Stefan Niederwieser: At the »hugo wolf festival«, visualists have to come up with material for something that already exists, something that they have no influence on and that is based on the educational canon of the 19th century. How do they go about it?

LIA: My works are abstract. This means I allow my audience to create their own associations. I don't want to show a tree because a picture of a tree is much too concrete. When I offer the viewers different shapes, they have the freedom to make their own picture. In the case of Hugo Wolf, I listened to the songs first to get a feeling for them: Is the music hard or soft, what are the texts about? Ninety-nine percent of visuals are produced on the basis of the sound. They either react to the sound or they open up an additional world of images that connects the viewers with the sound.

Niederwieser: But at the moment you're collaborating very closely with the Portuguese duo @©, aren't you?

LIA: Their music is very precisely geared to the things my software can do, and they know exactly how my visual tools function. The collaboration consists in my telling them how I want things structured or where I would like to have a cut. But in the performance, the images very clearly react to the sound.

Niederwieser: Most of you want to get out of the club room, because visuals take second place there. What would be the ideal conditions for a visual artist?

Timo Novotny: I think the ideal thing is working together with the musicians. There are not many people who can be spontaneous for six or seven hours. The DJs mostly change over after two hours, but VJs are booked for the whole evening. They get much less money, but have to do seven-hour programmes. To do that, you have to draw on a lot of found-footage material, and we're not really interested in that.

Florian Launisch: That's something I've experienced too. Sometimes you're invited to art spaces where you get attention and good feedback. But in the club, you stand somewhere at the back and do your job. I have to admit, though, that I couldn't perform in the more prestigious venues if I hadn't developed my own style in the clubs. For ten years, we have been producing our own exclusive material and adapt it for special occasions. If you're invited somewhere, you listen to the kind of music that's being made there – then you produce new images and mix them up with older material. The whole live thing is very important for my visuals, but there aren't many people who can take the stress for that long.

Victoria Coeln: In the visualists' scene, we're now discussing something that has been around in music for a long time: composition versus improvisation. The question is whether a completely notated composition can be more powerful than something live that's based on improvisation methods – or a mixture of both approaches.
As far as our visual material being determined by the educational canon of the 19th century is concerned, I don't see any restrictions, but rather sources of inspiration, as is always the case with music, for example. I think it is much more exciting to think about how Hugo Wolf read Mörike's poems. My assumption is that his approach wasn't analytical, but inspired and emotional. Of course, it is important to me to know about the historical background, but that's mostly so I can forget about it again. With Hugo Wolf's songs, there are two equally powerful elements of inspiration: poem and music. We decide at every moment of our visual composition what inspires us more or less, or perhaps choose to have the two layers overlap.

Niederwieser: Claudia, you have already worked in both areas: with New Music, but also in clubs. Does the »versus« in the title have any relevance to you?

Claudia Rohrmoser: Absolutely. We are talking about a huge range here, and I have deliberately stopped performing in clubs. I always wanted too much there. I wrote my thesis on »Narration in the Club Scene«, and the answer is something like »Don't go worrying people in clubs with narration«. But I still believe that you can and must convey ideas. In Berlin, for example, the visual scene is shrinking fast at the moment, but the place where visuals still have great significance is in the field of club architecture - in the way spaces are designed with regard to atmosphere and media. But this is not my direction, because I always try to bring across an idea. That's why we're out of clubs and are doing more in the form of live cinema performances, for example.
At the moment, I am working a lot with New Music composers, such as Kotoka Suzuki and the pianist Heather O'Donnell. We wanted to inspire the pianist to improvise with an open audiovisual composition. The whole thing was very experimental, and, particularly with New Music, where people work very precisely, you have to almost force musicians to do it. We told her that she should play according to the images, and provided her with particular musical patterns that she can combine as she wants. But she has to use the image as notation. There were five different movements and five different interrelations between the score, the pianist and the image. One time the image followed the music, and then things were turned around and played in a circle, so to speak.
The time it takes to develop projects in this field is much longer. You can't use the same spontaneity that you work with in the club scene in the field of classical music.

Niederwieser: Is this perceived deficit – of not being able to convey content – still there for you in the classical field?

Rohrmoser: When I work with music, I mostly remain abstract, but I did become representational with the visualisations of the Hugo Wolf songs. With him, there isn't just the music but the text as well, the poems. I listened to them like fairy tales, also because I haven't worked very much yet with the time in which the songs were composed. Actually, I only encountered music from the period around 1900 with Gustav Mahler and Hugo Wolf for the first time recently. At any rate, I took a different approach and use very different images than I usually do. They are representational, but not necessarily narrative. I try to open up a space of narrative and provide the opportunity for associations in this space. I don't want to restrict the visitors too much – so I don't want to let a tree be a tree, but to slide past the text a bit with the images and to produce something additional with this friction. This should basically be the aim of intermedial works. You go to the limits of each medium's language to allow something new to come into being.

