As in a modified computer game from bygone times, we glide through an animated labyrinth in a point-of-view perspective. We first go around corners again and again, past walls tiled with circular visual elements from various advertising brochures: lifestyle products, Sudoku, attractive surfaces depicting plants and flowers. They blink as we make our way through. This flow is accompanied by a collage of voice-overs offering motivational and inspirational slogans taken from social media channels: “No need for psychologists when you’re in a forest!” “Why not use the stones people put in your way to build something really great?” “Keep moving – or move over.” We pick up speed. The path goes up, down, back on a straightaway, with roller-coaster and haunted-house movements in dynamic alternation. This would-be stream of consciousness, translated into motion, is directed by those algorithms intended to deform our lives, while they pretend to promote our personal autonomy, whenever we come into contact with the world through the Internet. “High-performance relaxation” is demanded of us “in order to finally find our inner center”, according to the director Veronika Schubert. As it generates patterns and confusion simultaneously, the stream through the labyrinth accelerates while its visual components become smaller and smaller. Color moods change until the artifacts from artificially created personality profiles form mosaic-like images of people plastered across the corridors of this maze, conveying just as little substance as the disembodied voices. In the end, only white walls remain.
(Sixpackfilm / Melanie Letschnig; Translation: John Wojtowicz)
Beauty online tutorials set standards and serve as a social blueprint. Textile patterns were tracedwith carbon paper and then form the basic pixels for this animation. Mosaic software has rearranged these patterns. In the beginning the pictures are very raw, but they are becoming contoured more
and more The audio collage is composed of sentences that come from make-up tutorials or videos in which so-called influencers are filming their daily routines, testing products or just pursuing their leisure activities. This animation is at the same time a documentary about our current beauty standards, gender roles as well a humorous statement about everyday craziness.
What characterizes cultural exchange on an international level? Speeches of diplomats, ambassadors and cultural workers were extracted and recombined. Sign language, braille and morse code complement this linguistic potpourri.
When thousands of refugees were arriving in Austria in 2015, the Austrian government was very slow to take action, maybe even waiting on purpose, as to provoke images of despair and upheaval that should serve as a deterrant for other refugees. So during the first few weeks, it was the so-called civil society that actually helped the refugees, while the European solidarity was being hotly debated and argued about in the media. The debate concerning border fences, which were downplayed to „technical protection“ or even „ doors with side panels“, was the starting point for my examination with the language of politics.
A GRAVE matter such as the way refugees are being treated in a crisis, was consequently engraved into glass. The animation is based on time-lapse images of cloud formations. Their outlines were then engraved onto a little more than 3000 small pieces of glass with an electric engraving cutter. However, these lines don’t so much resemble clouds anymore, but rather ever-changing border lines on a map.
The individual sentences have been taken from Austrian news reports that were aired in September 2015 and later. The collage made of these sentences shows the helplessness and inability of the Austrian government as well as the disunity on the European level. The politicians have been hiding themselves behind hollow phrases and platitudes whereas television has been responding continually with the same limited language. In this video I want to express my anger about the lack of solidarity, commitment, willingness to help and empathy.
Making-of: https://vimeo.com/237042661
In 2010, the television show Tatort celebrates its fortieth birthday: no other production has influenced a genre so greatly or been the epitome of popular German culture for such a long time. Veronika Schubert’s found footage animation Ink Eraser draws from this rich reservoir. The artist’s special interest, however, is not in the genre or the medium, but instead, in what the genre and the medium contribute to contemporary visual and linguistic culture. Ink Eraser is a montage of entirely incidentally emerging visual and linguistic clichés and phrases. The genre of constitutive gestures is called on for this: the discovery of a corpse, a telephone conversation, a lying suspect, a confessing murderess, an assurance that it is all routine, is not intentional, etc.; on the other hand, the composition allows the shreds of language and images to also come to unusual, surprising, even humorous insights and points:
Was the dead woman having her period? – That would most definitely interest Dr. Eckermann! A bit of coke isn’t a big thing…… – No thanks, I’m on duty.
Ink Eraser abstracts a collage from rituals and banalities that define every television crime show, as such, and compiles, quasi literally, a type of blueprint of the genre: ink rather than blood flows through the images. In tedious, finely detailed work, Schubert processed 3,000 individual images with ink and eraser pen. This technique rests on the progression of saturation and emptiness, of blue color that is made visible and invisible, which then appears as white. Tension and intensity thus become immediately visible in icy dark blue images that at some point freeze the blood of their viewers to ice.
(Sixpackfilm / Sylvia Szely; Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt)