Deborah Stratman‘s film, It Will Die Out in the Mind, is featured in the Techno Mystic program curated by Michael Connor for MOCAtv, MOCA’s video art channel on YouTube. The series explores the incongruous co-existence of mystical beliefs and modern technologies. Along with Deborah’s film, Techno Mystic also includes work by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Sam Fleischner, Seth Price, Shana Moulton and Jon Rafman.
Stratman is a 2012 Film/Video grantee, and was recently selected by popular vote as one of our Community-Supported Artists. It Will Die Out in the Mind is a short meditation on the possibility of spiritual existence and the paranormal in our information age. Texts are lifted from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, in which the Stalker’s daughter redeems his otherwise doomed spiritual journey. She offers him something more expansive and less explicable than logic or technology as the conceptual pillar of the human spirit.
The title is taken from a passage about time from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed:

Stavrogin: …in the Apocalypse the angel swears that there’ll be no more time.

Kirillov: I know. It’s quite true, it’s said very clearly and exactly. When the whole of man has achieved happiness, there won’t be any time, because it won’t be needed. It’s perfectly true.

Stavrogin: Where will they put it then?

Kirillov: They won’t put it anywhere. Time isn’t a thing, it’s an idea. It’ll die out in the mind.