Our Glossary is a collection of alphabetically organized terms, quotes and images, that are
related to the working methods of Soyuz Apollo.
The logical discrepancy between experienced and conceptual reality creates effects in the recipient, which are perceived as absurd. It evokes effects that can initiate dialectical processes and revise mental models of reality.
"Other fields of science are built on propositions that may seem absurd but in fact are true (air is heavy, has weight? Water is made up of two gases ?
the continents are adrift in the oceans?)"
Donald O. Hebb
In an efficient practice, the means used require adaptations to the environment. These again are reflected in the the results.
Soyuz Apollo operates a media archive. Media products are investigated, collected, managed and archived here in order to make them available to the other departments as source, screening and research material.
"Normally, our consciousness is limited to what the society we belong to allows us to perceive (...)"
Erich Fromm
In terms of the activities and conception of Soyuz Apollo, it is among others an artistic project. Its structure is subject to dynamic discourses and practices based on perceptions, representations and knowledge. The reference to the concept of art and the integration into corresponding social contexts is an inevitable consequence, but not the sole purpose of the company.
"If I knew what art is, I would keep it for myself."
Pablo Picasso
Statements from Soyuz Apollo have to be classified as assertions. Soyuz Apollo uses the results of various sciences, but does not work scientifically. The postulated media realities of Soyuz Apollo stand for possibilities that don´t require evidence at the moment of utterance. Assertions soleyly derive from the logic of the medium.
Soyuz Apollo primarily works with media that combine auditory and visual sensations.
The resulting relationships of material, technology, distribution and perception are of great interest in relation to the effects of individual products and the corporate structure as a whole.
Conveying originality and authenticity makes the identification with presented medial realities easier. It creates a receptivity, which allows a wide scope of hypothetical realities. The presented facts are considered genuine.
The possibilities of the interaction between media and social realities are expanded by authentic representations.
"A person designated as authentic is perceived as real, sincere and unaffected. Interestingly enough, this does not have to be the actual characteristics of the person under consideration. Attributions created by the viewers can cause the impression of authenticity. By that Authenticity can be staged."
Barbara Kern
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Capitalist and cultural creation of value sometimes follow different economic logics.
Soyuz Apollo´s objectives are difficult to reconcile with the mechanisms of the market, which means that capitalism´s driving forces are not compatible with the goals of the project. The logic of capitalism and its market mechanisms rather excludes the goals and orientations of the project.
"Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand."
"Being a capitalist means not only to take a purely personal, but also a social position in production."
Karl Marx
Cinema, as an event space in which audiovisual content is received collectively, offers its own special form of perception and reflection. The interactions between location, exhibition method, cultural practice and social communication include complex connections between media and social realities.
"I don't want to be a grumpy old man or too pessimistic, because if I have a chance, I would prefer to watch a film in the cinema with an audience on a big screen instead of watching it on a cell phone. It's a very different experience, but somehow I think this form will have its own future and life."
Wong Kar-wai
Media products are received by the sensorium and are processed subsequently - directly as well as indirectly.
The different levels of consciousness involved in that prcess work in a complex way on different levels. Individual models of reality may emerge, where consistency and dissent and consistencies can coexist without being perceived as a contradiction.
At the societal level, these models may be competing. This competition contains an idealistic value which constitues the special responsibility of media work.
"Consciousness shows itself, more than any other mental quality, depending on material conditions. It comes, goes, disappears and returns in strict connection with a whole number of material influences on the organ of the mind."
Ludwig Büchner
Continuity is a term from film production that describes the task to maintain a temporal and spatial logic within cinematic realities, that coincides with everyday experience.
This field of tension contains the possibility of fictitious realities to be designed consistently or to deliberatly generate contradictions that may initiate dialectical processes.
When producing documentary content with historical reference, Soyuz Apollo uses contemporary witnesses, among others, to create emotional ties between the audience and the protagonist´s narration.
Experienced and historically documented realities become tangible by the emotional access the contemporary witness can establish.
Creating contradictions is a purposely used method within the work of Soyuz Apollo and an inevitable consequence of confronted models of reality within the work of media. They occur within individual media pieces, as well as in the project´s structure as such. For the recipient they can serve as antithetical factors and promote dialectical and discursive processes.
Cut-Up is a method from literature, the visual arts and music.
It combines different individual elements into a new unit.
Soyuz Apollo uses this method as a dialectical consequence of coincidence
in the synthetic recombination of media products.
