Please note that all of the films in this programme contain flashing and strobing images. 

Sonic Cinema is thrilled to present an evening of recent films by Austrian audiovisual artists exploring the boundaries of perception. Through the concepts of visual music and synaesthesia –a neurological condition that causes a blending of the senses– these formally adventurous works blur the boundaries between the visual and sonic arts. From glitching algorithmic compositions to deconstructions of genre cinema, this programme features six digital projections by Tina Frank, Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Rainer Kohlberger, NO1, Peter Kutin & Florian Kindlinger, followed by Billy Roisz’ and Dieb13’s (a.k.a. Dieter Kovačič) live A/V performance TWIXT.

Billy Roisz and Dieter Kovačič (TWIXT) will be in conversation with Atau Tanaka following their performance.

Programmed by Oliver Dickens. Special thanks to Fielding Hope at Cafe OTO, Vanessa Fewster at ACF London, Richard Clark at Radiant Circus, Isabelle Piechaczyk & Gerald Weber at Sixpackfilm, Andy Jenkin, and Gareth Evans.

Dedicated to the memory of Louis Benassi and Peter Rehberg.

Supported by:

SONIC CINEMA
Sonic Cinema is a research project and event series by Oliver Dickens, exploring the intersection of moving-image, sound art and experimental music practice. www.soniccinema.org

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PROGRAMME

Frozen Jumper, Tina Frank, 2020, 7 min
Sound: Peter Rehberg

“Peter Rehberg’s track Frozen Jumper begins in hit-and-run style with a pulsating noise texture. Flickering, nearly rectangular patterns join in on the image plane, at first in black-and-white, bringing to mind the sprocket holes in celluloid film and, not least due to the lack of geometric precision, giving the impression of having a pre-digital origin. As the soundtrack rattles on in a rather minimalistic way, the pattern’s twitchy dance is submerged in various warm hues such as yellow, pink, light green, and light blue, which in a different rhythm and to a more agreeable music could be perceived as the signature of slightly psychedelic retro ambitions.” – Thomas Edlinger

HEAT, Peter Kutin & Florian Kindlinger, 2020, 16 min
Sound: Peter Kutin, Florian Kindlinger

“Heat is made visible and audible – or the other way around – the pulse and harmony of particular instruments is translated into thermal images: the synesthetic profit of the transformation fuels ever new image/sound discoveries. Florian Kindlinger and Peter Kutin brilliantly adopt this approach in their imagistic musical suite HEAT. Four stringed instruments (an upright bass, two cellos and a hurdy-gurdy) combine with diverse percussion instruments to constitute an ensemble generating a finely structured composition propelled both visually and acoustically by extraordinary moments of synergy.” – Christian Höller

Thorax, Siegfried A. Fruhauf, 2019, 8 min
Sound: Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Jürgen Gruber, Anna Katharina Laggner

“Rattling, diamond shaped refractions of light: a projector? fluorescent tubes? It turns out to be more like a "human machine" the filmmaker is dissecting with a fine surgical blade. And so commences an imagined dolly shot into the bloodless, post-humanoid body, travelling into an abstract space that occasionally seems to become concrete of its own accord before dissolving back into glistening streaks and ultimately, wide expanses: a cinematic worm hole leading behind the images, where the sluggish human eye is and must be subject to a trick of light arrangements.” – Sebastian Höglinger

ROTOЯ | Sonic Body, NO1, 2020, 13 min
Sound: Peter Kutin

“ROTOЯ | Sonic Body is the multimedia work by artist collective NO1 (Peter Kutin, Patrik Lechner, Mathias Lenz). (…) [A] physically intense perception cinema and phenomenological study. At visual and acoustic levels, the video confronts the fundamental categories of movement, time, and space and makes references to Paul Virilio’s “raging standstill”; the crystal images of Gilles Deleuze; and psychedelic objects, such as Bryon Gysin’s Dreamachine.” – Shilla Strelka

not even nothing can be free of ghosts, Rainer Kohlberger, 2016, 11 min
Sound: Rainer Kohlberger

“Rainer Kohlberger’s audio-visual compositions are always fierce attacks on the human system of perception. His algorithmic works have little in common with conventional film and video. Kohlberger uses the possibilities that the present digital projection technology offers in a radical way. However, what binds him in terms of intellectual history with the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century is the constant search for point zero, as well as the pleasure in technical and aesthetic experimentation. No motion pictures meet the retina, but instead, impulses and waves of pure light. The extreme light-dark intervals incessantly vary, climaxing in a black-and-white stroboscope storm.“ – Norbert Pfaffenbichler

Who´s Afraid Of RGB, Billy Roisz, 2019, 8 min
Sound: Billy Roisz, Susanna Gartmayer

“Who´s Afraid Of RGB continues a direction clearly evident in THE and TOUTES DIRECTIONS (2014 and 2017, both created together with Dieter Dieter Kovačič), digital works through which Billy Roisz specifically engages cinema and its formulas. Paralleling her previous treatment of the horror film and the road movie, Who´s Afraid Of RGB subjects the genres of romantic movies, dramas, and melodramas to Roiszian compression.“ – Alejandro Bachmann

TWIXT, Billy Roisz & Dieb13, 45 min, live AV performance

TWIXT is a new duo-project bringing together Billy Roisz’ and Dieter Kovačič’s (a.k.a. dieb13) works as film directors and their activities as live musicians. Over the years, the two have directed and produced several experimental short films dealing with classical film genres such as horror, westerns, or road movies. The films explore the inner mechanisms of well established cinematic conventions and turn them into an immediate sensual experience. TWIXT uses re-arranged footage of these short films as a score for a live soundtrack and fuses abstract and concrete imagery and sounds into a synaesthetical and synecstatical media-meltdown.

Billy Roisz & Dieter Kovačič in discussion with Atau Tanaka