v i d e o a r t

Signers Koffer (Signer's Suitcase) is a kind of road movie that takes us right across Europe. From the Swiss Alps to eastern Poland, from Stromboli to Iceland. Always following the magically charged "groove" of the landscape. A wide-ranging attempt to find the ideal travelling speed. Roman Signer uses his very personal bag of tricks to mark the stations along the way: strikingly simple operations brimming with subtle humour. But the film is also a journey through mental states. A tightrope walk between whimsy and melancholy. Danger - both physical and psychological - becomes a stimulus to the senses. Sudden plunges, abrupt mood changes shape the rhythm and atmosphere of this cinematic journey.

Videonale 12 is one of the most important video art festivals in Germany and presents over 40 different videos from all over the world...

Fischli/Weiss (1987)

"Cantaloup" (1980) by Steina Vasulka presents an outline of the Vasulkas' concept of the "instantly moving image" that begins with electronic imaging and developed through computer techniques of image generation. Steina explains the potential of the "Digital Image Articulator" to create complex forms of visuality which themselves expand the "vocabulary" of the operations of image simulation. "She describes the varying sizes of pixels (picture elements), the layers of color and tone that can be derived from one image, and techniques such as "grabbing" the image and multiplying it. Basically, the "Digital Image Articulator" generates constructive techniques of "image transformation" and "image as object" that are "open-ended" in a number of senses. Steina Vasulka presents the process of transfiguration in "Lilith" (1987), in which the constantly changing image field describes the shift from temporal to spatial image organization..."she alters and manipulates the face of a woman (painter Doris Cross) son that it is submerged within a natural and technological landscape". The flexibility of visual imagery, in particular, emphasizes the spatial dimension, as opposed to the temporal. Thus the image as object overtakes the medium presentation. The result is an "almost sculptural fusion of human figure and landscape". The optical image is transcended "when image becomes object in a stream of parallel events, where "image synthesis" also establishes a link between electronic transtormation and digital spatiality. In "Orka" (1997), she combines both techniques, processuality and synthesis, to rendering visual imagery in spatially condensed, flowing motion on the basis of a principle of musical composition, since it expresses motion, a motion that runs counter to the laws of physics and the dictates of the "frame-bound photographic image"..."Since my art schooling was in music, I do not think of images as stills, but always as motion...It is like a duty to show what c