Wurmloch (wormhole)

//graduate film HfG Offenbach
//sci-fi essay
//feature length
//16mm color, 35mm b/w, miniDV video 
//locations: Offenbach, Frankfurt, Würzburg
//currently in editing, expected completion End of 2025

//SYNOPSIS

is a science/fiction/film/essay about life forms and their machines in the information age.

Ursula Pfeffer talks in a video to descendants about her life as a war child. Times later there is another child exploring an abandoned data centre.

The film is narrated by voices and images living in the data centre, which are made up of archive fragments.

Wurmloch juxtaposes the virtual digital world with its physical part. How does the www appear in experience, and how tos it materialize through its spatial claims? The film technology is elementary: Film faces digital data streams. 16mm film, 35mm still photography, and miniDV video. Like wormholes, cuts pierce from one to the other.

“On my rides, I pass archives, spaces where contradictions can occur. Places that don’t produce growth, but rather ramifications and spaces where things don’t become more, but closer.”

floodgate Oberrad of the river Main – filmstill from 16mm shoot Aug 2024

16mm color

A dialogue while the camera slowly moves along the fibre optic infrastructure. Images of public life and the voice-over text relate to each other. The infrastructure of the network is criss-crossed everywhere in the urban space, but it remains invisible. Data flows. Streams of data. The river Main.

protagonist of the b/w part on a test shoot June 2024

35mm b/w

Just frozen frames. A young child laughs in the halting black and white world. It has survived the apocalypse and trudges through an abandoned data center. What to do here, when the knowledge of binary code has been lost?

Ursula Pfeffer on her balcony at the shoot July 2024

miniDV video

The voice of its great-grandmother resounds from a pre-binary world. She is my grandmother, Ursula Pfeffer, born at the end of the Second World War. She decided to move to Offenbach, became a nurse there, met my grandpa. It was on Ursula’s computer that I took my first binary steps in the late 90s and early 2000s.

contact: wurmloch@freieseite.net

funded by a mountain of unpaid work and Hessenfilm&Medien