These images were created for the film
Until the End of the World
In the story the Electronic Paintings are dreamlike images, generated with the help of a sophisticated camera-like device which is capable of recording and storing images which are send directly to a persons brain and ultimately allow the blind to 'see'.

Wim Wenders on the process of their creation:

"All our images were transferred to high definition tape, and then processed digitally, some of them for more than a hundred different effects and generations.



Sean Naughton and I sent those images through every possible manipulation, via paint-box, matte-box, color correctors and every trick in the book. Our idea was: the sleeping brain functions in a mysterious, cacophonic, uncontrolled and self-regulating way, half junkyard of images, half visionary prophecy or poetry.



So we tried to also unchain the electronic medium, and find out what all the millions of pixels of each image would do if you would set them free, or if you would only control them in the same spontaneous way a painter might use his brushes, his chalk or his colors. In the course of this adventure, we slowly understood the inner mechanism of the digital process, and after a time of frustration, failure and disappointments, the high-vision screen started to show us amazing pictures: in vivid colors and with incredible brightness and definition, there were the same images we had started out with, but they had taken on a unique quality of their own.



We felt that in this high-tech suite we were actually visited by some painters. The impressionists showed up, followed by pointillist painters, but also by cubists and abstract ones. Turner stuck his head in, Renoir and Seurat said hello, Degas waved from the screen, Picasso and Kandinsky strolled by, and one image we even called "our electronic Mona Lisa".



It is not what we want to pride ourselves to have in any way "painted" like those masters; that would be preposterous. But we were proud to have done some pioneering work and to show that high definition video has wide artistic possibilities which can certainly enrich the cinema and that will eventually become the image-language of the 21st century. And maybe we proved that painters could work with this medium in the future".

Italy, October 2, 1992

"We were proud to have done some pioneering work and to show that high definition video has wide artistic possibilities which can certainly enrich the cinema and that will eventually become the image-language of the 21st century."

 

Electronic images have grown up. They are more beautiful and more detailed and more seductive than ever. They have also finally left behind the idea of the ‘original’. Every copy is now identical to the original, every electronic image is available and reproducible almost everywhere in the world simultaneously. Electronic images are therefore more beautiful and more accessible than ever, but they are not necessarily more trustworthy. The digital image can be manipulated in every possible sense, and therefore can be falsified in every possible way. As there is no more original, there is also no more proof of ‘Truth’. The digital electronic image has finally made the distance between ‘reality’ and ‘secondhand reality’ wider than ever. It has maybe even broken the link.

Wim Wenders (excerpt from The Act of Seeing)

In the past artists represented things they had seen on earth, things they liked seeing or might have liked to see. Today they reveal the relativity of visible things; they express their belief that the visible is only an isolated aspect in relation to the universe as a whole, and that other, invisible truths are the overriding factors. Things appear to assume a broader and more diversified meaning, often seeming to contradict the rational experience of yesterday. The artist strives to express the essential character of the accidental.

Paul Klee, Berlin 1920