Harun Farocki: Parallel I–IV (2012–2014)

Parallel I–IV (2012–2014) is the last project realised by Harun Farocki (1944–2014). The artwork is regarded as a seminal work in media arts and a crucial piece of cultural critique on computer animation. This marks the first time the installation is being exhibited in Southeast Asia.

The four-part video installation follows the trajectory of computer game imagery—from the flat, pixelated geometries of the early arcade era to the expansive, hyper-detailed landscapes of contemporary gaming. Farocki is less concerned with technical progress than with what these images disclose about how worlds are constructed and how reality itself can be simulated.

Seen not merely as a separate sphere of entertainment, the work situates video games within a longer history of images, examining how digital environments operate as autonomous systems with their own rules of perspective, physics, and interaction—immersive domains that shape how characters and players define themselves and engage with one another. These are not replications of the real but distinct image-worlds that organise vision and structure the very experience of play.

Farocki sets these digital terrains against the often-invisible architectures of code and image production through which digital images are constructed, revealing video games as laboratories of vision where entertainment, technology, and ideology converge. “Computer animations are currently becoming a general model, surpassing film,” he observed. “In films, there is the wind that blows and the wind that is produced by a wind machine. Computer images do not have two kinds of wind.”

Parallel I–IV thus stands as both a critique and a meditation on how images no longer merely represent but actively generate worlds, combining poetic speculation with analytical clarity in what became Farocki’s final artistic achievement.

The exhibition is placed in conversation with a selection of 29 films by Harun Farocki, produced over nearly five decades from 1966 to 2014, ranging from landmark works, early shorts, rarely seen films, and works originally conceived for installation.

Complementing the programme, an Artist Talk, Labour in a Single Shot, led by Antje Ehmann, introduces the global project she initiated with Farocki in 2011, documenting contemporary forms of work through single-take videos.

The exhibition is curated by Pathompong Manakitsomboon and Antje Ehmann. It is a cooperation between the Bangkok International Film Festival, the Goethe-Institut Thailand, and Harun Farocki GbR.