Nik Thoenen

The experimental short negotiates the conventions of the invisible camera. In a bare room without windows or doors, someone puts up a futile against the steady gaze of a bodiless camera. The camera evades the protagonist´s physical attacks by changing positions by means and hard cuts.

The unpretentiousness of this video’s title equals the simplicity of its underlying structure. Nik Thoenen, a graphic artist by trade, constructed an installation consisting of fluorescent tubes mounted in a horizontal row especially for this video, his first. The arrangement of tubes was then “scanned“ with a mounted Super-8 film camera.

The eye operates with such amazing precision that individual film frames can be read. Nevertheless, when the content in their sequence becomes too different, the perception of the actually projected content is stretched to its limits. Shown in individual frames, the alphabet is something we can only assume while placing trust in its reproduction. The 25 frames per second are rendered a visual challenge. Additionally, as the spoken alphabet is condensed into one second, it loses its contours. The story, however, still remains complete; it is interpreted, which makes for the beauty of this film: Not everything needs to be perceived or shown, we fill in the missing parts through interpretation in our heads.