The Netherlands Media Art Institute presents in collaboration with the Sonic Acts festival an exhibition with works related to the Sonic Acts XII theme: The Cinematic Experience. All works presented create various forms of cinematic experience, ranging from music to visual art, installations and media arts.
The festival will focus on the rich history of the cinematic experience, from magic lanterns, colour organs and zootropes to experience machines and immersive environments. Sonic Acts will also peer into the future. Will cinema distance itself from narrative in the near future? What is the prospect for celluloid? And what role will sensory deprivation play in future cinema?
Works presented:
probe – Boris Debackere
probe – noun, an unmanned exploratory spacecraft designed to transmit information about its environment. Cinema is a virtual capsule with a projection screen as a window, which gives access to an audiovisual trip through time and space. As soon as the film starts the projection surface becomes invisible. It becomes the magic window of the cinema capsule that engages the whole body through the eyes and ears, and abducts it to another time and space. The film machine transforms reality by generating mental activity in the viewer: cinema as a dream machine for condensed experiences and emotions. probe is an interactive installation in which the relationship between the viewer and the screen is central. The position of the viewer determines the creation of generative sound and image that physically take the viewer on an audiovisual trip.
Scape (2007) – Kurt Hentschläger
High definition video 166:9, surround sound, 23’00 Scape is a contemplative work, a video-landscape with surround sound in which time is the subject. Time contracts only to ultimately expand. A bare-bones minimalist tree in black and white moves in and out of focus in a slow pan evoking the scrolling of a Zen ink drawing of bamboo. The focus slowly shifts and dissolves at the edge of our perception. Scape exists at these borders of perception but also at another: the border between the representation of reduced but iconic imagery and pure abstraction. Scape is a phenomenological work, expressing the a-temporality that occurs during the process or perception – or consciousness itself.
OSC (2006) – Ulf Langheinrich
OSC is an installation dealing with interference, slicing time and the perception of time itself. The visitor experiences a fascinating and disturbing transformation.
Soil (2005) – Ulf Langheinrich
Four virtual horizontal displays glow in the darkness like aquariums. A core of dimensionless abstract movements derived from normal narrative film material is presented in four almost identical versions. They drift apart and re-sync again at random. The sound is almost inaudible. Soil was originally created in 2004 and is the first result of ongoing research into time structure and field creation. Soil simply states a field. The question was whether such a diffident approach would still
create work that successfully conveys a specific vision of time, depth and purity.
Low Resolution Cinema (2005) – Julien Maire
Low Resolution Cinema is a 128 x 64 pixels projection that represents in an abstract way the geopolitical space of Berlin. The piece is based on reducing the resolution of the image and tries to ‘decompress’ the image in a three-dimensional space. The projection is produced with a special projector using two black and white Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD) that move inside the projector. The horizon, or border of the image is physically cut, as both screens are physically cut in half to display only the upper or the lower part of the image. Low Resolution Cinema was developed with the support of the Conseil Générale de la Moselle and in
collaboration with Nobuyasu Sakonda (JP) and Jean-Pierre Fargeas (F).
Exploding Camera (2007) – Julien Maire
This celebrated installation transforms the exhibition space into an experimental film studio reminiscent of a battlefield. Through a deconstruction of media-image production, the absurdity and the lure of facts are brought to light.
Biographies
– Boris Debackere (B): is an artist and teaches at the Transmedia and audio visual department of Hogeschool Sint-Lukas . As a media artist his main interests are the possible integration of different expressive forms, with an emphasis on electronic sound and image. His most recent work and research focuses on translating and transforming the cinema concept into other forms such as Live Cinema and audiovisual installations.
– Chicago-based Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger (AT) creates dramatic audiovisual environments. The immersive nature of his work reflects on the metaphor of the sublime. Between 1992 and 2003 he worked collaboratively as a part of the duo Granular Synthesis. Employing large scale projected images and drone like soundscapes, his performances triggered the viewers on physical and emotional levels, overwhelming the audience with sensory information. His more recent solo work further researches the nature of human perception and the accelerated impact of new technologies on individual consciousness.
– Julien Maire (F): is an artist and performance artist, living and working in Berlin. In his work he deconstructs and re-invents the technology of audiovisual media. His works are exhibited internationally, and have been shown at Sonar, Ars Electronica, Tokyo, Melbourne and elsewhere.
http://julienmaire.ideenshop.net/
– Ulf Langheinrich (D): founded the media art collaboration Granular Synthesis together with Kurt Hentschläger . They collaborated on numerous large scale immersive installations such as Modell5, Noisegate and Areal. Since 2003 Langheinrich has realised several solo projects aimed at achieving a direct sensory impact. They focus on creating specific modulations of the projected material in time and in the projection-space, and effecting interference movements between the perceptive and processing potential of the eye-brain-apparatus.
http://www.langheinrich.info
Exhibition Opening Times
Opening Thursday 21 February 17:00 h.
Different opening times during the festival: Sonic Acts XII – The Cinematic Experience
21 24 February, Amsterdam
22&23 February 13:00 – 20:00, 24 February 13:00 18:00
Regular opening times after festival period:
Tuesday – Saturday and the first Sunday of the month Sunday 2 March 13:00 18:00 h.