Katabasis

In a cave situated between the ridges of a human fingerprint, a primordial encounter with matter, light and sound unfolds. The Katabasis, the western mythological descent to the underworld, is here stripped of its mythical connotations to reveal only its narrative function, the confrontation with the past and with what has been lost.
Katabasis is an abstract film that merges analogue, camera-less techniques and digital ones such as algorithmic editing. The imagery was created entirely from hand-painted 35mm slides and film exposed to electricity via a Tesla coil – a device invented by Nikola Tesla to generate artificial lightning arcs. These same images were then fed into a self-developed algorithm that re-arranges them in real-time according to certain prescribed parameters but without an entirely predictable order, resulting in an editing process that lingers at the border of chaos and control. Echoing the film’s structure and closely adhering to it, the soundtrack was composed from recordings of electromagnetic fields produced by household objects and gongs played by hands, mallets or activated through acoustic feedback alone – without any physical touch involved.

Martin Moolhuijsen is an intermedia artist working at the threshold of experimental film and sound art. Trained as a musicologist and a sound artist, he makes highly material abstract films, whose composition is built equally on musical as well as film principles. His work has been presented at Annecy International Animation Film Festival, ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst und Medien and Akademie der Künste, among others. He is a member of the artist-run analogue film lab LaborBerlin.

Director Martin Moolhuijsen. Editing Martin Moolhuijsen. Music Martin Moolhuijsen. Producer Martin Moolhuijsen. Production company Martin Moolhuijsen (Berlin, Germany).

Films: 2023: grain cloud atmosphere. 2026: Katabasis.