RELEASE

ARTIST-STATEMENT

The experimental film RELEASE operates in multiple layers, ranging from a conceptual work of art to a sensual cinematic experience – clashing and uniting them, creating a hybrid form that intends to work on both levels, each questioning and deconstructing the other.

My wish was to create a film that explores the broad subject of disintegration. Dealing with the sub-themes information, stimulus, presence, absence, flaw/defect and fragmentation, the next aim was to analyze and reflect the medium digital film – especially comparing regular cinema to experimental/artistic film, and trying to create a form of film that could be appreciated in a cinema as well as shown in an art gallery. Another interest was to place the digital film in its context of the Internet era, exploring how it changes our way of perception.
The German word Aufloesung -transl.: dissolution- is the same as that of Bild-Aufloesung -transl.: image resolution. This coincidence and sameness served as a starting point on a medial and content level, with the word Aufloesung referring to the digital image itself and to the general process of dissolution.

The footage was shot via storyboard on Malta in 2010. The performer Nela Adam and I filmed many hours underwater without oxygen supply, shooting 2-5 minute shots, repeatedly resurfacing to review the footage and discuss the next shots. The same year a rough cut was made. In 2011 I finalized a first version, yet was unsatisfied. The film felt too poetic, too clean and cinematic, it left no critical impact. I felt it didn’t yet capture what it was about on the superficial layer disintegration nor did it yet reflect the medium. I needed to find a way to keep the audience from being immersed by the film without questioning it, at the same time wanted to use cinematic tools to create an aesthetic and emotional language that would hold the audiences attention and transmit the theme on a subconscious level too.
By 2012 I had completely fragmented the first version. To start the film with a long and intense sequence of moving plants and light reflexes, creating a stimulus satiation by visual information overload that would slowly dissolve into emptiness throughout the film was the only concept that remained.
Slowing down the film to its single frames and integrating stills were important steps, as was the inclusion of black frames. The digital carrier medium of the film started to play a key role. It became clear to me that I had to focus on the essence of digital information and its processing in order to reflect and analyze the medium and to convey the subject matter of the film: 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 and releasing its form.
By 2013 - with a grant from Wien Kultur that helped me focus on the film for two months without distraction - I finally had my breakthrough, realizing how I needed to break the film into its single pieces to make it work, using all available perceivable parts of the medium, clashing them against each other, abstracting and dissolving them.
The most important part was to create disruptive factors that would trigger irritation and distance the audience from what they see again and again. To achieve this I worked on its form, montage, time, space, sound, association, expectation and started to direct media reflexive attention to the digital carrier medium itself by turning to the films image resolution. I integrated fragmentation and abstraction into the moving images by utilizing the two most common image compression types JPEG, MPEG and GIF.
In the process I started to radically destroy segments of the film, frame by frame, blowing them up, tearing them down, distorting and disrupting them by using different algorithms, compression types, filters, degrees of data loss, of error and defects. By these means I was able to create a source of irritation, a visual impulse, repeatedly creating a distance between audience and film. Breaking the digital image into its smallest single parts and pixel information, disassembling it completely with GIF and MPEG-compression allowed me to visualize the subject matter and to reflect the digital medium itself. Simultaneously, tiny editing features became more and more refined, almost fading to invisibility unless watched in slow motion. To do all this without losing the films sensual and emotional quality to stay approachable was a huge challenge.

Another important factor was sound. I wanted the undefined, timeless space of the visual layer to converge and recoil with mundane real life acoustics. Sound samples were collected during my travels in Egypt, Malta, Helgoland, America and Italy and then post-edited and interwoven by sound artist Marcel Saegesser, who enriched the collection with his own samples, arranged minimal music for strings and created the final sound concept with great attention for detail. The final mix of every day sounds like cars, electric humming, boilers, crowds, tv sounds, re-arranged Muezzin-calls, ventilation systems and indistinguishable texture-like noises managed to expand the visible space and let it 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.

Visual disintegration, fragmentation, clash, contrast, abstraction, discontinuity, stills, superimposition of imagery in different forms, transparency-layers, clash of sound and image, black frames and white frames, multiple degrees of image compression and defects became the main tools of the film. Continuously eluding the film from the viewers grasp by disrupting it thus helped to transmit the theme on the visual, acoustic and medial level. By working with every aspect inherent to the medium, analyzing each segment carefully before breaking it down into its most essential parts, I was able to finally implement the subjects disintegration and absence without losing the cinematic approachability of the film.