Whilst visuals have been par for the course in the music scene for a good two decades, attempts to marry literature and visualisation art are just taking their first faltering steps. Those familiar with the mentality of the German-language literature business may be tempted to explain this with reference to a certain reticence about visual media, which many subliminally perceive as an over-powerful competitor in the struggle for audience attention and, more generally, as a threat to written culture, and consequently to culture in its entirety.
The decisive factor determining the dearth of such visualisations to date may however lie in something more banal, namely the distance between the two scenes. As a consequence, the idea of cooperation never even arises, as those involved have no idea who they could cooperate with. This assumption is suggested by reactions in the run-up to the atdeparture symposium »Quer«, when a search was launched for authors and visualists willing to appear together in a »literatur lab« (literature laboratory) format: without exception, every single artist contacted was interested in taking part in the proposed cooperation. At the same time it transpired that there were no existing personal contacts between the visualists and authors, and neither group had anything but a very modest knowledge of their counterparts’ work.

The most recent changes in how literature is mediated and presented in various media formats provide good reasons to change this state of affairs and to enquire more closely into the potential for visualisation of literature; audio books have developed a permanent presence and have gradually changed habits of reception and it seems reasonable to expect that electronic books will have a similar impact. At the same time, organised events have become dramatically more important in the literature business, although there still seems to be little idea of how to set the stage for a reading. This could offer new angles for approaching inter-media cooperation, which may be exactly what is needed to keep new audiences engaged. Finally, we are currently experiencing a significant moment in cultural history, as the first generation of »digital natives« is coming of age, and can engage seriously with literature. This is the generation that no longer encounters text primarily in printed form, but experiences it instead as a screen-oriented, Internet-based volatile hyper-medium with scope for user editing.
In order to determine how accurate such appraisals are through the prism of specific examples, »literatur lab« asked the eight (teams of) visualists - Neon Golden, Starsky, 4youreye, bljak!, Annablume, Strukt, Valence and Tagtool - to work on accompanying visuals for texts by Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Kathrin Röggla, Thomas Stangl, Marlene Streeruwitz, Ferdinand Schmatz, Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl. The text spectrum ranged from short stories to essay-style prose or novel excerpts, as well as poems; the texts were read either by the authors or by actors. Gregor Ladenhauf embedded poems by Trakl and Rilke in his musical accompaniment to the respective visuals.

Reflecting the diversity of the texts that formed the point of departure, the visuals, which were all top-notch aesthetically, were also very diverse. Although this made the presentations visually impressive, difficulties repeatedly arose in the interplay with the text, particularly in the case of the longer prose. At times some of the visuals responded to the text in an almost illustrative mode, only to flip into seemingly unconnected abstraction a moment later.
One instantly successful transposition was created by the visualist Starsky, with a one-to-one re-enactment of Elfriede Jelinek’s »Die Kinder der Toten« (»The Children of the Dead«) using dolls, Austrian-style petit-fours, Mozartkugel confectionery, toy cars and photos from tourist brochures. Clearly a notch above the other works, this grotesquely humorous micro-theatre, projected live, also received the most resounding applause of the entire afternoon.

Visuals for prose texts pose enormous challenges for visualists and apparently pre-suppose – as was clear in Starsky’s piece – a captivating design idea, for otherwise the audience cannot manage for long to pay equal attention to following both the text and the visualisation – and therefore opts sooner or later to concentrate on one level and neglect the other.
Poetry appears to be more intrinsically accommodating of visualisation. Its rhythmic structure, repetitive patterns, songlike nature and brevity is more readily compatible with the visualists’ practice, which was originally developed working with music. The best example of that is the visual piece for a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, analysed to death for decades in school classrooms. In the transposition by visualist duo Valence and musician Gregor Ladenhauf, Rilke’s »Karussell« (»The Carousel«) had a quite astonishing freshness and urgency. Valence and Ladenhauf brought out an eerie, surreal dimension in the poem, giving an exemplary demonstration of what the poet Ferdinand Schmatz probably meant when he declared before the event that »an extension of the senses through the senses« is the criterion in creating successful visualisations.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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