Reset the Apparatus

becoming more and more present in artistic practices, as well as in popular culture, often blurring boundaries between the two. It is especially the “improper” use of film stock, cameras, projectors, and other photographic and cinematic software and hardware that brings to light the vast creative potential of outmoded media. This return to obsolete media is not a rejection of the contemporary or a nostalgic turn to the past, but instead fulfills a critical function. It questions the notion of linear progress and challenges the idea of an “appropriate” distance of the body to the apparatus – which is to be understood not only as a technological artifact, but also as a set-up or “dispositive”. The arts-based research project RESET THE APPARATUS!, with its trans-disciplinary, international team of artists and scholars, explores the phenomenon of retrograde technicity by merging artistic and theoretical approaches that will not only bring about new ways of understanding of the photographic and the cinematic, but also of our relation to media both old and new.