| VIDEO / FILM / INSTALLATION WORKS: |
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EVERYONE'S |
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| Live performance project of Manfred Hofer and Jade. Everyone's little secret is an audiovisual duo which refers to fashion-inspired influences in design and uses playful elements of exhibiting. The live performance is positioned between art and conceptual design, between experiment and pushing background. Its output is created by recycled objects and new appliances of unexpected components in uncommon ways. Gesture is simulated by quick rotation. Rotating movements break out sometimes and meander across the screen. The rotating axes build graphic structures, small electric motors become innovative devices - a process of form finding which tailors visible traces into the space by the interaction of light and centrifugal energy. Sound patterns based on delayed beats and stretched sounds provide themselves a dynamic interplay with experimental, driving kickbeatbassgrooves which dare a balancing act with all possible and impossible music genres. A mainly improvised set, as open as possible and also entirely concentrated. Music & image production for people who like to abandon to the creative concept and slowly lose contact to the ground. Everyone has a little secret. |
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PROSPECTS |
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| Multi-channel video installation. Modified version of the experimental documentary PROSPECTS [2011]. The term PROSPECTS is used in a more condensed way, in the way of a promise, in the way travel agencies use it for their holiday offers. For this work the interviews from the documentary have been reduced to simple but catchy slogans. |
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UN |
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| The content of this film is the rearrangement of Plato's Symposion using text fragments from philosophical essays by Roland Barthes, Alain Badiou, Blaise Pascal, Stendhal and José Ortega y Gasset. |
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IN THE RE-MAKING [2012] |
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| An experimental film project reflecting the process of film-making. In this film project an actress is directed in a restaging of Chantal Akerman's film 'Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles' from 1975. Re-enacting the contemplative, expanded motions of a woman's daily life, this work demonstrates Schwentner's ongoing investigation into personal and historic (collective) memory. |
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NOCTILUCA [2011] |
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| Audiovisual composition for RML CineChamber [w/ Peter Rehberg]. Live presentation premiered at musikprotokoll / steirischer herbst Graz 2011. |
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CHANTER TOUJOURS [2011] |
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| 14 11 2011 - 06 01 2012. Kryptophon. Hoerstadt Linz Sound installation |
| The sound installation CHANTER TOUJOURS is an allegory: a special sound is extracted from its original context and is transformed into an new one - the always singing cricket prolongs the summer and should be - as sound intervention - hopefully a nice surprise in the cold season. At the same time CHANTER TOUJOURS is an infinitive invitation to sing or make sound - more and almost any time! |
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IT WILL ALL |
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| Text on memo-cube Error correction by repetition? Or realisation by repetition? Can a wish become true if you write it down a hundred times? The sentence IT WILL ALL BE DIFFERENT was written on a memo-cube consisting of 600 sheets. This installation work also refers to the exhibition title AFFENARBEIT [= tough stupid work] at AREA53 in spring 2011. |
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| PROSPECTS [2011] An essayistic documentary featuring women in the Mediterranean who are talking about their ideas of paradise / utopia. HD, 32 min, colour, english subtitles. 2-channel video installation or film version for cinema projection. |
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| LA ROUTE DU PARADIS [2011] Side project of PROSPECTS A map showing the tour I made round the Mediterranean Sea to do research and interview work Light bulbs on cardboard / fixing pins on framed cardboard Installation work |
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MOUVEMENTS/ |
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Video, 10 min Sound: Paul Clouvel [Elektra Music] |
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| CANRANC [2010] Video, 12 min Sound: Paul Clouvel [Elektra Music] |
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| DES SOUVENIRS VAGUES [2009] Video, 8 min Sound: Michaela Schwentner DES SOUVENIRS VAGUES is a short film about visual memories and their repetition, about shifts and refractions. The film's main elements are vaguely remembered, isolated scenes en miniature. They could be from a film, they could also be personal moments of someone. The soundtrack comprises samples of female characters from various film works. |
