Q&A

Is it possible to reverse the course of time? Part documentary, part science fiction, Caspar Stracke’s neo-psychedelic film essay investigates the mystery of time by featuring an eclectic group of philosophers, scientists, and cultural producers whose work relates to time reversal defined as either a methodology or a speculative concept: Manuel DeLanda, Aubrey de Grey, Diedrich Diederichsen, Ivan Ladislav Galeta, Narcisa Hirsch, Michio Kaku, Sarah Rudner, and Michael West. Once moving images and sounds are being played backwards, they reveal the century-old medium of cinema to be the ultimate time machine. Before asking what it would look like if life were to run backwards, Stracke’s redux/time/OUT OF JOINT (US/DE 2015/16, 59′) explores the question what makes time tick through a recourse to Heideggerian and Deleuzian concepts of time and space. Discussing the emergence of an entire industry of so-called age reversal, gerontology, cryonics, and life extension, the film probes the framework of the human condition itself and its incongruous and programmatic fate: life, after all, is finite, is marked by death.

Caspar Stracke is an artist, filmmaker, and curator living and working in New York City and Helsinki. His interdisciplinary work focuses on socio-political and aesthetic potentialities in architecture, urbanism, media archaeology, and – most self-referentially – cinema itself, its poetics, ephemeralities, and time-based mechanisms. His films, videos, and installation works have been shown at exhibitions and festivals throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. In 1999 he completed his first feature-length film CIRCLE’S SHORT CIRCUIT, which toured throughout the US and Europe and was selected for the exhibition “American Century Part II” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He taught as professor for Contemporary Art and Moving Image at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki from 2012 to 2017.

After thirty years teaching at the University of California Laurence A. Rickels was professor in art and theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe as successor to Klaus Theweleit. In spring semester 2018 he holds the Eberhard Berent Goethe Chair at New York University. He is also the Sigmund Freud Professor of Media and Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland. Rickels is the author of Aberrations of Mourning (1988), The Case of California (1991, reprint 2001), Nazi Psychoanalysis (2002), The Vampire Lectures (1999), The Devil Notebooks (2008), Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema (2008), I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick (2010), SPECTRE (2013), Germany: A Science Fiction (2015), and The Psycho Records (2016).