Further encounters

At the Jesuit University of Detroit-Mercy I spoke with Father John Staudenmaier, historian and editor of countless publications on technology and culture. He developed the thesis that electrically influenced technology increases the value of light by devaluating darkness, just as an emphasis on precision and measurement simultaneously refuses to acknowledge imprecision and ambiguity. All this has fatally changed the relationship to our natural bodies: "We move at the speed that our blood moves through our body and that our neural systems relate things and we move at the paces of our hormones. That‘s the manner in which the human animal moves and thinks and feels and savours and makes decisions. But an awful lot of the world that you and I live in now is moving at the speed of light. Whether we‘re talking about communication systems that allow me to talk to someone in europe as if we were sitting across a table or we‘re talking about a very complex network of electrical power distribution that allows people to take in data on demand shifts in the grid and where you can get your supplies from in the grid so that you avoid blackouts. Those kinds of movements of information or you‘re talking about a computer database that can track my criminal record from a driving violation in a database that can say you‘re wanted in the state of Conneticut even though you‘ve just run a stop light in Wisconsin. Those kinds of things, all of them have this one thing in common and that is that because you can now move signals at the speed of light through various media you can do a lot of things very very very much faster than human beings could ever do them before. And I think one of the really intriguing questions to be asked about this is: how good are people, whose bodies are the home of their consciousness, how good are people at maintaining the speed of light in their networked relationships of information shifting. That‘s a very good set of questions it seems to me.“
Hartmut Runge from the R&D department of SIEMENS in Munich-Perlach reminds us how complex natural language and intelligence contrast with the sequential logic of computer systems. "The terrible thing about human communication is that it is so unbelievably lacking in precision; we rarely express ourselves in a exact manner, so we have gestures and facial expressions." The big aim of Siemens' researchers and developers is to make computers able to read these signs.
The film ELECTROMAN is also an homage to the original author of this title, German director Harry Piel, one hell of a chap who made a science-fiction movie in 1916 named "The Electroman" a.k.a. "The Big Bet". Lost without trace for many years, its title and screenplay have fired the sparks of imagination, inspiring - at least in part - the ELECTROMAN of 2002.

Guardian angels

One would have imagined that some traces of this film would have remained. Rolf Giesen and Martin Koerber of the German Museum of Cinema brought my attention to a later science-fiction film made by Piel in 1934, "Master of the Universe". A mad professor digs himself away in the laboratory of a big mining company, seemingly occupied with the development of robots. It transpires, however that he is far more interested in the construction of a gigantic fighting machine, which he offers to Dr. Heller, the idealistic owner and director of the company as a means to put down rebellions and strikes. The latter resists, becoming the first victim of the robokiller. This film-within-a-film, telling an archetypal story of men, power and machines is combined in the montage with more recent archive footage from the (most helpful and cooperative) SIEMENS-Forum in Munich. This lends the video synthesis a further layer: time travel through the cinematic phantasmagoria of electricity, seen in films like Impuls unserer Zeit (Impulse of our Time) commissioned by Siemens in 1955 as a true hymn to the electrical age, directed by Otto Martini. The AEG Archives in Berlin also provided material dating back as far back as the First World War and the early twenties.
The Henry Ford Museum in Greenfield Village, a park in Dearborn near Detroit, Michigan, is a striking example of a lively museum culture. Besides the many 1:1 copies of buildings, including the bicycle-shop of the Wright-Brothers, we took advantage of the laid-back competence of the various guides positioned all over the site. A close friend of Thomas Edison, Ford saved the remains of the inventor's first laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, and had the abandoned huts reconstructed by means of drawings and photographs.
At the very last minute historian Ulrich Wengenroth threw a critical glance at the text of the film. His lightning-quick ideas and the spontaneous gift of two images - sent by internet - enabled the last gaps in the timeline to be filled in. The computers of the first generation (for instance Konrad Zuse's Z3) belong to the ever astonishing collection of the German Museum in Munich.
Electricity: an invisible energy which turns everything into a medium by means of friction and agitation, contact and resistance, isolation and stream, polarizing and magnetizing, impulse and tension - the music of the universe? Georg F. Schenck, whose interpretation of Beethoven's Sonata op. 106 is as "electrifying" as only pure music can be, reminded me of the early works of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen. Who else could claim to have introduced electrical sounds to the world of music in such an intense manner? The soundtrack of ELECTORMAN is shaped by this marvelously courageous music and features the early compositions "Studie I" (1953), "Studie II" (1954) and especially the "Gesang der Jünglinge" (Chant of the Boys) (1955/56) and "Kontakte" ("Contacts") (1959/60). They are accompanied here and there by tunes from Dick Hyman and Paul Burch.
Last but not least we appreciate the help of the many friends without whose support this film would not have been possible.
The date and location of the English language premiere of ELECTROMAN will be published soon.