UnionDocs is very excited to welcome experimental filmmaker Caspar Stracke to the space for a screening of his new film time/ Out of Joint, preceding his Assembling Reality workshop. With research that spans the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Martin Heidegger to modern mythologies in which time reversal plays a crucial role — such as failed time machines, speed of light travel, and occult practices involving speech — Stracke combines science and philosophy in an attempt to defy death through cinema and the notion of time reversal.

Everyone knows what time is but when you start thinking about it, there is no turning back. Or is there? Is it possible to make time go backwards? Part documentary, part science fiction, Caspar Stracke’s neo-psychedelic film essay investigates the mystery of time by featuring an eclectic group of philosophers, scientists, and cultural producers whose work relates to time reversal defined as either a methodology or a speculative concept: Manuel DeLanda, Aubrey de Grey, Diedrich Diederichsen, Ivan Ladislav Galeta, Narcisa Hirsch, Michio Kaku, Sarah Rudner, and Michael West. Reversed moving images and sounds unmask the century-old medium of cinema as the ultimate time machine. Before asking how life would run backwards, redux/time/OUT OF JOINT tries to find out what makes time tick forward while touching upon Heideggerian and Deleuzian concepts of time and space. By discussing the emergence of the industry of so-called age reversal, gerontology, cryonics, and life extension, the film probes the framework of the human condition itself and its incongruous and programmatic fate: life’s finitude marked by death.

Caspar Stracke is an interdisciplinary artist filmmaker and curator. From 2012 – 17 he taught at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki as professor for Contemporary Art and Moving Image. Caspar holds an MFA in Experimental Film and Photography from the Academy of Fine Arts, Braunschweig, Germany then moved to New York City and continued studying film and philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York (on a DAAD fellowship). He continued to live in NYC for 20 years.

Stracke’s films, videos and installations formulate critical responses to cinema, architecture and urbanism and have been shown internationally in places such as MoMA, The Whitney Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, ZKM among many others. He is an active member of The Thing, a center for art and net culture based in NYC. From 2005 until 2013 Stracke was the co-director of video_dumbo, an international moving image exhibition and festival in New York. In 2014 he he co-curated the 60th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar together with Gabriela Monroy.

Caspar is currently editing GODARD / BOOMERANG a book about contemporary artists engaged with Godard’s films, theories and aesthetics, to be published summer 2018.

Jacqueline Goss makes movies about scientific systems and how they change the ways we think about ourselves. Her two most recent works are “The Observers” –a feature-ish length portrait of a weather observatory on the windiest mountain in the world and “The Measures” – an essay film made with artist Jenny Perlin about the history of the metric system and “invention” of the meter.

A native of New Hampshire, Goss is a 2008 Tribeca Film Institute Media Arts Fellow and the 2007 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Film and Video. Goss teaches in the Film and Electronic Arts program at Bard College in the Hudson Valley of New York.