In March, Austrian digital video productions of a mostly experimental bent were again presented at »Diagonale,« the festival of Austrian film. Curators Barbara Pichler and Norbert Pfaffenbichler merged together the sections »Austrian Abstracts« and »Music/Video Programme« that had featured in the previous three years to form a single series under the title »Video Visions.« »Video Visions« provides an overview of new audio-visual works in which the components of image and sound interact on an equal footing.
In the Music/Video programmes of 2000 and 2001, visual autodidacts from the club scene (among others) called the conventional video clip format into question by fusing and rhythmicising existing tracks from the Electronica scene with digital images, while the parallel programme »Austrian Abstracts« brought together somewhat more rigid abstract approaches, where artists, in particular from the multimedia and graphic design area, extended their work at the computer into three dimensions, often using their own sounds. However, it was never really possible to draw sharp dividing lines between the conceptions of these two predecessors of »Video Visions.«
This year, »Video Visions« included 25 videos. According to the catalogue, curators Barbara Pichler and Norbert Pfaffenbichler intended »to dispense with self-imposed conceptual restrictions, and make the compilations more diverse and varied.« But the next step would have been to break up the scenes, opening the programme up. Where were collaborations coming from somewhere other than an experimental, electronic »community,« for example the hip-hop videos commissioned by the Waxolusionists or Total Chaos? And why were there no dancefloor clips like the one Tina Schula made for Louie Austen\'s »Amore«? »This isn\'t maybe,« with visuals by Bert Hunger and Wolfgang Werzowa, was the only video produced on a »professional« budget and made in collaboration with the label. This state of affairs can of course be seen as a reflection of the difficult situation faced by video makers in the commercial music scene.
Most of the »Video Vision« works were made on a low budget and independently. In »Blinq,« Billy Roisz successfully and radically challenged the concept of image-sound synchronisation, thus turning away completely from any type of music clip format. »In my video works, I\'m getting more and more interested in breaking up familiar patterns of perception. I\'m rapidly moving away from putting pictures to music, and instead explore the spaces separating sound and image from the recipients,« says Roisz. She asked musicians from Germany, Austria and Japan (including Boris Hauf, Chrisof Kurzmann and akoasma) to provide her with »mini-tracks« with a maximal duration of 30 seconds. Roisz then made picture sequences of the same length to accompany them, often digital grids of a cell-like appearance, which she then detached from the sound in the final version, giving the pattern: sound & black leader/picture & silence/sound & black leader/ ...
Besides the videos that extended graphic and musical elements using special software, it was interesting to see the relatively widespread usage of found-footage material from the sixties and seventies (by mvd, Angela Lehner and Alexander Ivan, for example). The fact that the retro-veneer can easily be scratched off - and this is meant as a compliment - was proven by Thomas Aigelsreiter with »Key West.« He superimposed and combined black-and-white sixties pictures from the holiday paradise of Florida. Aigelreiter, who also works as a comics artist and illustrator under the name Auge, compresses and merges restless pictures of things like fast car drives and highways with beach shots in which people laze around in bathers or surf. The music, added after editing by Thomas\'s father, composer Rudi Aigelsreiter, plunges »Key West« into an almost David-Lynch-like mood. The idyll, accompanied by sounds that bring Angelo Badalamentis to mind, is given a jolt, and the intensifying restlessness builds up a disturbing chain reaction.
While many of the »Video Vision« entries noticeably used a monotone or reduced palette, the fascination of »mir mig men« by Karø Goldt resulted from its unconventionally gentle colour scheme. Goldt used photos of soldiers that she had taken at the International Aerospace Exhibition/ILA Berlin 98, manipulating handmade colour prints of them, scanning them into a computer, and finally editing them into a video. »Each soldier taken alone is a phantom,« says Goldt, who came to film via painting and photography, »and, at least as an individual, more a symbolic figure than a person.« In »mir mig men«, a »male cult in the sphere of war« only appears fragmentarily. It becomes unfocused, overlaid with pale colours. Cockpits, uniforms, shaven heads, sinking deeper and deeper into white to the accompaniment of Rashim\'s sound.
According to the collective wr, an omnipresent technological fetishism is becoming rife in the present flood of digital pictures. In opposition to this trend, the group presented »sigma 3,« a single unedited and uncut tableau to the music of the same name. Wr placed a roundabout at the centre of the picture for five minutes. It turns around, lights flashing, with only a few people riding on it, while in the foreground a child in a toy car races again and again across the bare scenario. »sigma 3« has a subtle humour, and more: with the gentle electronic sounds of mimisecu as a background, a Burgenland fair, which at first glance might seem rather shabby, appears almost enchanted. »We no longer see what we would expect of a provincial show event, but something new - a deconstructed, re-encoded experience, without exposing it to all the various software programmes,« wr says.
»Realtime« by experimental filmmaker Siegried A. Fruhauf is also based on a strictly minimalist concept. Fruhauf wanted to make something »that is reduced to the essential characteristics of the moving picture: time and light.« In »Realtime,« we can watch for four-and-a-half minutes how the sun moves in realtime from the edge of the picture to its centre, before disappearing behind a cloud. The picture is accompanied by »It\'s an ordinary world« by Jürgen Gruber and Christoph Ruschak. The background is black, the sun a green ball. The coloration was created during the shoot through the necessary shading of the lens and the filters put in front of it. »Realtime« is an attempt to teach the eye, which has now become used to rapid image sequences, to again experience time through slow movement. At the same time, the title is an ironic allusion to the present development in electronic media, where »realtime« promises the possibility of faster and faster production and reproduction. Fruhauf, who is usually more involved in researching and using the medium of film, would also seem to represent a tendency in the young Austrian avant-garde, where artists are employing New Media and video as well as experimental electronic music in their work to an ever-increasing extent.