capricorn sunset [a constellation] | Johannes Binotto

Volker Pantenburg:

It is not easy to introduce Johannes Binottos capricorn sunset [a constellation] without giving away too much and spoiling the fun of watching (and listening to) it. This difficulty is augmented by the fact that Binotto himself has written a very elegant introduction to his 6 minute essay. Perhaps, the beginning of this essay is the most suitable introduction: «What happens when we scale things? Increasing or reducing size may seem an innocuous practice which only changes the measurements of an object. But in fact, scaling provokes brutal breaks and uncanny tipping points where things become radically and irrevocably different. This is what the vision machines of film with its variable image sizes always tried to tell us: how things by being scaled can fall apart – a lesson perhaps not only about our perception but also about our fragile world at the verge of tipping points.»

capricorn sunset is, first of all, a double homage: on one hand, it references the Eames’s breath-taking Powers of 10 which measures the enormous spectrum from the infinitely big (our universe and beyond) to the infinitely small (approaching the atomic smallness of matter), and on the other, a second “universe” is inserted into the framework (quite literally a framework) of the Eames’s method of zooming in and reminding us of the scale during the process. It is the cosmos of cinephilia, epitomized here by one devotional object and one particular moment in time. Whoever wants to have an educated guess can linger on the two words of the title and enter them in the search form of the cinephile unconscious – «I’m ready for my close up».

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capricorn sunset [a constellation] | Video Essay | Johannes Binotto | 2023 | 6’ | published on: Interfaces, n. 50: Re-Scale: The Art and Culture of Size and Scale

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