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SPEECH [2008/09] Video, 8 min Sound: Paul Clouvel [Elektra Music] In her experimental video speech, Michaela Schwentner has taken up the invitation by French musician Paul Clouvel to illustrate his composition of the same name. She trenchantly aestheticizes Paul Clouvel`s soundscape, for which, among other things, he deconstructs the language of contemporary artist Joël Frémiot. SPEECH thereby emerges as a multiply overwritten communication process among artists from various disciplines. Like a choreographer, video artist Schwentner carries out the visual metamorphosis of a standard dance, which begins from something unrecognisable. On the sound track, electro-acoustic processes and intense fragmentation render a text spoken by a dominant male narrating voice increasingly vehement. Schwentner subtly counteracts the sound with soft, abstract bodies pulsating as though ghostly creatures and pink flames on the picture surface. A painterly poetics surrounds Schwentner`s digital structure, which one credits to her intuitive female sensibility. The visual particles, which are constantly subjected to transformations and shifts in rhythm, actually emerge as the trunk and legs of a dancing woman. Half of a dance partner then joins in. Schwentner deconstructs her original material once again [an insert of Ginger and Fred in the eponymous film by Fellini]. The image, which has been alienated by video effects, has a groove to it. The dress swings, transforms, and discloses anew the glory of concise reduction. With speech, Michaela Schwentner continues her clear and independent vision of abstraction. [Petra Erdmann] |
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| PITA & JADE [2008] Live-set at Netmage Bologna.08 Sound: Pita [Editions Mego] |
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| ALPINE PASSAGE [2008] Video, 6 min Sound: Michaela Schwentner ALPINE PASSAGE is a film comprising individual images about a journey across Alpine mountains. The mountains, impressive as a painting, and in front of them a sort of architecture that enables either a panoramic or a close view. |
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| RIDIN' [2008] Video, 5 min Sound: Irradiation |
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| BELLEVUE [2007] Video, 9 min Sound: Michaela Schwentner Snow, fog, clouds and in the midst of it all, a barely perceptible massif. Or, better yet, a white noise from which contours gradually emerge and just as steadily dissolve back into: As though ghost lights in the digital image-fog that dominates the expanse of this composition. A mountain peak, only vaguely discernible for the longest time, that halfway disappears again the moment it appears. The starting material for Michaela Schwentner`s BELLEVUE are webcam recordings from Grossglockner that she collected for months and condensed into a nine-minute time image. Schwentner`s method benefits from the rigid takes, mainly because within them, the interplay of appearing and eluding, of revealing and concealing, can develop the greatest possible effect. Thus, the figure of the mountain uncovers and covers itself in a constant, modulating movement: ridges and slopes peel from the whiteness of the surroundings, to then immediately vanish again within it. Accompanied by a subtle ambient-like rustle, which Schwentner gathered from the direct transformation of the image into sound data, the vision continually clears up and becomes disarranged. As though the mountain, seen and photographed millions of times, does not want to disclose its identity so simply; yes, as though the apparently banal weather panorama recordings harbor a key of sorts to the disappearance of the supposedly most unchangeable natural things. The beautiful view is fundamentally blurred as a result of bellevue. Not by things incidentally blocking it, such as snow, fog, or clouds, but by a basic instability in the process of [electronic] seeing itself. The more persistently it pursues the phenomena, the more they keep themselves covered from time to time. [Christian Höller] |
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COMPOSITION SET // IMAGE TRANSFORMED // MOZART MOVED [2006] |
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Video / 35mm, 1 min Sound: Michaela Schwentner The idea was to transform a picture of Mozart on the basis of a new composition arranged with the so-called musical dice game, sound-controlled manipulation and also a dismantling of the common clean and kitschy Mozart image. A postcard with a bright frontal view of Mozart turns into a rough, decadent picture. This turnaround within an extremely short period of time also represents life in process and decay. The alteration is equivalent to a life cycle: The lush color at the beginning fades, the leaves shrivel, the tree disappears, the postcard with Mozart`s picture yellows and becomes a Mozart of stone. A figure for the ages. The manipulation on the musical level was inspired by the musical dice game as played during Mozart`s day. The composer himself wrote short pieces and re-arranged the individual measures according to a roll of the dice. The sound level of the film comprises short samples of the violin concerto no. 3 and symphony no. 38. |
