Mustererkenntnis (Pattern Cognition) (Thorsten Fleisch, 2019) (Patreon)

Some artists, like Beatrice Gibson, get more interesting over time, partly because of developments in their work, but also because you learn to read their signals and more fully occupy their world. Unfortunately, some artists get less interesting over time, and one of those artists is Thorsten Fleisch. The German experimentalist has been on my radar for over a decade, having occasionally placed films in the New York Film Festival during its "Views From the Avant-Garde" iteration. While his work seemed tangentially related to certain Austrian abstractionists, such as Siegfried A. Fruhauf and Dietmar Brehm, Fleisch has been unique in his willingness to employ edgy electronic soundtracks to ramp up the playful aggression in his work. 

But Mustererkenntnis (Pattern Cognition) is a pretty clear demonstration of where Fleisch's work has gone in recent years. In this film in particular, his use of flicker and color patterns strikes me as rooted in a basic misrecognition regarding what made someone like Paul Sharits a master filmmaker. The pulsing and throbbing of Sharits' films, which could sometimes make them physically difficult to watch, came about as the result of complex patterns and sequences. The assault they often seemed to represent was a collateral effect of that internal logic, even as it became a defining feature of the films. By contrast, Pattern Cognition promises legible structure but instead proffers a kind of digital improv field of color and fuzz. The fact that Fleisch may have programmed certain intervals into the work does not mean they are perceptible, and the result is that a lot of spatial noise is thrown at the viewer, its essential randomness compensated for, in theory, by breakneck velocity. 

In Pattern Cognition's final third, Fleisch introduces a single variation, wherein color fields are warped and blended by parabolic ingress forms, like an analog television whose raster is being warped by magnetism. The result is a lot like Lynn Marie Kirby's superior, and still underseen, Light Exposure works. Whereas Kirby's pieces are short, silent, and operate according to a crystalline geometry, Fleisch here sort of throws everything at the screen to see what might produce some rogue affect.