Niederwieser: There is a subliminal hierarchy between décor, design and art, and visualists are always lamenting that in a club the visuals are seen as décor. Would it be unfair to say that electronic live visuals simply have too little artistic quality?

Rohrmoser: I don't want to pass judgement on what is art and what isn't, but you can work artistically anywhere. The question is just who is watching. We know that attention in a club is diffuse, and we don't want people to sit there and look. Of course it is difficult to work artistically in a club – in the form of video art, for example. The border to décor or decoration is always there, though, and the hardest thing to do is perhaps coping with arbitrariness. After six hours in a club, you simply become arbitrary.

Eva Fischer: I think that there are good and less good works in every context. Even in clubs there are outstanding approaches, and if a VJ has a feeling for the situation and the particular audience response, something of great value can be created. I have been wondering for some time now why the visuals are disappearing again at the moment, but it probably has to do with the length of the parties there – unlike in Vienna, parties in Berlin clubs go for over 15 hours. And in Vienna it doesn't look as if the visuals are disappearing.

Launisch: Perhaps it has to do with a different quality to club nights in Vienna. There isn't as much time to really let go and celebrate, so the whole event has to be focused more quickly. But what I do feel is a deficit is that no one ever talks about visuals. There are no aesthetic discussions. People allow themselves to pronounce judgement on the DJs, but they don't talk about the visuals. Even the organisers just go and book anyone, just so long as there are some kind of visual effects. I often have to shut my eyes, not to enjoy the music, but so as not to see the visuals.

Coeln: Last year I had a Weill song evening with Ute Gfrerer in the Bauhaus Dessau, and one of the the critiques – one that was really meant to be positive – said that the visualisations didn't get in the way. People come with certain attitudes and habits. Providing an additional level of interpretation by means of images is something new. We should give the audience time to grow accustomed to this new format. In Germany in particular, visualisations in theatre have a bad reputation, although there's a lot happening. People are »finally working really realistically« with the new media, but that's precisely what visualisations are not about for me. Gradually, theatres are being equipped with media servers and are hiring people who technically operate these servers. These technicians are always being asked to provide content. Many people don't realise what potential there is in the creative effort.

Niederwieser: I'd now like to go to the structural or institutional level. We have six people here who make their living with visual art. This is an outstanding field for intercreativity, but there are no media to discuss it. And there is no professional infrastructure: a booking business, PR etc.. Is this analysis correct?

Novotny: I think it's also got to do with the fact that in the visual field you have to have been on the spot yourself. We know how difficult it is to capture a live event on DVD. I've been working on that for twelve years, but when I am sitting in the cutting room, I always see that it simply doesn't work. The reception can only happen live, and that's why there is no reception in the media. When I perform with the Sofa Surfers, we are mostly promoting a record, or with my film »Life in Loops« we promote the film live. We adapt something that already exists in another medium: a DVD, a film or a recording. That's what makes it difficult to get any reviews at all. People can't write them if they weren't there.

Fischer: Professional structures are mostly to be found at festivals, so they are of limited duration. Once a year in Vienna, once in Berlin and once in Geneva – and that's when the discourse takes place. I would of course like to see media taking an interest and for there to even be a special medium specifically for visuals at some stage.

Coeln: For me, intercreativity starts in the studio in the work with the dancers. Their movements are influence by my lighting changes during filming, and that's exactly how it could work with music as well, for example. It's up to us not to be too lazy and to produce material that can be drawn on. We come up with projects, but then nothing happens because we don't produce any clips that can be posted. I began very simply with Keynote (Macs Powerpoint), because it was only there that I could produce the smooth transitions. Now I use HD mixers – we are talking of very short time spans in which technology develops, and the rest follows. The technology will soon exist, but we have to work at distributing our content.

Rohrmoser: It is the nature of our work that we are caught between two stools. That's nothing new, and this kind of multi-media art is always on the margins and was never present in the mainstream. I am always experiencing new things, for example when I work together with set designers or sculptors, and I'm always learning something new. New structures and contexts open up that I didn't previously know. We meander between different disciplines and their institutions, but I have to say that the scene in Vienna is pretty astonishing. It is remarkable how much production and critical reflection there is here to do with audiovisual culture.

LIA: www.liaworks.com
Timo Novotny: www.inloops.com, www.sofasurfers.info
Florian Launisch: www.luma.launisch.at
Victoria Coeln: www.victoriacoeln.at
Claudia Rohrmoser: www.rohrmoser.tv
Eva Fischer: www.myspace.com/evaeiskonfekt

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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