Katabasis

Slides and 35mm to digital, 15:40, 24fps, 4K, color and black & white, 5.1 sound

In a cave situated between the ridges of the fingerprints of a human being, a primordial encounter with matter, light and sound unfolds. The Katabasis, the western mythological descent to the underworld, is here stripped of its mythical connotations to reveal only its narrative function, the confrontation with the past and with what has been lost.

Katabasis is an abstract film that merges analog, camera-less techniques and digital ones such as algorithmic editing. The imagery was created entirely from hand-painted 35mm slides and film exposed to electricity via a Tesla coil—an instrument invented by Nikola Tesla to generate artificial lightning arcs. These same images were then fed into a self-developed algorithm that re-arranges them in real-time according to certain prescribed parameters but without an entirely predictable order, resulting in an editing process that lingers on the border of chaos and control. Echoing the film’s structure and closely adhering to it, the soundtrack was composed from recordings of electromagnetic fields produced by household objects and gongs played by hands, mallets or activated through acoustic feedback alone—without any physical touch involved.