Film Talk 2021: Markus Maicher in conversation with Laura Bianco
A talk with Markus Maicher, director of '10 megabytes of memory' and "Into the Wild'
SYNOPSES
10 megabytes of memory
What is the meaning of "memory" in the digital age? For humans memory consists of subjective images of past events, for computers memory refers to an objective capacity to store information. The film compresses 10 human years in 10 megabytes of binary information and employs an aesthetics of the small file format, a counter strategy against the ever increasing resolution, bitrate and cost of digital images. The file was compressed and assembled with open-source software ffmpeg, the original Video8 tapes were left unedited.
Into the Wild
Images, harvested on a farm in Mount Forest, Canada, captured with a hand-cranked Bolex, on film material that is made for sound only. Processed in buckets, in shimmering red light down by the old stables. A glimpse through the cracks, somebody is walking in the meadow, trees trembling in the wind, flowers, grass. A world that only film can see, a material flow emerging from the coupling of camera, celluloid, silver salts, chemicals, light particles and the hand of the filmmaker. The film was entirely processed by hand and chemically treated: overexposed images were brought back to life with bleach, other images were solarized and reversed.
BIOGRAPHY
Markus Maicher, 1984, is an experimental filmmaker, projectionist at the Austrian Filmmuseum, part of the artist-run film lab filmkoop wien, PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts and teaches film as artistic research at the TU Vienna. He studied Sociology, Urban Studies, Psychoanalytic Cultural Studies, Film Studies and Experimental Film at the Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film. His film works engage with the cinematographic dispositiv and the poetry of the physical qualities of film itself. His films have been shown at festivals such as Vienna Shorts Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Experiments in Cinema, Analogica, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Fracto, RPM Festival and at the Austrian Filmmuseum, Stadtkino and Metro Kinokulturhaus.