The Graz art association Medienturm has decided »due to the often inadequate sustainability afforded by the exhibition system« to open a distribution channel for contemporary experimental pictorial art by developing a series of DVDs based on four video works commissioned each year. In this way, they hope to reach a »wider qualified public and new groups of collectors«. The question is whether releases of this kind should not at the same time be addressed to a redefined target audience. With an edition of 18 and a subscription price of 220 Euros, the DVDs might very well appeal to institutions and »old« collectors, but not to the »popular« audience, who, considering the progressively greater interest in art shown by the mass media, might likewise be interested in this type of edition. Is it so absurd to think that a DVD series featuring experimental video works, released in large numbers at a reasonable price, might find favor with certain groups of consumers, just like music CDs or films on DVD? Like a kind of electronic counterpart to a picture hanging on a wall?

A viewer’s first encounter with a reMI piece is usually ambivalent. Trying to find a system or creative intention behind the flickering color fields and seemingly chaotic form changes is difficult. Even if you know that they are based on an interference principle, a certain order in decomposition, the images irritate more than they captivate. Their »anti-form« is just too apparent.

Perhaps the meaning behind the images can be captured through an unintended intervention. After all, a DVD player allows one to stop the flow, to »generate« a still image. The result may be surprising. Nothing is as expected. The image frame now on the screen is something you couldn’t see before: it consists of coherent abstract wall paintings. However, the film knows nothing or hardly anything about these components of itself, the individual images. Because this is not what they are. They are first and foremost the result of a fundamentally new order of imagery. The whole comes first, and then the parts. The destructive attack/operation is carried out on sequences that already exist as such, recycled material from earlier works, a kind of »live« found footage. If the establishment and breakdown of signals occurs so rapidly that the naked eye has no time to make out anything like a single image, this is not due to the speed of the sequence but rather to the compositional practice being turned on its head. Unlike with film or video works, the shot, frame or other unit is not created first and then successively and continuously put together to form a whole film. Instead, the vital flows of existing data sets are themselves the object of designed interferences. One might also say that the body of given data complexes as such, as a whole or as »individual shape« (Lev Manovich), is the object of the operations. And this body can be endlessly huge, an »organless body« (Deleuze/Guattari), a »multiplicity of unity«.

Actually, it is merely »a picture« that is not composed linearly or sequentially, but out of layers in space along a spatial montage, a many-layered picture that grows together when played, vibrating on the surface as an amorphous, flickering body of light. What we see is »a body« in permanent dissolution – not into discrete parts, but into energy fields. At the same time we hear notes, the sounds of these operations, which are evoked by the dissolution, the liquefaction itself. Audio and video sources are networked, intermeshed; the desemanticizing of the body of data takes place visually and auditorily in realtime. One might call them sublime decompositions. While reMI used to generate the required system crashes and manipulations to the hardware themselves, these are now programmed using free software (PD = pure data = public domain). Violence itself has congealed into a program, into a system.

In sum, one might say that reMI pursues a method for image and sound degeneration that is not interested in results – and that to some degree does not even recognize these (we’re talking about 30% gray area here) –, but rather in strictly observed methodical, mathematical interference strategies, on the dissolution and decomposition processes themselves. An aesthetics of anti-form.1 Once the eye has become accustomed to perceiving this, nothing stands in the way of progressively greater enjoyment. Because the dissolution of sense is, in the case of reMI, inversely proportional to the enhancement of sensuality.

http://www.medienturm.at, http://remi.mur.at

 

 

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