/ 16 July 2010

Art at play

A few weeks ago, the German artist and filmmaker Harun Farocki was on hand at the Johannesburg Art Gallery to discuss his installation Deep Play, the latest offering in the art meets culture programme from the Goethe Institut.

Farocki’s work consists of 12 screens all running simultaneously and showing a different perspective of the 2006 World Cup final between Italy and France.

One screen contains the actual footage of the game, overlapped with diagrams following the path of the ball during the match. Another is footage of the French coach in the first half, followed by the Italian in the second, with diagrams showing the movement of players. 

There is surveillance footage taken during the game, with shots of the crowd, and grainy images from inside the bowels of the stadium, including the police cells. Farocki points out that while there were 60 cameras filming the game, more than 200 cameras were used to watch the spectators.

Another monitor shows the outside the stadium, and was filmed from 900 metres away, Farocki says fairly precisely. ‘It was an interesting point of reference for me, because here you see time passing’, Farocki explains  ‘It gets darker and darker, you get the fireworks when the game has ended.’ That is one way of looking it. Another way would be to describe it as just the outside of the stadium for 90 minutes.

Farocki has also included a video continuously following one particular Italian or French player for 15 minutes. It shows the player standing still, running around, walking slowly, and trying to get the ball. ‘The interesting thing is that if you have watched for a while, one would never believe that there is something like solitude which you can watch in a team game,’ he says, laughing.

‘Sometimes the people touch the ball only for a fragment of a second, and then there’s no action for them at all. And how much they have to run before they really can contribute something – especially the attackers.’ He mentions one of his inspirations, an experimental film by a German artist, which showed the Northern Irish player George Best in isolation for ninety minutes.

Farocki seems uninterested in the actual football, discussing the work in an abstract context of images and data. It no longer seems to matter what happens in the game. He refers to this as ‘derealisation’.

Farocki describes how some of these systems of image processing and data analysis were initially developed in the context of war, and says that the software used to track and recognise patterns are now used in industry to increase production. ‘To my astonishment the same applications are used in the analysis of sports nowadays,’ he adds.

To produce his Deep Play installation, Farocki struggled for nearly 8 months to get the footage from FIFA. He describes how hard it was just to get them on the phone. ‘It was risky until the end, even when the final was on we didn’t know that we would get the footage, although they had promised it officially on a higher level.’

‘Film images – cinematographic images, animated images – are mainly used for entertainment reasons,’ says Farocki. ‘On the other hand even the core of entertainment images when it comes to sport, have already become tools for measurement with which you can calculate things. The images are no longer images, but data of a kind.’

In this installation, Farocki is trying to explore the point of view from which people watch soccer. ‘And it is very obvious that at the moment everybody talks about strategies, systems, and all this stuff for which you can collect the data. Not so much about players, or skills, or genius moments,’ he laughs again. 

Farocki dismisses the idea that he is interested in digitising reality. ‘That is always dangerous as a conclusion. Perhaps, it is a symbolic attempt to master things, symbolically at least, in a computer system,’ he suggests. This is a very deep space that Farocki inhabits.