(Originally published in Revista Multiplot, n. 23, spring of 2024)

When I speak of time, it’s not yet

When I speak of a place, it has disappeared

When I speak of a man, he’s already dead

When I speak of a time, it already is no more

Raymond Queneau

We are fascinated by the phantasm of an integral reality, by the alpha and

omega of digital programming. The real is leitmotif and obsession of all discourses.

But are we not far less fascinated by the real than by its vanishing,

its ineluctable disappearance?

Jean Baudrillard

One of the great questions that has plagued art in general since its birth and has trespassed generations of painters, theorists, and even spectators is the issue of the plausibility of the image. Whether in movements like Suprematism or Cubism in the visual arts, in experimental cinema, or in concrete poetry, the need for a representation of the world as it is, remains a door ajar—a mystery without solution. After all, everything depends on the eye of the beholder and how we see. The world, in general, is composed of great visual mysteries, and it is up to us to interpret them.

There are those who confront these peculiarities with the idiosyncrasies between the dualities of the world; real and imaginary, natural and artificial, real and virtual. These questions have gained significant traction in contemporary cinema, especially with the advent of digital technology as a primary source of filmmaking. We have moved from the awe of capturing the movement of leaves in the background of Le Répas du Bébe by the Lumière brothers in 1895 to the wonder of recreating the movement of leaves and landscapes in video games with an exacerbated degree of realism. At the border between the real and the machinic stands Harun Farocki, a German filmmaker who poses himself before the machines to bring the camera into the scene, acting as a kind of anonymous figure within a mechanical structure—a cog in a machine.

In Parallel I-IV (2012–2014), there is a cycle of films focused on constructing a simulacrum of the real world within virtual environments such as video games and graphic representations. It is no surprise that the collision between man, machine, and the world of things is a recurring theme in much of Farocki’s work. However, the questioning of the representation of the natural world as a simulacrum and the interaction between simulacrum/reality and the spectator is a formula that recurs in other installations, particularly in his later works (such as Serious Games and Eye/Machine).¹

In Parallel I-IV, the historiography presented ranges from the earliest forms of animation to the latest advancements in video games, where gameplay and interaction with space become central questions of the cinematic apparatus. Both the Lumière brothers and Farocki strive for the same goal: to portray the world. However, the latter’s intent is to question whether, in the symbolic realism of nature constructed by games, a tree truly represents a tree, despite not being made of organic matter.

Ultimately, in the voice of Antje Ehmann, amidst computational landscapes, the emulation of the world through animation becomes the norm, offering the possibility of transcending cinema as a depiction of reality. Yet, she reminds us: “In films, there are winds that blow, and winds produced by a fan. In animated worlds, the wind blows in only one direction.” How can a constructed world be considered natural? At the same time, how can we deny that it is, in fact, a world?

What reigns Parallel I-IV is the notion that the natural representation of the world through cinema and the virtualization of nature and landscapes is a kind of return to the initial Renaissance impulse – where Technique and Science were at the service of Art. This may seem controversial; however, in a world where the water is always crystal clear and the trees are placed in coordinates and everything, absolutely everything is made of dots, commas, dashes and Cartesian coordinates, it may not seem so absurd. After all, the flattened plane and the nothingness beyond the surface of things is a pre-Hellenic notion of the world. 

Either way, this kind of representational mystery of the world and nature, the water made of algorithms, an infinitely finite flat horizon, a bottomless and purposeless sea provokes awe. How many times, after seeing an image of a videogame or an emulation, the words ‘this is more real than the reality itself’ come out of our mouths? 

Is it, though? If this is the real world, does it cease to exist when I’m not seeing? Where does this world end? And this is the main question of Parallel: The virtual nature is made of emptiness and non-existing perspectives. The world that is seen may appear to be, but it is not; the idea of infinity and what lies beyond the reach shows that maybe it’s not the movement of the leaves in the background of the frame that mattered in the emulations of the world, but rather, its disappearance. We want to know what’s beyond them, behind the mountains, beyond the map, outside the horizon. It is a superhuman need: to reach the unreachable. 

As Jean Baudrillard said in ‘Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?’,

Behind every image, something has disappeared. And that is the source of its fascination. Behind virtual reality in all its forms (telematics, IT, digitization, etc.), the real has disappeared. And that is what fascinates everyone. According to the official version, we worship the real and the reality principle, but – and this is the source of all the current suspense – is it, in fact, the real we worship or its disappearance?

Indeed, the disappearance is the only constant both in the real and virtual world, and Parallel I-IV reinforces a world doomed to constant disappearance, where everything floats in emptiness.
This only highlights that the difference between the living world and the virtual world is the primary rule of finitude; while on Earth, everything is finite and governed by the laws of physics, in the virtual world, the notion of infinity in the simulacrum only defines how limited the existence of its beings on screen is. This allows for infinite representations of the world within a single place; however, the horizon is hollow. The bottom of the sea is emptiness. The creatures are governed by their own rules but, at the same time, their existence is only among themselves, being obliterated by an invisible power. The nature around them transcends anti-natural barriers, invisible obstacles. Everything disappears, even in the artificial infinite.

Waleska Antunes

1. Speaking of Serious Games and Auge/Maschine, the matter of cinematic image goes beyond mere manipulation, delving into sociopolitical implications of a virtualized world; after all, according Farocki, in terms of war, the sun only shines on the virtual tanks and the digital American soldiers, while the Middle Eastern characters perish even in their digital shadows, reflecting the dehumanization between invader and besieged.