SPACE LAB I. Licht und Raum [light and space]
20.11.2003 8pm
Medienwerkstatt Wien, Neubaugasse 40a, 1070 Wien
curated by Martina Tritthart



This video program shows international short films, which discuss perception, imagination, time, space, light and most of all the sensuous quality of spatial perception. The program is a phenomenological exploration of the relationship between appearance and reality of our spatial environment.

Part I Films by Peter Rose:
Peter Rose’s works in film, video, installation, and performance have received extensive national and international exhibition, including shows at the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Yokohama Museum of Art, and exhibitions at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
In their exploration of perception, language, time, and mythos, Rose’s works lead us to new forms of cinematic and linguistic structure and take us on peculiar journeys that modulate between the sublime and the ridiculous. Rose directs the Film Program at the University of the Arts and resides in Philadelphia.
His work has drawn significant support from an impressive roster of sources, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Pew Foundation, has been the subject of a number of articles on contemporary media art, and is included in several major international collections.

Metalogue (1996, 3 min)

Metalogue has been described as a cross between a “speech” and a “fireworks display.” Digital editing techniques have been used to reflect and refract a complex monologue about memory, time, and language. By embedding the corresponding gestures in a spectacular diachronic array, Rose creates a new form of poetry. Metalogue won a Bronze Award at the New York Short Film and Video Festival and has been shown at the Oberhausen International Film Festival, the Hamburg Film Festival, and the World Wide Video Festival.

The Geosophist´s Tears (2002, 8 min)
Shot during a seven-week cross country road trip in the aftermath of Sept. 11th, the work is symphonic in ambition and offers a complex meditation on the iconography of the American landscape. Drawing on the stratagems of the early geosophists, who believed that through the operation of a mysterious instrument landscapes might be placed in an emotionally meaningful correspondence with one another, the work uses a variety of visual algorithms to propose and discover surprising structural features of the uninhabited American landscape. Sounds for the work were produced by a remarkable antique slide rule, dating from 1895, that was untouched for over forty years and whose peculiar threnody is both mournful and rhapsodic. In its fractured and phantasmagoric reworkings of the horizon, the work offers us unstable metaphors for the state of the union and a respectful homage to the traditions of painting. The video was shown recently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and has recently been acquired by the Centre Pompidou.

The Darkening (2000, 8 min)

is a Stygian night journey animated by unknown languages, illuminated speech, and mysterious conjugations of light. The work is animated by the idea that if language is to give some shape to thought, it is language as invocation, rather than denotation, that we must consider, and from consequent experiments with a form of performative image-making that integrates speech, gesture, sound and light in order to conjure images through a kind of cinematic incantation.
It has been shown at the European Media Art Festival, at the Oberhausen International Film Festival, at USC’s Art In Motion festival, and in the Black Maria Film and Video Festival.

Rotary Almanac (2000, 4 min)
A two channel video installation that presents a complex contrapuntal collage of the details of a landscape seen through the seasons. The work was exhibited as part of the Delaware Art Museum
Biennial in 2000.


Ben Franklin Dreams of Metaphysics
(1990 ,3 :15 min)
was part of a three-channel video installation commissioned on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Franklin's death. A kind of post-modern media biography, this 20 min. work celebrates and re-imagines Franklin's sensibility from the inside, presenting a dreamscape in which Franklin’s thoughts on research, invention, politics, lies, electricity, women, and language are projected into contemporary idioms. The work was installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1991. This is the first of seven sections, a tongue-in-cheek Rosicrucian-like meditation on the metaphysical analogies between life and electricity. A solitary traveler moves through a river landscape. It is chaotic, electrified, metaphysical. Electrical flow is identified and analyzed and instructions are given for navigating through virtual space.

Part II
Peter Weibel
The endless Sandwich (1969, 1:40 min)
Between TV and viewer there is a function, i.e.: The user switches the device on and off. This function is illustrated and content of the program. A "sandwich"- character of real process and figure process, of reflection and action. In the screen there are viewers seen sitting in front of their TV. In the last picture a disturbance occurs, so that the viewer who watches this scene has to get up, in order to repair the failure. Thus the screen of the next viewer is disturbed. The disturbance reproduces itself, up to the real TV set, so that the real viewer must rise the same way, in order to remove the disturbance. Time delay: The real action is the final point of the reproduced process.

Michael Langoth
Retracer (1991, 3:30 min)
The current of time is caught in a loop and accelerated. Everyday life noises become rhythmic patterns and finally a rising tone. The video is limited by the temporal resolving power of the medium. Theoretically it would be infinite.

Van McElwee
Space Splice (1994, 12:06 min)

Space Splice is a form of conceptual architecture that could only be realized in video. Forward motion and edits connect interior volumes shot in the United States, Europe, and India. The viewer experiences unimpeded movement through a network of hypothetical spaces.

Stupaform (2002, 7:30 min)

The result of extensive location shooting, Stupaform gathers into one moment the myriad manifestations of the Buddhist stupa, or pagoda. Stupaform oscillates between the inner and outer aspects of this symbol of transcendence, distilling an essence. The actual structures become electronic phenomena, apparitions of the stupa’s inner form. The sound of a Nepalese bell follows this vector, a physical reflection of an unstruck vibration.

Jasmin Leb- Idris
Anguilla (1997, 5min)

Anguilla, an eel on a cinematic journey. The movements of an eel and close-ups on its skin are the content of this film. Interference and malfunctions are not disguised in the work of the filmmaker and architect Jasmin Leb-Idris, but rather given prominence to create new landscapes of light and shadows.

Nicole Pruckermayr
Zweigang (2003, 1min)

The spatial perception of an empty corridor triggers the imagination. The “subjective” view of the observer overlaps the “objective” view of the corridor.

Holger Lang
Shy (2001, 7min)

Shy is an observation without comment of a street corner in Madrid in November 2001. Within one week about 24 hours of footage were recorded, shortened to a quarter of the length and then accelerated to a 7 minutes long composition .
Shy is about meeting in the public area, the temporary occupation of a space, of a crossing, an urban section, by passing or short staying humans. The transitory nature of the shared time and of the moments spent in walking by becomes conscious during this static observation of a spatial segment. The movement of humans in systems they created produces a pattern which reaches further in meaning than individual fates can do and which is able to represent the mutuality in the superordinate structures of human existence. The relativity of personal movements gets visible through the distance of the accelerated spacereferred view.

Ulf Staeger
Doppelgänger (1997/ 2003, 5min)

Everyday scenes from Vienna and Berlin in juxtaposition. Vehicles and people become concepts and symbols in a single urban reality in which the spatial distance between the two cities disappears. A sequel to „Duocity“.

Duocity (1992, 4min)
A short stroll through Vienna and Berlin, through an everyday world of shapes banished into our subconscious in which we try to orientate ourselves.