- HD-video, black and white, stereo, 12’22”
The experimental film ‘RELEASE’ ranges from a conceptual work of art to a sensual cinematic experience – clashing and uniting both, creating a hybrid form, each questioning and deconstructing the other. It explores the subject of ‘disintegration’, breaking down a unity into its smallest pieces, leading to temporary destruction; from something to nothing, from presence to absence, making each particle, each aspect, each layer visible on an abstract level – letting unity go, releasing its form.
Eastern and western aesthetics, form, montage, time, space, narration, sound, association, expectation and media reflexive attention to the digital carrier medium itself – by turning to the film’s image resolution (in German, ‘resolution’ and ‘dissolution’ are the same word: ‘Auflösung’) – form the basis of the work. The two most common image compression types JPEG (MPEG) and GIF radically destroy parts of the film, frame by frame, destructing them by implementing different algorithms and degrees of data loss (partly known from glitch art), creating disruptive factors in form of defects which trigger irritation and distance the audience from the otherwise poetic film repeatedly. Breaking the digital image into its single parts and pixel information, disassembling it completely, visualizes the subject matter of the film and reflects the digital medium as well as cinema itself.
A mix of every day sounds like cars, electric humming, crowds, tv sounds, re-arranged Muezzin-calls, ventilation systems and indistinguishable texture-like noises expand the visible space and recurrently collide with the abstract and deformed black and white images. A few times an almost ‘cinematic’ orchestral music fills the space yet never lasts long enough for the audience to completely delve into it.
Intermittently withdrawing the film by clashing continuity with disruption and abstraction transmits the theme on the visual, acoustic and medial level. The audience is challenged to let go of what it experiences. By working with every aspect inherent to the digital film medium, breaking it down into its essential parts, (re-)building a cinematic experience that is recurrently ruptured, ‘disintegration’ and ‘absence’ become intellectually and emotionally perceivable.
Analogue photo series RELEASE.
Crew
Marcel Zaes – sound
Nela Adam – performer
Sponsor
Thanks to Vienna City Council of Culture, New Media & Film Department for supporting this work with a grant
Screenings
CINERAMABC, 2015
CINERAMABC VIVO, 2nd June 2015, 7 PM, Santa Catarina, BR
42nd ATHENS INT. FILM + VIDEO FESTIVAL, 2015
Competition Experimental Film, 8th April 2015, Athens/Ohio, USA
21st INT. REGENSBURG SHORT FILM WEEK 2015
Special Program, 20th March 2015, Regensburg, DE
13th INT. FESTIVAL SIGNES DE NUIT PARIS, 2015
Syntox: Image – Sound – Interference, 28th November 2015, 6 PM, Paris, FR
ALTERNATIVE FILM / VIDEO FESTIVAL 2015
Main Competitive Program, December 2015, tba, Belgrade, RS
