Kevin B. Lee ft. Harun Farocki

This desktop investigation asks: how can one begin to learn about Harun Farocki? It begins with a naive search for his name online to see what it can reveal. It scans over his body of work and asks how one should begin to watch it. By using different methods to make sense of Farocki's images, a key concept emerges: the counter-image.

This short piece for the television station Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) is highly relevant to Farocki's later work. Zwei Wege is a description of a picture! Farocki shows us an image of an oil painting, a religious allegory showing the 'right' and the 'wrong' path for a Christian. The one path leads to heaven, the other to hell.

Five decades of Harun Farocki's film and video material are transformed into an audiovisual vocabulary, teaching key Farockian concepts from A-Z. This video essay takes inspiration from its commissioner, the Goethe Institut, in its capacity as a leading German-language educator in the world, as well as from Farocki's lifelong fascination with the pedagogical functions of film and media.

Farocki questions philosopher Vilém Flusser about the way the front page of the daily tabloid Bild Zeitung is put together. This page is conceived as an entity in itself: on the one hand, it's impossible to reach the text without referring to the images, used maximum impact; on the other hand, the headline typography – large white letters on black – creates a potent and brutal visual impression. Image and text reinforce each other then, to provoke the same media "impact". (Locarno FIlm Festival, 1998)

What can be learned from watching only the moments when an artist appears in his own work? Harun Farocki appears in 24 of his own films; his time on screen totals 2 hours and 21 minutes, enough to form a movie in itself. The footage reveals a remarkable, evolving relationship between a man and his own images.

Parallel II and III seek out the boundaries of the game worlds and the nature of the objects. It emerges that many game worlds take the form of discs floating in the universe – reminiscent of pre-Hellenistic conceptions of the world. The worlds have an apron and a backdrop, like theatre stages, and the things in these games have no real existence. Each of their properties must be separately constructed and assigned to them.