Note on Peter Stromer (1315 – 1388)
Video
20 min
2017 (rev. 2020)

Beginning on October 9th, 1368, Peter Stromer, a Nuremberg councilor and mining entrepreneur established the worlds first known artificial woodland area in what is known today as the Nürnberger Reichswald. Therein, he overcame the medieval worldview and its embedded one-sided relationship between nature and culture, introducing concepts of design and sustainability into agroforestry. From a contemporary perspective, Stromers achievements can be understood as significant event within what is now conceptualized as the anthropocene, the geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth‘s geology and ecosystems.

Note on Peter Stromer (1315 – 1388) is based on 20 minutes of footage, shot in the Wienerwald, a forest close to Vienna. This organic, natural and somewhat idyllic material is subjected to a quantized, steril and diagrammatic organization. Every frame and its corresponding audio-chunk is re-sorted following aesthetic criteria. In the upper half of the image, the frames are sorted from the least to the most saturated one, in the lower half from the darkest to the brightest. The left audio channel starts with the lowest and ends with the highest pitched chunk, the right one begins with the loudest and ends with the most quiet one.

Thus, Note on Peter Stromer (1315 – 1388) seeks to construct a sort of uncanny temporality, alluding to the growing mutual interpenetration of natural/analog and cultural/digital principles of organization, the blurring or even dissolution of their respective borders perceivable today.