he’s taken an interest in the human face.

In order to create the haunting works exhibited in the darkened, temple-like gallery space (titled Faceness 01 Egypt-New York, Faceness 02 Egypt-London and Faceness 03 Egypt-Paris, all from 2015), he shot raw source video images in three of the largest ancient Egyptian collections in the world: the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris.

Next, he programmed his computer to scan through hours of video, looking for the faces. He then combined thousands of them together—120,000 per second—forming never-before-seen hybrids, unrecognisable new chimeras both related and unrelated to the original images.

The faces endlessly morph in a seamless flow. They transform from old to young, female to male, regal to common, ancient to seemingly contemporary. Each of us identifies our individuality in our face. Yet, all faces are alike in their essential proportions. It’s that “faceness” that connects us to the experience of being human, unbounded by time and difference.

For Ralske, the face-as-information is an opportunity for inquiry into the nature of the individual and the collective. The works in Faceness constantly shift between the specific and the universal, the temporal and the eternal.

The two-channel video work, The NonFace (2015), is both a remnant and complement from the other exhibition works, an amalgam of image data that bordered on the areas detected by the computer. As the title suggest, it’s the absence of “faceness”; a void that’s represented by an empty space between the two screens, a space that not coincidentally measured the average width of a human head. Visitors could plunge headfirst into this void, take a look in this mirror of history and humanity, and feel the hints of “faceness” and the innumerable sculptures that brim around them.