PARADAYS | 1989 | IOOI SUꓵS

PARADAYS, 1989, special price of the jury at the 4. Marler Video-Kunst-Preis 1990
Betacam SP, color, mono, 7:29 min

Paradays (1989) unfolds like a cryptic transmission from an extraterrestrial intellect, probing the hidden architecture of reality within a world governed by the insistent mantra of submission, discipline, work, life, and future. The seven-minute experimental collage blends Super 8, 16mm film, and early 3D computer animation into a conceptual atmosphere of civilizational transition.

The short film operates at the intersection of consciousness, technology, and observation. By juxtaposing imagery of early computing with parapsychology’s classic tests of extrasensory perception, the work establishes a tension between rational code and intuitive, human supra-rational potential. At the center of this tension are five abstract symbols, the Zener cards. These geometric forms function as a bridge between human cognition and machine processing, inviting viewers to confront an unfolding central hypothesis: that collective and connective futures emerge through symbolic systems shaped by both technological and extrasensory forms of corrective intelligence.

This hypothesis materializes through a dark spherical anomaly: the nuclear pan ovum, the seed of human metamorphosis. As the film progresses, the sphere gives way to a female torso: a hovering, enigmatic body. This torso embodies the civilizational threshold, the latent technological future quietly overwriting and reprogramming human creative potential and responsibility. Children appear as silent witnesses, observing both the transformation and the newly coded fabric of existence.

To navigate this fragile threshold, the film closes with an excerpt from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s essay On Life. Shelley’s words resonate across the transformation, evoking the impermanence of empires, the collapse of dynasties, and the cyclical recurrence of artificial political and technological systems, juxtaposing human ruin against the evolving, uncanny grandeur of life itself.

Paradays draws our senses into the architecture of change, leaving the viewer with Shelley’s encompassing revelation: life is “that which includes all.”

Paradays (1989) sits at the very beginning of Michael Saup’s career as a media pioneer. Before shifting his focus in the 2000s toward the ecological impact of digital infrastructure and nuclear history, Saup’s early work was strictly focused on the structural relationship between code, sound, and visual space.

During the era Paradays was produced, Saup was experimenting with the automated control of video editing triggered directly by music. He explored real-time computer-assisted transformations of audio and visual signals, effectively using early computing to bridge acoustic events with visual media. Paradays is a foundational piece in this timeline, leading directly to his more complex interactive installations in the 1990s, such as Pulse8 (1992), and his collaborations with the Ballett Frankfurt.

CREDITS

with

Achim Wollscheid
Doris Raabe

Technical & Creative Team

Camera: Anna Saup, Michael Saup
Music: Maria Koval, Michael Saup
Mirage Effects: Ralf Drechsler (Bibo Tv, Das Werk, Frankfurt)
Hardware: Bibo Tv (Bad Homburg)

Vocal & Text Contributions

Voices: J.G. Bennett, Zener, David Larcher, Eugenia Fulkerson
Text Source: P.B. Shelley

What are changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties, with the opinions which supported them; what is the birth and the extinction of religious and of political systems, to life? What are the revolutions of the globe which we inhabit, and the operations of the elements of which it is composed, compared with life? What is the universe of stars, and suns, of which this inhabited earth is one, and their motions, and their destiny, compared with life? Life, the great miracle, we admire not, because it is so miraculous.
It is well that we are thus shielded by the familiarity of what is at once so certain…
If any artist, I do not say had executed, but had merely conceived in his mind the system of the sun, and the stars, and had painted to us in words, the spectacle now afforded by the nightly cope of heaven, great would be our admiration.
…Truly we should have been astonished, and it would not have been a vain boast to have said of such a man, “Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta.” [“None merits the name of creator except God and the Poet” by Torquato Tasso (1544 – 1595)] But now these things are looked on with little wonder, and to be conscious of them with intense delight is esteemed to be the distinguishing mark of a refined and extraordinary person. The multitude of men care not for them. It is thus with Life – that which includes all.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, On Life, 1819