What happens when a technical glitch turns into a creative act? That is the question Alexander Fahima and Volker Renner explore in their collaborative book project “Der Player”.

It all starts with a seemingly trivial incident: an antiquated DVD player no longer simply replays the film images, it destroys them. Or more accurately: it starts recalling them in its own distinctive way. Where one would expect to see crisply recognizable scenes from popular movies, a novel imagery crowds the screen: ghosts of cinema’s past that had been hiding unseen in the digital copies. Rather than dismissing the glitch as a mere defect, the artists seize on it as a productive impulse. Over the course of a year, they both watch the same fifty-two movies, letting the wayward device scan the material. This sets a digital metamorphosis in motion: the images lose their narrative context, their original cinematic function—and gain new depth and structure in return. Cinema, and our recollection of it, is deconstructed and recomposed in a double negation. Amid visual noise, streaks of color, and fragmented bodies, a visual archive of disappearance comes into being.

The book is not only an homage to the medium of film, but also a meditation on the materiality of digital images and the beauty of the flaw. Fahima and Renner demonstrate that even what is lost can be made visible. And sometimes what is erased is just the beginning of a new story.

640 pages, sewn binding
with an original essay by Georg Seeßlen
Textem Verlag Hamburg (2025)