For those of you who missed Dietmar Offenhuber’s brilliant Upgrade! Boston presentation last night, here are some of the projects he shared with us (headphones recommended):

please stand back (excerpt) from stadtmusik on Vimeo.

zurückbleiben bitte!: “Above and below do not exist at first, and other indications of direction do not work either. The picture itself is an agglomeration of details that are constantly being created and disappearing, becoming and ceasing to exist, assembling and breaking up.” (Marc Ries)

Dust till Dawn from dietmar offenhuber on Vimeo.

dust till dawn: fun with lasers, noise and dirt by maex decker, dietmar offenhuber, ushi reiter: DTD kicks up a lot of dust – with atmosphere being its sole medium of interaction. The project is a sound installation for a room with dusty floor, on which a number of phonographs are placed, playing back silent vinyl records. As a result of the visitors movements, particles of dust accumulate in the grooves of empty records and define a musical score. A carpet of monochromatic light visualizes the turbulence in the atmosphere and detects its ephemeral structures, which are directly linked to the noise generated by the dusty records. Over time, the physical impact of the interaction irreversibly consumes the interface and destroys the needles of the phonographs.

mauerpark (excerpt) from stadtmusik on Vimeo.

mauerpark: The winter landscape of mauerpark in berlin turns into a theatrical stage, populated by pedestrians and cyclists following various, sometimes mysterious activities. What seems like a slice of daily life is in fact heavily digitally manipulated. The soundtrack creates a second space, sometimes contradicting the visual events in the picture. The travelling focus directs the visual attention and is controlled by subtle acoustic ambience. Its unnatural strength has a miniaturizing effect on the whole scenery.

Credits

sam auinger
dietmar offenhuber
hannes strobl
actors: katrin emler, daniel scheffler, martin offenhuber

loopcity from dietmar offenhuber on Vimeo.

loopcity: describing the city through repeated everyday actions

In his novel L’Innommable Beckett describes a strange world made up from a complex system of repetitive cyclical events. What is described as social architecture – the spatial / temporal organisation of everyday life- is often very similar to this: people do the same things at the same time. They follow the same routes in regular periods. Sometimes when riding the tram, visiting a cafe or going to the supermarket I recognize strangers who seem to live in the same “loops” like I do. The Project is a subjective description of the city as a set of repeating actions and events on different scales. A space composed of closed loops, intersecting each other. each loop is a thematic entity, a story: a stroll through the shelves of a local supermarket. Looking for a free place in a parking lot. A tourists guide round through a district. A hotel maid’s morning round.

besenbahn (excerpt) from stadtmusik on Vimeo.

“the freewaysystem in its totality is now a single comprehensible place, a coherent state of mind, a complete way of life” – Reyner Banham

“It’s subject is not “natural” perception, but perception put in motion by modern means of transportation, and therefore implicitly the history of an epochal transformation of the way in which time and space is experienced.

It has come to a preliminary end in suitable contexts – for example cities such as Los Angeles, which has been shaped by the history of motorization – where moving perception now seems to be regarded as integral to natural perception.

The thesis presented by besenbahn in this regard would therefore be that the specifically aesthetic quality of such animated perception is absent from the forms of audiovisual representation which are already considered natural (such as indicating movement by means of a tracking shot): In its fragmentation of the continuum of perception, the “subjective geometry which defines space through intervals of time” (Dietmar Offenhuber) illustrates a manner of experience which could remain submerged because it is already so familiar.” – Vrääth Öhner

2001, 10 min
music: tamtam (Sam Auinger, Hannes Strobl)
more information on www.stadtmusik.org
video: Dietmar Offenhuber