FFFOUND#25.01
2025

10“ Monitor with mediaplayer, textile cable, cardboard
37 x 26 x 7 cm
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QuickTime, 2160x3840 Pixel, HEVC/H.265
00:21 Min. in loop each
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ED 1/1 +1AP

A Quiet Rage Against the Economies of Distraction and Destruction
By Daniel Blochwitz

When living in a time where digital media begin to affect our sense of that time lived, and even obscure life itself, then we ought to realize that we have taken a wrong turn somewhere. Any gesture that goes against the grain of the zeitgeist must be called radical. One artist who is doing just that is Matthias Gubler (*1981 in Zürich), who offers us pause, to reconsider the overlooked, seemingly obsolete and often fragile fragments of the everyday. In his ongoing video series fffound, for example, he transforms the mundane into a space of contemplation, through the meticulous animation of ordinary objects, challenging our perceptions of time, value, and presence. His work opens up questions about how we engage with the world around us and the significance we assign to the seemingly insignificant.

Where the 2023 iteration of fffound relied on an open-frame, skeletal structure that lined-up multiple, hand-held monitors, inviting viewers to rummage through their contents, the current version of the work turns each screen into a distinct object of contemplation. Hand-crafted frames and freestanding pedestals made of cardboard combine a DIY aesthetic with clean minimalism and handsome design sensibility. The work shifts from self-directed discovery to presenting ‘found objects ’as entities doubly on display: animated on screens and exhibited within the gallery. In this duality, they gain new value by re-familiarizing us with a world we thought we knew. By choosing cardboard—at once fragile, recyclable, and ubiquitous—Gubler situates his work within the material economy of global circulation. The same material that delivers endless commodities to our doors here frames a loop of objects already discarded. Packaging becomes pedestal, the disposable becomes display. This play with value and mediation leads directly to another dimension of the work: how we encounter objects less and less through their physical presence and more through the screens that frame them. This tension lies at the heart of Gubler’s work: the world reaches us through smartphones and tablets that dictate what we notice, calling attention only to what appears on these devices. By focusing on banal, everyday objects, many from a distinctly industrial era, Gubler recalibrates our sense of worth, as well as our perception of time, reality, and materiality.

Through repetition, isolation, and the loop’s quiet insistence, fffound casts the unassuming material protagonists for a new role on a stage of meaningful and ethical reconsideration. In our culture where attention privileges luminous rectangles, the work subverts the function of today’s screens into an almost obsolete machine that is doomed to play just one thing over and over again. These loops point back to the Machine Age, recalling pre-cinematic devices such as the zoetrope and phenakistiscope, and appropriate them to decelerate the pace of turnover while extending our attention span. Also, this historic arc from the steamy and greased engines of human progress to the sanitized appearance on today’s screens utters a quiet irony: what we know about the world is through two-dimensional effigies we see on hand-held devices but not by handling depicted objects or working those machines. Gubler underscores this with his crafted pedestal: an analogue armature supporting a digital animation of an analogue fragment. The object must be mediated to be seen, but the mediation is stripped of distraction and spectacularity. Instead of infinite feeds and scrolls, the loop enforces duration, recurrence, and slow recognition. And what we may take away from fffound is: our alienation is not just from labor, but from the world itself. Our minds and bodies can attest to that.

Gubler’s practice belongs to a lineage of video and new media artists for whom the use of found material is never neutral. From Harun Farocki’s forensic dissection of visual regimes to Hito Steyerl’s critique of digital circulation, and Tacita Dean’s contemplations of temporal fragility, the deliberate choice to work with the “already-existing” carries political resonance. These practices foreground the infrastructures—economic, social, ecological—that shape how we see and what we value. Gubler extends this tradition in a quieter but no less pointed register: his loops do not expose the violence of systems but instead revalue the seemingly banal and antecedent machines. This speaks to today’s false sense that things necessarily become obsolete at some point, even if we still use ancient technologies every day. Capitalism tries to make us believe that progress is that constant, linear process of something new replacing something old. That is the basis for the myth of “economic growth”, which is incompatible with sustainability. By foregrounding the unnoticed and obsolete while reframing it with minimalist precision, fffound asserts that even the smallest gestures of attention can destabilize the economies of distraction and destruction that dominate contemporary life.

If earlier generations of artists dismantled the capitalist spectacle by revealing its mechanisms, Gubler’s strategy is almost inverse: he constructs small, fragile mechanisms that resist this spectacle altogether. Cardboard, loops, fragments—these are not just materials but propositions for how to inhabit a world saturated by speed and excess. In the quiet of fffound, value is not extracted but re-circulated, and attention itself becomes a resource to be sustained rather than consumed. In this sense, Gubler does not simply show us objects differently; he models a different economy of looking and doing, one that insists on care, duration, and the possibility of inhabiting a different rhythm of life.