STChM - What’s About?
Stoichemaan, a partnership comprising an unnamed director-cinematographer duo, operates at the obscure intersection of high-concept media, narrative abstraction, and theoretical cinema.
Proponents of meta-representation and recursive image-making, Stoichemaan claims an ethos rooted in defiance of linear narrative and the pursuit of what they ambiguously term “contextual dissonance”—a praxis unmoored from conventional filmmaking, with works that are, in their own words, “transposed disturbances” of modern visual ontology. Stoichemaan’s productions emerge as “anti-narrative artefacts,” characterized by their membership in the Collector’s Forum and alliances with experimental societies such as the Swiss Noise Academy, the Dialectic Union of Visual Sciences, and the Hermetic League of Perceptual Deviants.
Their oeuvre includes long-form films, episodic series, and so-called “meta-documentaries”—works engineered as self-negating studies of format and form. Stoichemaan’s practice is typified by their loyalty to the cryptic and their self-imposed mandate to eschew accessibility, as evidenced by their extensive index of intentions, or “indexicals,” which is attached to each project. These twenty indexed points, each presented as a dissertation-length exegesis, are rumored to contain speculative footnotes in fields ranging from imaginary cartographies to synesthetic linguistics.
The Stoichemaan Indexicals
Index of Transcendental Voids – An homage to Wittgenstein’s philosophy of silence, coupled with an experimental nod to the “void spaces” theory of the Swiss Noise Academy. Visual Amnesia Practices – Examining their “subtractional” cinematography, inspired by anti-pictorialism and Dadaist visual interruptions. Theory of Absent Dialogue – Rooted in Stoichemaan’s dictum that dialogue “falsifies image,” based on their association with the Lucid Mutism Syndicate. Recursive Cognition and Fictive Memory – An epistemological venture into cinematic memory, tracing ties to the Dialectic Union of Visual Sciences and Bachelard’s “poetics of space.” Metaphysical Documentarism – A non-linear and temporal mapping based on anthropological “mythic realities,” invoking Latour’s theories of facticity. Cinematic Simulacra and Hyper-Ritualism – An effort to reconstitute Baudrillardian simulation within the frame-by-frame ethos of the Stoichemaan method. Absurdist Archiving – In partnership with the Nomadic Cartographers’ Union, this encompasses their project to collect “documentary fictions” from para-realist sources. Extrapolated Truisms and the Index of Sciences – A “nonsense taxonomy,” with reference to what Stoichemaan calls the “pseudo-rational language of archival fallacies.” Polymorphic Sight and the Synesthetic Apparatus – Exploring the theory that sound and image are mutable, derived from Stoichemaan’s collaborative work with the Swiss Synesthetic Language Institute. Dialectic Stammering and Filmic Hesitation – A “rupture technique” that rejects continuity, inspired by Barthesian structuralist ideas and their linkage to filmic surrealism. Spectral Footnotes – Their film’s meta-narratives are annotated with “spectral” commentary, drawn from the imaginary linguistics of Stoichemaan’s Lexicon of Absent Forms. Ontologies of the Obscure – Articulating a taxonomy of “visual enigmas,” echoing the Stoichemaan position that art’s primary obligation is to remain undiscernible. Perceptual Fragmentation Praxis – Derives from early studies with the Hermetic League of Perceptual Deviants, a split-screen technique yielding cinematic “anomalies.” Theorized Dispersal of Narrative Loci – Positioning the visual frame as “an unresolvable paradox” and rejecting causality through a fragmented structure of time. Negated Focalization – A study of “defocalized” cinematography, structured after the Stoichemaan ideal of “pure ambient interference.” Chronotopic Defiance – An anarchic engagement with Bakhtin’s chronotope, integrating Stoichemaan’s tendency toward multi-layered timelines. Non-Linear Epistemologies – A fusion of dialectics and paradox, defining what Stoichemaan terms “oscillatory consciousness” in visual production. Imagined Noise Framework – Enacted as both philosophy and practice, it underscores Stoichemaan’s alliance with the Swiss Noise Academy to explore sound beyond comprehension. Transpositional Cinematic Syntax – Stoichemaan’s attempt at “disordered syntax” in film, based loosely on Wittgensteinian language games and non-hierarchical structuring. Monadic Visualism – Derived from Leibniz, this concludes the index by regarding every frame as an irreducible “monad” of perception.