Freddy Paul Grunert and Cristina Fiordimela

A prior state of unity, or the collapse of the time-space dimension of the motion picture, the suspension of ego-ism, realized in the immanence of the a-perspective image. A-perspective, or beyond perception time, beyond the optical representation of space. The image-art of Adi Da Samraj shows a reading of the relationship of the »real of reality« that exceeds the dichotomy between what’s real and the reproduction of reality, in “the Transcendental Condition of Reality, always, inherently, and totally beyond and prior to any ‘point of view’”. The image is concurrently departure, arrival and action, operating within a medium where the process of the event generates new processes. The a-perspective elaborated by Adi Da interrelates cognitive processes and participation with the idea of space as a transcendental attitude, as a connection between inter-subjective and perceptual environments, revealed through the metamorphosis produced by light over the surface.

The temporal dimension is included in the spatial one in a combined view, where transition and movement are sublimated in the composition of a fixed image. From photography, to the synthesis of the sign as trace of motion, till the abstract suite narratives, the surfaces elaborated by Adi Da with the environment in which he is steeped as a whole, transcend the »chrono-cinematographic narrativity«, to settle in the a-dimension, where the action area, the surface, acts as a cognitive active threshold. The geometries broken down by the implicit thrusts of the instinctive gesture pry open the performance to bring out the form, which becomes the channel for an unpredictable process that in turn generates further processes. 

The images as a whole convey the experience of an ecstatic essence that interprets the form as a dynamic relationship between the things being touched by the breaths of light, as a synaesthetic passage from mind to matter. The surface of the image is a media leaf, a screen, its thickness near to zero, a membrane-like device for getting closer, to almost touch the sign’s a-dimensionality, making the transition from flat screen representation to consciousness-activating flat screen. Adi Da contrasts this process of identification that turns art into a knowledge device. Adi Da activates consciousness, as a participated cognitive act, "sibling-correlation between emotional and intellectual intelligence".  The screen-image, the free intersection trespassing beyond the shape and abstraction pair, evocate Paul Klee’s compositions and his contribution on the subject of non-separateness between context and action, between nature and subject, taking us to the “de-localized subject” of the »L’œil et l’esprit« Merleau-Ponty “which inhabits space and time”. The a-perspective of Adi Da and its fixing and opening in the screen, that joins analysis and synthesis, opens out as a sort of common thread among the folds of interstitial research and inter-disciplinary inaction, where the perspective – as time and space perception – is recanted since, besides underlying a linear conception of the world, it effects a swerve between theory and practice. Pavel Florenskij (1919), mathematician and art scholar, defines the icon’s painted surface a “focalization screen between artwork (author) and end-user”, a space which is neither limited nor closed, but without perspective, lacking the depth that carries linear time perception. Bi-dimensional space of n-dimensions, as unlimited dimensional expansion of space. Getting back to Adi Da’s work we wish to recall Florenskij once again, when he lingers on the non-scission between real plane and imaginary plane, by defining the screen-icon as “plane/wrap or real plane”, where the distinction between »reality« and »imaginary« doesn’t make sense because they coincide in the unity of the plane-screen-image. “The vitality of Floresnkij’s specific-art depends on the degree of cohesion of the sensations of the content and of the means of expression of the content”. And such coincidence also provides the key for interpreting the image as an active source of knowledge, which Adi Da develops in other terms. Florenskij speaks of the “artistic object” as the relationship’s source and motor, when he explains that “the artistic object is not a thing but must be intended as the source of the creation that flows eternally and never runs out, as living, pulsating activity”. Which is why “the work of art lives only in the fullness of the necessary conditions for its existence, according to and within which it was conceived”.

Adi Da moves within the plane like a possible simultaneity between knowledge and participation, as a-dimension where the experience is realized and extends beyond the plane itself. The plane is a form of adherence between the motions that generate signs, images, suites, and the motions that cause their emanation. The flat-screen-image of Adi Da acts as interstice of a reality a-priori. Interstice as topological surface of source-derivation of the form itself. Interstice as sediment of the relationship which, getting back to Nicolas Bourriaud (1988) causes “the increase in social exchanges, greater individual mobility, gradual opening up of the isolated places, new media and digitalization, which went hand in hand with the opening of minds”.