"Is control controlled by its need to control?
Answer: yes."
William S. Burroughs
Decision-making processes are not organized democratically at Soyuz Apollo. Collective decisions lead to mediocre or regressive results and are therefore not practical for the project´s workflow. The sole sovereignty, competence and responsibility of the specialized departments, also includes their extensive freedom of choice within their departments responsibilty. Unlimited access to the existing resources is granted.
Soyuz Apollo is organized according to dialectical principles in order to dynamically enhance the internal processes of the project.
In the departments media products are treated as material and mental processes and are on both levels subjected to dialectical processes.
In overcoming existing contradictions and in producing new ones, this becomes an ongoing working principle.
"The dialectic, the so-called objective, prevails in all of nature, and the so-called subjective dialectic, the dialectical thinking, is only a reflex of nature, the movement of opposites, which is valid everywhere and which, through their constant conflict and their eventual merging , respectively in higher forms, just condition the life of nature."
Friedrich Engels
Documentary films can depict medial reality as an objective reality.
An attempt that constantly collides with the use of narrative elements and filmatic structure. An asserted version of truth, that is valid in relation to its own medial rules.
Due to this elementary and inseparable existence of the contradiction within experienced consistency, the documentary film reflects the work of Soyuz Apollo.
"Every edit is a lie."
"Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world."
Jean-Luc Godard
"The Dogma ist worth less than a cowpat."
Mao Tse Tung
Soyuz Apollo has no claim to truth.
The used working methods serve, among other things, to do justice to this principle. The departments make use of various practices to meet the material necessities of non-idealism.
Time-based media information has an order that is structured by sequences of actions. The overall form of media information is thus formed by spatio-temporal relationships.
Due to the influence of the dramaturgy on the reception, the transported content is directed and changed. In the production of time-based media, the dramaturgy is a decisive factor for their functioning.
"From market and advertising psychology, it is known that with a longer information chain, elements that are at the beginning or at the end are better remembered. This suggests that these parts are processed differently."
Julia Henkel
Enactments in the sense of artistic exhibition and representation can create relationships between recipients and the issues arranged therein.
The audience's perception is implicitly addressed in the method of the enactment.
"Perception, according to the cognition scientist Francisco Varela, is not a reflective representation, but an active enactment. The physicist David Bohm put it this way:" We construct space and time for our convenience [...] they are conventions." ..." Not rigid laws of nature, but conventions - habits of consciousness, reality tunnels."
Eberhard Sens
The organizational structure of Soyuz Apollo corresponds to an ensemble.
The specialists in the individual departments, perform their respective tasks as autonomous in order to perform complex, higher-level tasks in interaction with each other.
"A simpler and more familiar example of an ensemble representation is the pattern of lights on a message board. Individually, each light signifies nothing. Only in combination with other lights is there a meaning."
William H. Calvin
Like dialectical, evolutionary factors are one of the central processes that media products are subjected to by Soyuz Apollo.
These include: selection, recombination, variation, elimination and permutation. They are used to generate new media realities in discursive sequences.
"There is nothing permanent in the history of life except change."
Charles Darwin
Fiction, as a hypothetical, mental and narrative model of reality, points across valid rules of other realities to a space of alternative possibilities.
Due to its cultural, evolutionary and dialectical character, fiction is a discursive ensemble, that is part of the work of Soyuz Apollo.
"The Art of fiction is to invent things that are not true. But you have to invent them in such a way that they come true."
Salman Rushdie
"Der Film ist für uns die wichtigste der Künste."
Lenin
As an art form and mass medium:
As a time-based, audiovisual medium, its narrative style is based on a syntax that enables thematic, emotional and aesthetic content to be conveyed on several levels.
The great social importance of film as an entertainment and mass medium with high economic relevance on the one hand and the art genre with a high cultural reputation on the other, results in further relationships beyond the meaning of the individual work.
As material:
Film as a base ans substrate for audiovisual information places special demands on the work of Soyuz Apollo.
From archiving as a cultural asset, through manual processing in production, to distribution via projection, its materiality and technical nature determine its use and its perception.
Format
The technical nature of a certain media format has immediate influence on its production, distribution and reception methods. In the interactions between industrial norm, distribution channel and production methods, a variety of factors determine the perception of the stored information at various levels.
The term found footage describes the use of third-party material, or of third-party works in art, to generate a new, autonomous artwork from it.
