Unlearn the Apparatus – The plate camera as co-performer and site of critique
Updated: Oct 2
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The Intrepid 8x10 camera served as a major co-performer, site and medium of decolonizing critique in our “Unlearn the Apparatus” project in both the performance “The Plate camera intervention game” (June 18-21, 2026) and the exhibition “Every human is a work of art” (June 25-27, 2026).
Portraits of a camera
For our artistic research project in Hildesheim, Martin created a portrait series of the Intrepid camera to use for our “Unlearn the Apparatus” poster, flyer and banner design and the project website.
Photos: Martin Kulinna
Co-Performers - human-machine relations
For this rendition of working with a plate camera as a central co-performer, we used Martin Kulinna’s Intrepid 8x10 - a 21st century hand-made adaptation of the 19th century technology. (Information about the camera on a Blog in German) We challenged the authority of the technology and the photographer (an authority that usually has been imposed in racist colonial-technological, scientific and media abuses and violence) by actively involving Hildesheim citizen-audiences as observers, storytellers, photographic subjects, or critical inquirer who can switch roles from people in front of the lens to people behind the lens. The main focus for us was on relaxed interactions and the conversations that ensued about life, technology, resources (economy, ecology), power systems and our agency in these processes. A week later, in the exhibition of the photographs we took, celebrating each photographed person as a work of art, we handed back the photographs to the citizen co-performers (and did not keep them only for ourselves and our purposes as has been the case in colonial photography). Consent to actively engage was paramount. We did not pressure or coerce/persuade people into active participation who just wanted to watch and observe. People could come and go as they pleased. We also - as always - challenged hierarchies of the cultural-industrial complex that usually are imposed on labor divisions and treated each of our creative collaborators as co-performers/creators of equal importance, knowledge and skill - and responsibility.
We created an atmosphere of trust, creativity, inquiry, problem-solving, friendship and joy. We operated in artistic intelligence mode - A/IM.
Citizen co-performers. Photos: Dave Kemp
Previous experiments
See more visuals in project proposal HERE
In previous experiments we had used a historical plate camera from the 1870s that Martin purchased in 2018, and which was in bad condition. In 2020 he found a craftsman who was able to repair the camera’s wooden body so that we could work with it in several hybrid analogue-digital configurations during the Covid pandemic. We documented the rebuilding of this camera and our first setup and photo-making. See video “Performing a Plate Camera – Theatre of Affection”
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
Collectives
Martin Kulinna is the founder of the Photography Foundation Black and White in Neubrandenburg, Germany. Antje and Martin have collaborated in artistic collective constellations since 1994 on multi-media exhibitions related to intercultural exchange, migration, and solidarity. They are co-founders together with Heike Sommer and Erhard Ertel of “Schleifspur – Büro für ungehobelte Ansichten” (1994-2008) and have produced a number of ground-breaking exhibitions challenging far-right, colonial and racist tendencies in German society that were emerging more openly in Eastern Germany after the German unification. The early rise and ideology of what now has become the far-right political party AfD (Alternative for Germany) was already palpable and of great concern decades ago.
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