Christian Höller:
“Turn, turn, turn” was a motto of psychedelic culture. This became “evolve—revolve—evolve” in Barbara Doser’s film, which has a psychotropic effect equal to those of hallucinatory experiments made 40 years ago.
The point of departure chosen for it is minimal: In a one-minute black-and-white feedback video the upper and lower halves of two different images come together to produce something different. The resulting hybrids were then colored, in vivid Day-Glo pink, purple and orange, and then everything was once again subjected to a process of superimposition with semi-transparent images.
The final result, evolverevolve 01, impresses the viewer with its flickering forms and whirl of colors. Amorphous islands that overlap and run together, vaguely resembling paisley patterns, rotate on their axes at different speeds. As they do so, additions and subtractions in the spinning abstract-expressionist layers reveal additional shades of color. The restless pandemonium of similarly shaped sickles, disks and splotches undergo a long series of twists and convolutions—as if to deny the uninitiated eye any kind of firm footing.
Sound and image repeatedly start over from the beginning, and in this way the electronic soundtrack carries the feedback excess along, at times with a roar, then hypnotically, in high-frequency creaking, and lastly in deeply resounding crackling. All these audio mutations are synesthetic continuations of what can already be found in the reference-free visual fragmentation: the fact that what the “turns” promised, reinterpreted in this work as an ongoing process of evolution, lies in abandoning, through technically advanced means, any kind of peaceful center. Translation: Steve Wilder