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| SWINGING [2006] Video, 8:35 min Sound: Michaela Schwentner A bridge with an arched metal structure stretching over it is visible on a white field. The colors are subdued - gray and black, various shades of brown, blue and green - though they seem quite intense on the light background. The places connected by the bridge aren`t visible; portrayed as an isolated structure, it becomes the focus of an analysis in the medium of film.In contrast to some of the other videos made by Michaela Schwentner, the subject is easily recognizable in this case. At the same time the artist discovers an individual life in the architecture, which lets the concrete form slip into abstract patterns. The perspective shifts repeatedly, and different views of the structure appear. One shot fades into the next, and the movement of the pixels can literally be observed. This creates graphic and painterly moments, the play of light and shadow, lines and planes turns into a hypnotic game of deception. The camera`s gaze is directed at the structure`s details and unusual views so that individual portions of the bridge no longer seem to be bound to a certain function, and other fields of association open up in its formal structures. The geometric shapes resemble sketches, the cables between the bridge and its superstructure are like drawn lines, which lends the originally monumental structure of concrete and steel something fragile, translucent and with that a buoyant lightness. In contrast to a sketch, however, swinging also makes the three-dimensional character of its subject tangible, not least through the use of the soundtrac - which was also created by Michaela Schwentner. The shimmering of the dimensions and the materiality of the representation are underlined by the audio level. Each kind of material seems to have its own characteristic sound, and after electronic alteration it creates an acoustic landscape surrounding the bridge, which seems to «swing» from time to time. [Andrea Pollach] |
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| LA PETITE ILLUSION [2006] Video, 4 min Sound: Michaela Schwentner A little story of passions is told in LA PETITE ILLUSION: heavy breathing garnished by a jazzy bass line, a kiss, a woman falls into water at night. While the work`s title is an ironic reference to Jean Renoir`s 1937 «La grande illusion», the association is a dead end: Neither the images nor the soundtrack contains a direct quotation of Renoir`s pacifist fable, nor is a similar motif touched upon. The patina of early sound film which is celebrated in LA PETITE ILLUSION stands as the sole vague connection to the «grande illusion» - the sound and the look, the aesthetic stereotypes of Francophone cinema made between the wars. Michaela Schwentner`s chromatically ascetic electronic manipulation of found sounds and images is a study of emotional images from the history of cinema which is carefully kept in the air. The story told in LA PETITE ILLUSION is itself a kind of little illusion: It has the mere suggestion of a plot, a kind of mini-melodrama with built-in interference. While the narrative lines remain unresolved, irrationally linked as if in a dream, the film`s images themselves become unstable: They seem to melt, run into one another; just after coming together they fall apart, speed up, slow down, hammered with the artist`s omnipresent influence. «Animated Cubism» is the term she gave to her work method: The flat film images are committed to a virtual digital space, a different kind of illusion, and the material is released into a state of partial abstraction. In the referential space, filled with romantic ruins of images, fragments of emotional declamation and salon conversation in French, with canned music and the bright singing of anonymous film divas, emotions are transformed into signals, and the individual parts of trivial film tragedies are translated back into neutral cinematic symbols. [Stefan Grissemann] |
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DER KOPF DES |
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Video, 5 min Sound: Wallner.Stotz.Remsing When Vitus Bering completed his circumnavigation of northeast Asia on 13 August 1728 to prove that Asia and America are two separate continents, the coast of America was covered in fog and remained largely invisible to the discoverer. On the tracks of discovery. and at the same time groping through the dark; a confusing state, the various levels of which are made evident in Michaela Schwentner`s video the head of Vitus Bering. The picture shows the black silhouette of a landscape emerging from a brilliant white. The landscape is grouped on a horizontal and in some places also on a vertical axis. It changes, seems to oscillate between various aggregate states. Forms become visible or invisible; colors fluctuate between white-gray-black. A type of fata morgana in a desert of ice. Also the sound and the text make reference to a state of madness - or at least heightened sensibility; the violin bows are tense, the voices entangle and distort. Konrad Bayer`s text «Der Kopf des Vitus Bering» [1958 ff], which provides all of the quotations, is Schwentner`s immediate reference point. Bayer is interested in the figure of Bering as a location from which relations can be created and quotes André Breton, according to whom reality is not the sum of the facts, but rather, the sum of possibilities. Bayer`s text is a mosaic of facts, thus on the one hand history - and on the other, thoughts and speculations, mounted according to strict rules. He creates a dense atmosphere whose quality lies in the gaps that hold the knowledge of wealth, of reality. Also Schwentner`s video breathes this intensity; text, sound, and image combine to something greater than the sum of what happens and what is heard. It presents the abundance in its emptiness. [Sylvia Szely] |
