Mare Imbrium

Some time ago I was able to take a photograph that was as fascinating as it was ordinary: the reflection of the full moon on the surface of the sea. The allure of this double reflection of sunlight, from the moon over the surface of the water, brought me to the third level of reflection – the play of light on the cinema screen.  

Mare Imbrium forms a cinematic genesis, generated from the preconditions of seeing. Everything begins with particles of light, elementary particles from reflections of a body on a moving subsurface. The shimmering, dancing particles are captured in one figure, then in two others in the midst of black, with an increasing crackling orchestrating the rhythm. These constructed extracts of a reality made of a body and light transform into a kind of electro-magnetic field, into an asemantic noise. A roaring rainfall and foaming spray, a sea of rain (the German name for Mare Imbrium, the name given to one of those dark places on the moon) emerges associatively from the visual swarm. Thus begins a journey through space and time using the simplest means. In this new, post- or meta-physical state, the shape of the particles takes on a life of its own, becomes more abstract, or forms itself into a system of signs, a code; it is as if letters are flying through space, a new, video-graphic alphabet. The experimental demiurge, who brings forth this flurry of forms in a foreign script, now appeals to the power of his machine to realize the proto-aesthetic, non-material obstinacy of the image and its movements in a creaturely delirium. A kind of electronic drip painting. A chaosmos of light and supernatural bodies. And analogies are created. Suddenly the analog moon becomes visible, appearing above an analog eye, pupil and moon unite, a new way of seeing. In the final phase, a kind of skin, a porous membrane – the photochemical layer of a film strip destroyed by water – is laid over the moon, its organic being oscillating with the flux of the vibrating New Matter. And then the particles shimmer one last time, disappearing into nothingness. A powerful, creative visual act. (Marc Ries, with passages in italics by Siegfried A. Fruhauf)