Unlearn the Apparatus - Every Human is a Work of Art
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The project "Unlearn the Apparatus" consisted of two parts.
June 18-20, 2026 The Plate Camera Intervention Game – A Pop-up Store Participatory Multi-Media Performance. See Opening Night and Pre-show visit of urban visionaries
June 25-27, 2026 Every Human is a Piece of Art. - A Pop-up Store Multimedia Installation
Every Human is a Piece of Art. - A Pop-up Store Multimedia Installation
In the process of the first part we co-performed together with Hildesheim citizens, tourists, visiting scholars, and commuter workers who work in Hildesheim but live elsewhere. People came from cultural backgrounds of five continents. (Europe, Africa, Middle East, Latin America, North America)
Together with the citizen co-performers we produced encounters, shared stories, imaginations, sounds, critical conversations, surprising ideas, thoughtfulness, doubts, fears and laughter.
UPSIDE down
All of us - the creative collective - also co-performed with the plate camera, its multi-media interfaces inside and outside the pop-up store space and a printer in the back room - transparent to the participants.
In the photo exhibition we chose to hang these photos upside down. This choice reflects on the similarities of "seeing" through a plate camera and through the optical human apparatus - our eyes. While this is the case, the general expectation is of course, to showcase the photos in the way that our brains and ears make us see the world when standing upright. However, hanging the photos upside down - going against expectations - produces a unique V-effect, a Brechtian gestus of showing that evokes the processes of image making that link our biological apparatus with the technological and the social.
Printer/Paper/Ink
In the backroom we produced the physical copies of the images on high value, durable archival photo paper using durable ink. The citizen co-performers were delighted to see their photos become a part of the exhibition. Printing, different from dark room chemical processing of negatives, allows for an almost immediate sharing of these physical objects.
Image capture medium - digital camera
The photos were collectively created, using analogue-digital interfaces and embodied action. Traditionally plate cameras use glass plates coated with a light-sensitive emulsion as their primary image-capture medium. Historically, paper and film alternatives were also used. For the live performance we discussed the possibility to use photo paper as image capture medium and to make the chemical image development in a dark room setting part of the performance. The cost factor for that type of paper and the local conditions of the performance space prohibited this scenario. Instead, we used again a digital camera as the image-capture medium. This unique symbiosis between the analogue and the digital was originally caused by previous experiments during the Covid pandemic, when we were not able to be in the same space at the same time and had to find alternatives for being and performing together(ness).
To calibrate the relation between the plate camera and the digital camera, the camera operator, the audience co-performers and the light situation in the space requires patience. Making the image with the plate camera also requires patience on the part of the co-performers in front of the camera. Almost unanimously we were told and could all witness and experience ourselves, the feeling of time passing in the age of digital technologies and artificial intelligence is fundamentally different from what a plate camera requires. Snap shots are no option. Sitting still for up to one minute proved to be a challenge but also a healing memory of slowness and the possibility of being slow. Many communicated with delight or surprise a heightened sensual awareness of themselves, their relations with the people and technologies present. This feeling made them think.
PROJECTING Images
The video-projected photo collages were programmed by Dave Kemp to pulsate with the live sound creations like a breathing organism.
Video: Dave Kemp (edited by Antje Budde)
Soundscapes live
Important for both the performances and the exhibition were the live sound creations by Lars Crosby. These included everyday sound recordings of the day taken from the urban soundscape in the streets of Hildesheim, entangled with his oral and insrtumental imprivisations. He built unique loops and rhythmic entanglements for each day both analogue and electronic. This also included sound-compositions based on musicality of storytelling parts by the citizen co-performers or quotes from Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's essay that contextualized our project co-performers in several languages and that were exhibited in the glas showcases of the pop-up store facing Angoulêmeplatz.
Azoulay: “Toward the Abolition of Photography’s Imperial Rights” Capitalism and the Camera (Verso, 2021)
Video: Dave Kemp (edited by Antje Budde)
Photo exhibits APPEARING
Over the course of the performance days in Hildesheim our photo-video exhibitions and soundscapes grew slowly. One photo after the next was hung on the walls of the space and were also incorporated into digital projections and window digital exhibits. After we finished our performance series we turned the space into a multi-media exhibition space, presented the photographs of everyday people that had emerged as works of art and returned the images one by one back to our citizen co-performers and our photos to ourselves.
Photos: Antje Budde
Photo exhibits DISAPPEARING
The images had appeared in the space one by one during the performance days. Now - in the exhibitions - they were vanishing again one by one until the walls were empty. Only the digital shadows - the fleeting memories of the embodied actions - kept haunting the space until the lights were turned off for good.
Photos: Antje Budde
Photos: Antje Budde
Photos: Antje Budde
Photo exhibits RETURNING
Different from dominant histories of colonial and scientific photography we based our interactions on consent, respect and sharing. We returned the physical images to the co-creators of these photographs. Only one physical copy of each photograph exists. Returning the images to the co-producers created joy on both sides. A strange feeling of happiness emerged between previous strangers. We produced something together with joy. And now we are not as strange to each other any more.
Dave Kemp suggested we create memory stickers. Don Sinclair then designed the sticker with the event information, and logo that Antje Budde had designed. Martin Kulinna hunted for the sticker printing paper in Hildesheim and after some attempts was successful in an old-fashioned store for paper and office supplies. Antje then put the stickers on the back side of each photograph and put them into an envelope with the person's name and an thank you note.
LIMINAL Spaces - Street-level window exhibition
APPLES and BALLOONS
Our performance and exhibition space extended beyond the "art" space into the everyday of street space. A table, chairs, and a bowl with apples (not Apple) invited to sit down, chat, wonder.
IMAGES
In the main store window Don Sinclair had set up a triptych of monitors. The two smaller ones - one in landscape mode and one in portrait mode - emitted photo images we had taken over the course of the performances. They were added one at a time and rotated by change.
The larger, central main monitor showed real-time, time-lapse video of all actions that were happening inside the space. This invited street level observers to sneak-peak but also offered transparency and accountability for what was happening in the art space.
In addition, the triptych metaphor references earlier media and image-based dispositifs such as the The Hildesheim Triptych (Fiesole-Altar).
TEXTS
An important part of the outdoor exhibition/performance space were also the text fragments curated by Emre Cenit. These multi-lingual fragments were taken from the english essay by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: “Toward the Abolition of Photography’s Imperial Rights” Capitalism and the Camera (Verso, 2021) This essay inspired major concetpual ideas of the project.
Emre was a student in the course "Anarcheology and A/I - Engineering mediated performance as time machine” which Antje Budde taught as part of her DAAD Visiting Professorship at the Department of Cultural Policy/ UNESCO Chair in Cultural Policiy and the Arts in Transformation, University of Hildesheim. His text exhibition was part of his course work.
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Previous experiments:
Spring 2025 students experiment with plate camera interface in undergraduate course “DRM387HS Anarcheology and A/I - Engineering mediated performance as time machine” Luella Massey Studio Theatre, University of Toronto
Unboxing Imagination/Images Live Performing a Plate Camera - Interactively embodied performances among human FACES, a historical plate camera and digital FACES
Oct.27, 2020 Kaleidoscopic Imaginations - Performing Togetherness in Empty Spaces.
Oct.8, 2020 Rattling the Curve - Paradoxical ECODATA Performances of A/I and Facial Recognitions of Humans and Trees