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| TESTER [2004] Video, 5:25 min Sound: Radian The trio Radian [the track «Tester» was taken from their CD «Juxtaposition» from 2004] and Michaela Schwentner, who has translated several pieces by the three well-traveled sound researchers into images, are a proven team. This is a classic music video, though not really. The visuals are too autonomous, even if Schwentner goes along with the sounds at precisely their rhythm, reflects and emphasizes the growing intensity, and helps accentuate the fractures in the soundscape. The audio level is treated with greater respect than in conventional music videos, and the musical foundation is left unaltered rather than being [re-]interpreted. Extremely economical abstracted means taken from the real world of chromatic- and tonal-value reduction, their selection and arrangement apparently reflecting the title of Radian`s CD, are employed to create tableaus which are scanned by windows of varying size, shape and number - some of them no more than slits - moving over the black picture, and become wholly visible for only brief sequences. Strictly speaking this involves solely a single motif - varied by means of zooms - the only element which becomes recognisable, as all the other subjects are merely suggested. The images dispense with all eloquence, plot, commentary, unnecessary ballast. The result, in terms of the music, is a strangely coherent «enrichment»: Despite the opulent visual level of the finale, the music remains what it is and can be enjoyed as if heard from a CD-player. And even if the other way around you allow yourself to be totally consumed by the images, the music is not forced into the background: images on their way to becoming music. [Werner Korn] |
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| TUCKER [2004] Video, 6 min Sound: Le Charmant Rouge An image is not easy to destroy. It can be split or stretched, blurred or obscured, superimposed over other images or its colors altered. The result will always be an image, possibly less concrete and more difficult to comprehend, but an image nonetheless. Michaela Schwentner`s tucker begins with a brief report, a message from the machine: A narrow strip of electronically manipulated images flashes in the darkness, accompanied by a few synthetic sounds. This is a signal, though it points the wrong direction: Electronic abstraction is hardly the crux of this work. After that the image widens as if it first needed to be released, unleashed. A building is shown, plunged into blurriness, anonymous architecture in an unknown landscape, in the colors green and white with a little blue and black. The instrumental pop of Viennese band Le Charmant Rouge provides the nervous visual arrangement with a thoroughly relaxed foundation. White lines, rigidly set horizontally and vertically, structure the complex manipulations of the image, lend some clarity, even order, where at first glance chaos would seem to reign. The concept of movement is central to this many-layered art music clip: The illusion of an incessant push forward is created by means of montage, in the joining of the images, which themselves seem to be completely motionless. tucker is a work that demonstrates an affinity for abstraction which only peripherally, one could say discreetly refers to the external world. tucker is a film of decay and transformation, a work with uncommon visual power and at the same time a gentle work which deals with shifts in views and aestethicized visual interference. Near its conclusion the artist makes an abrupt switch, a brief plunge into blackness: A yellow field lights up on the left-hand side, to the right a soft red mixes with white and green while the previous conditions are restored in all their beauty. [Stefan Grissemann] |
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| GIULIANA 64:03 [2003] Video, 3 min Sound: Michaela Schwentner On a white background, black rectangles fall from the left upper edge of the picture. They amass to form larger surfaces, to then immediately thereafter shrink or shift on top of one another, and from time to time be lifted off each other by thin white lines. Similar to the cinema screen, the rectangular surfaces carry the schematic, digitally processed image of a woman, which is difficult to recognize as such. Instead, its large-pixel outline merges with the abstract forms, which constantly form anew. Like in a puzzle, individual facial details show up in different places; the various parts are continually put together, yet without ever revealing a completed picture. The stark, reduced soundtrack, which stems from Antonioni`s Il deserto rosso, as does the initial visual material, emphasises the clarity of the images and opens the gaze to the constantly changing forms. The face - reduced to flickering black and white areas - takes its place in this strict composition. At one point, the picture becomes almost completely black from the steady overlapping of different layers. Shortly thereafter, the schematic contours of the face push into the field of vision. In the end it seems to have almost won out over the abstract forms. This impression is supported by the replacement of the noise on the soundtrack with human voices. However, before the music [which begins suddenly], can spread out, and the black and white contours become completely recognizable as the reproduction of a human form, they turn quickly to the side and the picture disappears into the blackness. [Corinna Reicher] |