In many of Soyuz Apollo's work steps, this artistic design principle comes into play by editing existing pieces of media history and thus converting them into new contexts.
"Creativity isn’t magic. It happens by applying ordinary tools of thought to existing materials…. These are the basic elements of creativity: copy, transform, and combine.”
Kirby Ferguson
Taste, in the sense of "good taste", is a humanistic ideal that consists of aesthetic and moral aspects. The use of ideas, such as those on which good taste is based, must be understood as a limitation for the practice of Soyuz Apollo, since their models of reality do not allow dialectical counter-pairs.
"Having good taste means feeling and acknowledging a law of beauty, means finding, understanding, doing what fits together, even in the region, which is left to the chance of appeal, in the region where no judges hold meetings."
Friedrich Theodor von Vischer
In histotainment, historical events are the basis for audiovisual formats that are created for entertainment purpose. It contains a mixture of informative and dramaturgical elements, based on document, narration and (re) staging. An impenetrable and speculative representative of historical, experienced and media-created reality emerges. The simultaneity of different reality models with their respective claims to truth characterize this type of documentary and thereby the special importance for the work of Soyuz Apollo.
When dealing with existing models of representation, humor can make inadequacies and contradictions of those realities visible. It takes place on levels in which rational and emotional parts are involved and may, as a result, collide. Subjects of complex issues can be experienced immedialtely through humor and its effects
"Humor is the ability to discern in a kindly way the folly in what is considered normal, sublime behavior, and to discern the discrepancy in what appears as a truth." ... "Through humour we see in what seems rational, the irrational; in what seems important, the unimportant"
Charles Chaplin
The mental classification of the ego in presented medial contexts is a psychological consequence that corresponds to the creation of the ego.
The formation of identities and their representation in models and references is one of the interfaces of media and social realities.
"I am not what I am."
William Shakespeare
The structure of Soyuz Apollo is intended to guarantee maximum independence of the project. Collaborations with other institutions of media work and culture should not affect internal ambitions or create dependencies. In terms of maintaining this independence, possible collaborations must be carefully examined.
"Exchange is the most sensible form of dependency."
Thomas S. Lutter
The project structure is intended to promote dialectical and discursive factors and thus produce results that, in turn, promote mutual relationships in exchange with the recipients. Thereby the interaction is a central principle in the work of the project
"Successful cult memes induce intense social interaction behaviour between cult members. This trips the attention detectors."
Keith Henson
Soyuz Apollo uses journalistic forms and content as models of reality within the logic of the medium.
The potential interactions between media, social and subjective realities create a field of tension within which journalism and its forms offer a multitude of creative options of composition.
"The oldest journalists we know were the heralds the Odyssey tells of. They sat at the table of the grown-ups, struck the lute and reported in beautiful verses about the fall of Ilion, which was then twenty years ago. So the press wasn't in a hurry at that time, and the war reports weren't up to date. But they were written in heximeters..."
Victor Auburtin
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Laswell´s model of communication describes a basic model of mass communication, that emphasizes the relationship between channel and effect. This aspect is elementary in the work of Soyuz Apollo, atlthough the model describes the role of the recipient in a passive manner and the path of communication as linear only. Corresponding expansion are required.
"Who says What in Which Channel to Whom with What Effect."
Harold D. Lasswell
The logic used in the work of Soyuz Apollo corresponds to the logic of the respective medium.
Contradiction, consistency, reality, dogma, truth, lie, assertion, document, fiction, etc. can thereby coexist and thus relate to each other.
“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?"
George Orwell
In creating products of a culture industry, Soyuz Apollo applies methods that are based on material processes. Ideal coherences, as they are received in media content, result from material relationships which form their basis.
"Where there is matter, there is geometry."
Johannes Kepler
Soyuz Apollo uses means of narration in its audiovisual products. Within time-based media various narrative styles, conventions and genres can be adopted. A plot can extend the apparent objectivity of contemporary historic, documentary and scientific content with subjectively experienced or invented content.
"Storytelling is one of our ways of expressing ourselves, one of the broad categories in which we think. The plot is its thread of action and its active creative power, the product of our refusal to make temporality irrelevant, our stubborn insistence, to give meaning to the world and our life"
Peter Brooks
In order to meet the needs of the project's objectives, Soyuz Apollo has chosen a corresponding organizational form.
