Early morning September 26, 2016 film photographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth and I crammed camera, film stock, tripod, audio equipment, printer, a few miscellaneous props into the trunk of a taxi. It took about five minutes to get from my apartment to Anker Hotel. We put everything on a luggage trolley, got in the elevator and went up to a room on the 6th floor.

A few days earlier I had emailed Pål a sparse ‘manuscript’ entitled Røveren (The Robber). The film lasts just over 20 minutes. The premise is simple: The pages that make up Robert Walser's novel Røveren is copied by means of a compact camera and an inkjet printer. The narrative provides a detailed documentation of the technicalities of this process.

Two ideas formed the basis for the film: One was that of a blind, or at least uninterested, “reading machine” consisting of human and non-human components that by its operations recovers the unreadability of a text. (Walser’s original manuscript was written in nearly illegible microscript that it took researchers decades to render readable.) I also wanted to capture the particular sounds that cheap inkjet printers and compact cameras produce while operating, to accentuate friction in the machinery. The squeaks and hums of the printer churning out sheets of paper is occasionally joined by the higher pitched noise of the camera repeatedly trying to calculate its autofocus.

Around lunchtime, after completing about half of the ‘scenes’, we went and bought a pizza. This was left in its cardboard container on the bed, so that it, now in a half-eaten state, was included in what ended up being the film's opening sequence.

We finished early evening and took a taxi back to my apartment with equipment and props. Later that night, thanks to Pål, I managed to get the exposed film stock onto a shipment to a film lab in Stockholm, organized (and paid for) by an advertising agency that had also shot analog film that week. The material was developed and uploaded to an ftp server a few days later.

A frustrating week of editing followed. I always labor to bring the material together in a way that generates some value X that exceeds the sum of the parts. What usually happens, though, is that little by little my ambitions adjust to the properties of the actual material. One day I woke up after a long night of editing, turned on the computer and played back my latest edit and realized that, all of a sudden, it ‘worked’.