PNEUMA MONOXYD
Saturday 25 October 2008, from12-7pm
London BFI Southbank Studio

PNEUMA MONOXYD
Thomas Köner, Germany-Serbia, 2007, video, colour, sound, 10 min
As surveillance becomes a fundamental of today’s society, Köner’s work focuses on its implications by monitoring observation and usurping its tools. With the intention of taking a step forward from here, the artist began to invent his own imaginary tool. The scenes in Pneuma Monoxyd are observed with such an imaginary tool. Its ability to unlock future, past and present unveils the moment as it is being pieced together, blurred and unstable. Premonition, memory and splinters of ‘here’ and ‘now’ become perceptible as part of the fabric of the observed time. A static gaze of a Balkan market unveils the present moment as a porous frontier and seems like a window looking out to the beyond. (Transmediale 2008)

Thomas Köner attended music college in Dortmund and studied electronic music at the CEM-Studio in Arnhem. Extending his explorations of sound and duration to images, he began to work on video installations, photography and net art. Alchemie (1992) was the first of a sequence of collaborations with film artist Jürgen Reble in which sound and image were integrally manipulated during live performance. Köner has also composed music to accompany historic silent films for the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. He has been awarded the New Media Prize at the Montreal International Festival New Cinema New Media (2000), the Golden Nica at the Prix Ars Electronica (2004) and the Tiger Cub Award, International Film Festival Rotterdam (2005). His installation Suburbs Of The Void received the Transmediale 2005 award in Berlin and was presented at La Biennale di Venezia, Teatro La Fenice, as a live performance that the same year. Köner participated in the Media Art Biennal Seoul in 2008, and is currently working on a suite of five permanent sound installations commissioned by the Musée Rimbaud in Charleville-Mézières. www.koner.de

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