Part of an in-progress writing series related to an upcoming exhibition, On the Desperate Edge of Now, that looks at historical trauma and collective cultural memory in horror film and contemporary artists. These writings will eventually be published in volume four of Incognitum Hactenus and as exhibition catalogue. See previous post on Folkert de Jong here and Heather Cantrell here.

“Koester echoes in his investigations the magic at the heart of photography that fold the past into the future and the known into the imagined, a process that arrests time and captures possibilities.” – Lisa Le Feuvre

Joachim Koester’s film and photographic work become persistent ghost stories that meld the historical with pop-cultural and fictional constructions. Seeming to gravitate towards the macabre, Koester inclusion of Charles Mason, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the occult, the opium trade, and speculative fiction writers such as Baudelaire and Dumas as well as H.P. Lovecraft result in a contextual montage that both familiarizes and complicated our understanding of the past.

Koester’s video Numerous Incidents of Indefinite Outcomes (2007) attacks the very concept of time in terms of mining the past and manipulating the present. This work processes textual fragments from the “weird fiction: of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Notes of Commonplace Book through a computer program that generates endless possibilities of speculative musings. This is a never-ending, never-repetitive, constantly morphing process is a theatrical word play visualized. Fusing new connections pulls the past into the present or as William S. Burrough’s observed, “when you cut into the present the future leaks out.”

The video invokes the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft, an early 20th century writer who would, no doubt, be delighted to reach out from beyond the grave, manipulating his own words. Unlike his predecessor Edgar Allen Poe, who was more interested in the ghostly realm, the phenomenological writings of Lovecraft detail unseen worlds parallel to our own reality, often detailing an ancient monstrous civilization that exists on the liminal boundary between the past and the present. His infamous fictional cosmic entity Cthulu appeared in a series of stories as an ancient Elder God worthy of religious worship and capable of universal destruction while others, faceless and formless beings in The Beyond, threaten the limits of scientific and philosophical reasoning.

From The Beyond: “What do we know,” he had said, “of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects are infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with a wider, strong, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have…”

Koester’s technologically regulated usage of this “weird realism” adds an additional layer on to the pile of memory, belief, cult structures, and an understanding of our existence being shared embedded in Lovecraft’s ouvre. Numerous Incidents of Indefinite Outcomes fragments and perpetually re-contexutalizes meaning while simultaneously releasing the ghost of Lovecraft (the utilized text was published posthumously) as well as the undead characters in these narratives and the generative ghost in the machine. It verbalizes to us that we cannot trust continuity, or technology, and that variance and change are inevitable. Most importantly it presents and represents an evolving past, playing out in the now and into the foreseeable future. 

Images:
Tarantism, 2007, 16 mm film installation
The Hashish Club, 2009, 16mm film and B/W photo installation
Morning of the Magicians, 2006, 16mm film
Final scene in Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond, 1981