Cityscapes

The city as a topos of modernity continues to provide fascinating new motifs for film and video art. In particular, architectural constructions, acceleration and movement in the big city challenge formal considerations that represent an extension of everyday, fleeting perception.

Together with Martin Reinhard, Christoph Brunner developed his own camera, which compressed one minute of ghostly film time from four hours of recording time at Passau station. Jürgen Reble processed his material with chemical additives and thus found a counterpart to his memory of the Chicago elevated railroad. In between, a short documentary film about the field of vision of a Viennese crane operator. Michaela Grill used archive footage from the Austrian Film Museum to conjure up a contemporary city symphony in which only traces of the past are visible. In Dariusz Kowalski's work, recorded images from moving subway trains become a throbbing, geometric latticework.

The exhibition concludes with an example of Michael Snow's "Walking Women Media Works", in which he integrates sculpture, film and music to create a total form. (Brigitta Burger-Utzer)

Program
3 minutes (Christoph Brunner, A 2006, 35mm, 3 min.)
Chicago D (Jürgen Reble, 1996, 16mm, 12 min.)
Wolkenbügel (Alexander Binder/Stefan Hafner, A 1999, 35mm, 6 min.)
Cityscapes (Michaela Grill/Martin Siewert, A 2007, video, 16 min.)
Unterwerk (Dariusz Kowalski, A 2000, video, 2 min.)
NEW YORK EYE AND EAR CONTROL (Michael Snow, CAN 1964, 16mm, 34 min., music: Albert Ayler, Sonny Murray, a.o.)