NEW AGE VOLTAGE: CONTEMPORARY DIGITAL SOUND AND VISION
Wednesday 17 October 2001, at 6:00pm
London Barbican Prompt Corner

smokfraqs
Billy Roisz & Dieter Kovacic, Austria, 2001, colour, sound, 4 min
Distorted geometric forms are used to create a type of grainy texture, or a flickering background of subdued coloration in front of which white particles dance. Frames are repeated into infinity and a drop meanders across the finely grained strip. Eight 30-second sequences punctuated by black frames: smokfraqs, a serial work, is made compelling in part by its structural clarity and formal simplicity. (Isabella Reicher)

SEVENTHS SYNTHESIS
Steven Ball, UK, 2001, colour, sound, 7 min
Animated abstracted synthetic sound-to-image/image-to-sound digital material parsing experiments collide with trad pagan Beltane folk dance remixed Seven Step Polka in fragmentary, fractured fast digital scratch mix.

AZUR
Myriam Bessette, Canada, 2001, colour, sound, 3 min
Composed of synthetic light and voice samples, Azur attempts to establish an emotional link with the spectator.

INSTRUMENT
Jurgen Moritz, Austria, 1997, colour, sound, 5 min [Christian Fennesz]
Instrument is reminiscent of found footage shot a long time ago: six seconds of a girl moving. Moritz calls it ‘six seconds of innocence’. He manipulated the material until only fragments of this innocence remained. To the pumping rhythmn of the music the girl is simultaneously present and absent, never totally present. Moritz makes her intangible and thus creates space for ones own fantasy. (Lies Holtrop)

OVERFART
Ben Pointeker, Austria, 1999, colour, sound, 6 min [General Magic]
Inspired by the filmmaker’s interest in early Romantic landscape painting, especially the works of Caspar David Friedrich. Though “Temko” by General Magic is virtually the sole element of the soundtrack, this work was not intended to be a music video. The abstract spatiality of the music, which was apparently set in contrast to the images, and their cycles complement one another to produce the same intangibility.

CHROMINANCES
Nicolas Berthelot, France, 2000, colour, sound, 6 min
I believe that each image is creative of music and that each sound is a creator of images, and the two entities are independent of each other. Chrominances is built like a conversation between visual and musical reasoning. A new dialogue is born, a dialogue which neither visual, nor aural. It is a dialogue which binds the audio-visual spectator with the object, a dialogue which is not imposed, an original dialogue on each vision, each hearing. I tried to make a creative film of freedom, where the eyes and the ears would be two dancers who always dance together for the first time.

comp.tot4: ZARAKESH
ReMI, Austria, 1999, colour, sound, 10 min [Renata Oblak]
During a transmission, a video recording was damaged by defective equipment to the extent that none of the original concrete elements were visible. The fragments remaining from the process of decomposition were fed into a defective computer system, and a camera was able to capture only a portion of the stream of information. The result: the originally concrete footage was reorganised in a different aesthetic context through these limitations.

track 09
[n:ja], Austria, 2001, colour, sound, 4 min [Shabotinski]
A lively game with spatial structures. The constant modulation of scales and the resulting shifts in the grid’s spaces provide glimpses into ‘microscopic’ spaces.

ENTRÉE
Herwig Weiser, Austria, 1999, b/w, sound, 9 min
A reflection on the fusion of viewer and visual world in hi-tech cinema locations. The raw stock of the videotape is grainy film footage shot in the Parc d’image in Poitiers: the spherical crystalloid monumental architecture on green fields, oversize screens and dark arenas reserved for audiences. Multiple visual echoes, double images and the industrial staccato of sound samples on the soundtrack represent the technical subsumation of people subjected to the dictate of a robot-controlled event that consigns the viewers, unconsciously, from one experimental world to the next, and causes them ultimately to vanish in the process. (Reinhard Wolf)

TRANSISTOR
Michaela Schwentner, Austria, 2000, colour, sound, 6 min [Radian]
Accompanied by short, choppy segments of noise fragments, geometric gridworks appear with equal abruptness, as in a visual staccato. This not only places a visual matrix underneath the rasping, eruptive sound as a foundation, it also reveals the underlying matrix-like quality, the locking function in the digital culture as the interface at which graphic and acoustic elements have always overlapped. (Christian Höller)

ILOX
Karoe Goldt, 2001, Austria, colour, sound, 3 min [Rashim]
In a barely noticeable way, vertical strips with shades of red move intermittently to the rhythmically snapping and crackling soundtrack by Rashim (Yasmina Haddad and Gina Hell). The vague shadow of a twig appears through the strips of colour. The work uses this radical reduction to create an enormous amount of tension. To achieve this result, Karo Goldt animated over two thousand digitally manipulated photographs of a red, leafless plant called ilox. The influence of Colour Field painters such as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt on the filmmaker is obvious, whose work in this medium followed her involvement with painting and photography. (Norbert Pfaffenbichler)

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