Appatatus-based images of reality and reality it-self as correalate is the immanence of light as radiant life, or as revelation if the action. Action-event that is realized in the inter-relationship of bodies, without solution of continuity. Adi Da Samraj sublimates the film time in a unique automatic shutter release of the event, as a sort of »apocatastasis« of an eternal restart that follows an eternal comeback. The perception occurs in the image itself, in the screening as condition of reality, made of infinite planes of light with their intrinsic memory from space, “illumination of matter in its intrinsic profound quality” (Yves Klein/Robert Savage).

Adi Da’s work opens new attitudes towards cinematography by operating precisely within the interstice, intended in the vein of Bourriaud, between apparatus-based images of reality and reality it-self »as correlated«. In his photographic compositions Adi Da builds the frames like dynamic image-attractors. Dynamic attractors and basins (Ueda and Lorenz) which in Adi Da’s research are photograms shot in motion, discarding the fixity of the photographic perspective. Frames that trace trajectories of dynamic images. Frames like fundamental devices that in the dynamic pluralism of the trajectories transcend and at the same time tend to include and describe a systemic reality. Photography is systemic in itself, because its many shapes are made by prior photograms, as in the Koch snowflake (Mandelbrot). Adi Da through his apparatus-based images of reality develops a qualitative analysis of each image, based on the space-time of the two-dimensional image, rather than the quantitative description of the chrono-cinematography time-space. In his photographic compositions the geometric shapes in nature show a self-resemblance (Poincaré, Smale), sensitive to the fractal plurality of many points of view, that oscillate from the natural to the constructed-complex one.

In the wake of Adi Da and the prior attractor dynamic photogram, the computational image, which he develops together with the photographic one, could become a new paradigm for cinematography.

Adi Da is inserted here in a story of the image that includes Antonioni, Francesco Lo Savio, Emilio Trini, Ettore Sottsass, Lars Von Trier, Alberto Grifi, the artists who work on future-cinema, and that collects all those experiences originating from the shamanic dimension of the world.

Freddy Paul Grunert is an artist and associate curator at ZKM, Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, a research centre and museum that specialises in the study of information technology and its social and cultural repercussions, where he curated among other things, the anthology »Francesco Lo Savio – Tano Festa. The Lack of the Other«.

Grunert studied philosophy and anthropology in Stuttgart and Rome. ETCAEH Nova Gorica and TU Technischen Universität Berlin are two of his most recent lecturing posts.

Starting from the mid-1980s, he has contributed as an artist and curator to film, art e new media festivals, including the Venice Biennials where with the work »Xenografia« (a term coined by him) he launched a series of researches into new media art and communication physics, which were hosted also at the festivals of Locarno, São Paulo and Berlin.

He was engaged in political activity in Strasbourg and Brussels at The Council of Europe and the European Parliament, and at the Climate Change Conference. Such activity merged in Selph2 and was acknowledged by various commendations, among which Cecil of The Council of Europe 2012 with »Climate Walk«, Mindthestorm, developed with ZKM, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, TU Berlin, PIK, Postdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and the recognition as Official contribution for Sustainable Development by the United Nations and by the »Record Again! 40 Jahre Videokunst« collection Goethe Institut.

His most recent research weaves new media and science with »Meet the media guru« (Milano 2015), »Beyond Einstein’s Dream-Global« 2015 ZKM, and new media art and militancy with »Ceçi n’est pas une table«, International Festival of Commons (Chieri 2015). Moderator for »Die Grosse Revolution« with Nanni Balestrini and Toni Negri, Berlin 2016. Special Editor for »Babylon3« magazine (since 2015).

Cristina Fiordimela is visiting professor of Interior and Exhibition Design at the Architecture University of the Politecnico di Milano, she is a member of ICOM (International Council of Museum) and Ordine degli architetti di Milano (professional architecture order). Holding a degree and a master in architecture, in 2008 she earned a PhD in Interior architecture and Exhibition design from the Politecnico di Milano with a research grant at Le Corbusier Fondation. She has been a regular contributor to the Domus, Abitare, Babylon City of dreams and Il giornale dell’Architettura since 2005.

Among her most important publications are the books »The concept of relational museum from Andrea Emiliani« (2016) and “Interiors of monasteries” (2013).