Works

__ f-o-r-m-e-l__, Tomas Eller 2007
4’20 Minutes
Tomas Eller’s video art is produced in a close interrelationship between science, technology and art. He draws on the view of reality taken in the natural sciences, where it is formulated as a vast simulatio that still requires decyphering (Howard Rheingold, Reisen im Cyberspace).

In the work __ f-o-r-m-e-l__ (2007) he explores the laws of gravity and centrifugal force as competing forces, on the basis of the flight path of a helicopter over snow-covered mountainous terrain. In the continual attempt to hold between touching down and drifting back upwards the helicopter hovers above the grey and white, snow-covered ground without ever actually landing. Only the trails left by the wake become increasingly visible in the position concerned, revealing rocky ground beneath to provide an image with similar characteristics to one of the artist’s earlier etchings. The sides of the helicopter are covered with light-reflecting foil, creating the effect of two-dimensional surfaces that have been added to the image - addressing the constructed nature of three-dimensional images and the dissolution of form as they appear to dissolve into the background and the helicopter look like a skeleton. Working in collaboration with a physicist, Tomas Eller had the exact relationship between the opposing forces involved in the flight calculated, and has used the mathematical formula for the title of the video.
Sabine Gamper (2007)

 
Around And Around, Annja Krautgasser 2007
1’40 Minutes
The cinematic has always maneuvered in the charged field of visibility and its disruption or dissolution. Images appear and produce an order of visibility, yet to the same degree, cut and montage, slowing down and speeding up, superimposing and suppressing simultaneously drive this order to a border that it both constitutes and threatens, or at the very least, questions.

Around and Around by Annja Krautgasser refers to this border in multiple ways: there is, for one, the horizon, both end and unknown beginning, the division of the world, the demarcation of the field of view; there is also the panorama, the omniscience, the ‘scopic regime of modernity,’ the transgression of every containment of the gaze, removing its boundaries; and then there is still speed, acceleration, the crisis of the view, if not its catastrophic failure. And naturally, the cinematic medium (not video or film) is present, which Annja Krautgasser does not thematize, does not show in the montages of horizons rushing by (distinctive mountains and nearly abstract ‘deserts’), but rather, exhibits, one could say. Is it inherent in the event of the medium - as Jacques Derrida wrote - that what appears also disappears at the same time? Then Around and Around seems to work down to that vague ‘seam’ of the visual on which the filmic image threatens to go out, to disappear behind the horizon, and appears to tackle this erasure with ecstatic performance (i.e., with cinematic means). A postponement of disappearance that even seems to permit the ‘space’ of the visual in the first place.
Reinhard Braun, Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt

Bicycle And Wind Josh Müller 2008,
3’42 Minutes

Bicycle And Wind has been shot in 2008 during the production of the video piece Bikes (HD, 3.52 min, 2008).

The video documents a simple nocturnal setting in the artist’s studio: two strings and a bicycle. After turning on the camera, Josh Müller walks into the frame, sits down, grabs the two strings and starts moving the bike. The sound track consists of wind being simulated by mouth blowing; the imagery shows the bike being pulled back and forth via the strings.

Bicycle And Wind is an approximately four minute long video piece that reveals the hidden principles used in the shooting of Bikes. Abstracted by simplicity, the document describes a poetic moment, and thereby goes beyond the essence of Bikes. Using a substitute setting reconstructed in an interior space, Bicycle And Wind is a simulation of reality, a reconstruction of a poetic moment, a construction of a new reality.

Finally the wind ebbs away and the strings are put down to the ground. Josh Müller moves out of the frame and switches off the camera.

Bicycle And Wind is the second piece in a series of five - works that could be described as subtitles - themselves autonomous - for video pieces involving more complex production techniques.

Five Patterns, David Muth 2008
1’34 Minutes
courtesy: Edition Medienturm, Graz

The term “Pattern” is little short of summing up a graphical and conceptual genre in new media - traditionally one might simply say swatch or ornament as well. In electronic arts the term describes a process driven by a structured formula, whereby a fluid matrix emerges through the repetitive assemblage of single elements, permanently rearranging itself by algorithmic means. This digital method applies mostly to the design of graphical elements, referencing classical abstract examples, or rather developing them further through the application of current technical possibilities.

David Muth breaks with this common practice, and he does so by working with this story in a pictorial and humorous fashion. Muth photographs patterns of industrially manufactured covers that adorn the seats of public transport and obviously don’t promise any additional artistic value – to a greater degree their masking abstracted compositions seem to be precondition for diverse usage, resistant against contaminants. In close-ups Muth zooms into the encountered graphical structures and blends them with further patterns, as if he would like to invoke a discursive massacre. Applied arts meets fine arts, abstraction meets the real life.
Sandro Droschl (2008)

Goldfarmer, Axel Stockburger 2008
13 Minutes
courtesy of the artist and Jim and Mary Barr
 
The video “Goldfarmer” addresses contemporary economical and cultural transformations by interviewing a so-called goldfarmer, the player of a popular online game who generates an income by playing. The player has been rendered anonymous by digitally adding the avatar he embodies in the game environment over his face. The phenomenon of goldfarming, that has become a viable form of work, specifically in Asian countries, is used as a model to engage with the transformation of the border between work and play that seems to be characterised by the current dominance of economical paradigms over all other areas of life.

Concept, Camera, Editing: Axel Stockburger
Digital Animation and Motion Capturing: Franz Schubert
Sound Edit: Sebastian Schlachter
The interviewee wishes to remain anonymous.

Elements, Dariusz Kowalski 2006
8 Minutes
Sound: Stefan Németh, Mastering: Martin Siewert

Elements is a continuation, both stylistically and programmatically, of Luukkaankangas   updated, revisited  (2004). In this work data images animated in loops on the web site Alaska Weather Camera Program show occupied terrains in deserts of ice. At the same time Elements does not make reference to a precise object; it relates directly to space, to impregnable landscapes and uncertain horizons. While the web-cam’s motifs are small airfields in Alaska and the weather conditions there, time lapse and collage make the functional data disappear in the same way as the concrete objects, cars and planes. They yield to a rhythmization of the space that generates its elementary appearance as an interconnection of white planes that are empty of meaning. The landscape s nature is subject to this fast alternation, driving clouds and snow, extreme intensities of light. The video evokes a different sense of time, as the objects comprehensible daily drama is removed: they are there and then gone; present, and then absent. In other words they do not follow a teleological plan, and are like insignificant kinetic elements whose visibility comes between the images. The images decide whether the bodies, including the landscapes, will last or not. At the same time it is an element of the light that recovers the image, stark sunlight burning into the camera’s lens and subjecting the video material to interference. Element theory becomes a theory of conflicting forces. One could say that Elements is a horizon film rather than an object film which however works incessantly on the dissolution of the horizons with the purpose of approaching a kinetically contingent  abstraction.
Marc Ries, Translation: Steve Wilder