Since established environments of artistic, media or cultural production do not necessarily meety these reqirements the project operates within its own niche that favors the required working conditions.
"The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them."
George Bernard Shaw
Any statement within the media products of Soyuz Apollo must be understood within the context of the medium itself. Applied patterns that might reflect objective valuation only function as a space of media possibilities. They are representations within media realities and not the truth itself.
"What we define mathematically is only a small part of an objective fact, for the larger part it is an overview of possibilities."
Werner Heisenberg
The reorganization of media materials is an important part of Soyuz Apollo's work. As a result (and in combination with other methods) new, independent media products are generated or the individual pieces are put into new contexts within programs or compilations.
"There may be nothing new under the sun, but permutation of the old within complex systems can do wonders."
Stephen Jay Gould
Soyuz Apollo does not see itself as a political project. Statements expressed within its content are only valid within the media realities in which they occurs. There is no claim to correctness and truth beyond the exemplary limits of the medium.
The structure of the project itself only serves the project´s goals and does not represent interests within any social contexts.
"The philosopher who wants to intervene in public is no longer a philosopher, but a politician; he no longer merely seeks truth, but power."
Hannah Arendt
A task of the distribution department is to generate programs from the media products that have been produced and archived by Soyuz Apollo. Programs are designed according to formal and content-related aspects of the media and its channels of distribution.
Technical and format-related aspects are therefore also taken into account, as well as the performance options and the subject, content and expression of the program components.
Projection is relevant for Soyuz Apollo's media work - both in its optical and in its psychological meaning.
The images of a medium, which are transferred to screens with the help of projectors, contain, in a figurative sense, analogies to the images of the psyche. In terms of its meaning, the process thus has potential intersections between material and immaterial imaging. This is expressed in the practice of projection and refers to the visualization of stored images on a surface.
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The realities in which Soyuz Apollo's work is expressed are to be assessed according to the validity of the respective medium in which they are expressed. In terms of content, they are based on concepts that use reality as a model that allows contradictions within. The illusion of the medium is an integral part of the reality it represents.
"To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, means to somehow capture it and thus make it our own. But this approach implies the realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that by creating a substitute we have just woven another thread into the web of our great illusion."
Heinz Pagels
The last step of our internal working processes is to give the media products to reception. There they leave the sphere of our influence and they experience further changes through the recipients who come into action.
The working processes will be continued as an autonomous and individual external service within the audiences.
"It was once thought that the world was just out there, on the other side of the window pane. We are now sure that the perceived world is a construct in itself, a somewhat unstable patchwork of mental models, some of which are stimulated by that out there, some by genetically determined internal grammars, and some by the local cultural templates that we have used from childhood to adopt (including the language we use to categorize and communicate our understanding of the world)."
Damien Broderick
Reproduction is a method that is used in the sections of production and distribution. Replicas, copies and recreations of media source materials, or parts thereof, enable their classification in new contexts.
The process usually takes place in combination with other work methods that, analogous to evolutionary factors, determine the result.
Selection is a working method that is used in all sections of Soyuz Apollo. It affects the characteristics of a media object and is therefore one of the most important processes for the preservation, creation and distribution of media products.
The selective processes usually take place in combination with the methods of recombination, reproduction, adaptation and permutation.
"The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity."
Richard Dawkins
The sources from which Soyuz Apollo draws are products of media history.
These are archived, processed, compiled and thus further distributed in an expanded form.
"Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material."
Jeff Koons
Historically, television is the medium that has made audio visions accessible in the private sphere. In its existence, it has established itself as a mass medium. It produces diverse audiovisual forms of play and (still) is a source of information with a strong influence on social processes. Its audiovisual productions and their effects are subject of Soyuz Apollo's practice.
The transfer of media content into other contexts is one of the main tasks of Soyuz Apollo. It ´s established through recombinational processes within and between the sections of the project.
The transfer of media in form and content into new environments may create interactions that posses dialectical potential.
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Video is the central media in the work of the project. With the meaning of the Latin word "I see", the individual and the singular reception mode are at the center of the medium. Video established the advanced audio vision, a new level of singularity in the reception, and its economic branch, the video home entertainment. Since Digital video technology has now dominated all areas of production and distribution of audiovisual content. Soyuz Apollo is using the various technical and socio-cultural interactions that video created intensely.
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SOYUZ APOLLO
Billhorner Brückenstrasse 40
20539 Hamburg