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| HOW DO YOU WANT M.? [2003] Part 3 of MAZY Video, 4 min Sound: Heinz Dietsch Part 3 of MAZY - a project by choreographer Willi Dorner, who invited 3 artists to do interpretations of his dance piece. What is the human body able to sustain when subjected to devices that record sounds and images? And what can be done with the human body when it tends to evade the representational codes of these devices? MAZY [which means labyrinthine), based on the choreography by Willi Dorner, offers three answers formulated with the dispositives of video, film and computer: videographic marionette, expressive filmic being and computerized trace of movement. Michaela Schwentner draws the final conclusion from this working-over in HOW DO YOU WANT M.? The body is no more. What remains are nearly incomprehensible layered visual traces, created in a computer, that condense into abstract geometries in motion. Breakbeat fragments force us back to the point at which the question of what a human body can do is posed again. [Michael Palm] |
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| JET [2003] Video, 6 min Sound: Radian This video`s exhilarating dynamism results from a precisely composed interplay of color and form which structures the viewer`s perception of it significantly. Michaela Schwentner`s work method closely resembles that of electroacoustic sound artists Radian who employ a variety of painterly elements which are allowed to interact, overlapped or contrasted. Vertical and horizontal lines are arranged asymmetrically to resemble a grid over a diffuse reality which shifts up or down along with the lines, appears to move past or into the fore- or background or dissolves, parts of it disappearing completely. The view into the depth of the space is blocked repeatedly, the view of the real world remains fuzzy and fragmentary. The grainy black-and-white of this fleeting reality, reminiscent of photographs or archival film footage, passes at a speed which precludes registering it in its entirety; solely subjective assembly is possible. Variously sized orange dots and squares employed minimalistically are in harmony with musical punctuation, creating a picturesque moment. The result is counterpoint, not only with regard to colour, to the otherwise cool shades of the images moving past, but also spatial. While the multiple layers suggest depth, the dots remain on the surface. They appear and disappear, then become permeable and lay circular colour filters over the images behind them. The journey through this landscape of sound and image passes quickly, apparently stopping only when the music is extremely concentrated. It stops in fact when the viewer is gently brought back to earth by landscape scenes at the conclusion. [Christa Benzer] |
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| TAKE THE BUS [2002] Video, 4 min Sound: General Magic Layers, grids, loops and filters: Michaela Schwentner`s video take the bus makes use of the basic means of composition employed for the piece of music it accompanies, applying them visually. While there is no direct translation of the music, which is largely without reference, a transfer takes place from one medium to another and the images are derived from the tracks` structures. There are the various rigidly, at the same time playfully reduced sound layers: General Magic loosely overlapped slowly grooving shuffle sounds, and interference is created through five to six simultaneous tracks in each individual sound layer. The same happens in Schwentner`s pulsing black-and-white animation: Small fields filled with silhouettes blink along with the ping-pong beats in grid lines layered in two dimensions. The result is a mostly asynchronous flickering which conveys the impression of acceleration. When a sound layer is added, rectangular frames, transparent blocks and lines of pixels move across the pulsing field from the right or from above. The individual layers are looped: The old General Magic obsession with driving and speed is in this case slowed to a leisurely swaying «bus ride». The same applies to Schwentner`s video translation, which spices up the music`s pleasantly slow pace with almost prickling warmth. Finally, the constant filtering becomes a principle of composition as the video departs from the music`s blueprint: Reference material is no longer discernible, solely «negative images» are created with digital filters, each one forming a separate world of its own. The «bus trip» through their audiovisual circuits has begun. [Christian Höller] |
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