Photo: Pez Hejduk

update: an article in derStandard

Die für diese Arbeit entwickelte  „Wackel“ – Technik unterstützt diese Verfremdung. Durch die Bewegungsparallaxe entsteht bei längerer Betrachtung ein räumlicher Eindruck, der mit dem stereoskopischen Sehen vergleichbar ist, aber eine andere Qualität besitzt. Der Soundtrack der neun präsentierten Räume geht noch einen Schritt weiter und überlagert ein sich durchziehendes Grundgeräusch – wie im Fiebertraum – mit assoziativen Elementen.

Bei manchen Betrachtern kann der Film durch die dargestellten Bewegungsmuster Schwindel und Übelkeit auslösen.

Credits:
Bild: Dietmar Offenhuber; Ton: Sam Auinger Hannes Strobl
14 min; digital Video HD720p; prod. Frühjahr 2009

Der Film wurde eigentlich für eine Videoinstallation als bewegte Fotografie geplant. Gezeigt wird eine innsbrucker Küche. Wie schon bei Mauerpark ist die Szene Resultat von analogen Raummanipulationen durch in-camera effects und digitalem compositing. Die Gegenstände der Küche und erzeugen in Verbindung mit der Klangkulisse der Stadt einen hybriden Raum, aus in dem sich ein teilweise absurdes Eigenleben entwickelt.

Credits:
Bild & Ton: stadtmusik (auinger, offenhuber, strobl)
12 min; digital Video HD720p; Prod. Sommer 2008

“Above and below do not exist at first, and other indications of direction do not work either. The picture itself is an agglomeration of details that are constantly being created and disappearing, becoming and ceasing to exist, assembling and breaking up.” (Marc Ries)
more information on www.stadtmusik.org
please stand back (excerpt)

more information on www.stadtmusik.org

part of edition “abstracts of syn“, published and distributed by kunstverein medienturm

“Urban architecture is a sound box, it shapes a space, wherein the range of sounds which surround us is resounded and reflected. The video STADTMUSIK (“City Music”) by Dietmar Offenhuber (Linz/Boston) and the formation tamtam (Sam Auinger, Hannes Strobl; Berlin) discusses sound in cities by analysing sound structures which are triggered by urban buildings and facilities. They focus on the aspect of movement in the city, which reinforces a dynamic experience of the urban soundscape: particular sounds emerge through movement, sound and its timbre evolve from material and space. The video actually consists of two parts “Kapitel 3” (Chapter 3), “m18 felsen” (“m18 rocks”), each one discussing individually auditory situations in a big city.”

kapitel 3 (excerpt)

Credits

sam auinger
dietmar offenhuber
hannes strobl
actors: katrin emler, daniel scheffler, martin offenhuber

distributed by sixpackfilm – catalog page
more information on www.stadtmusik.org

“The long backwards tracking shot through a trench in Kubrick’s WWI drama Paths of Glory, which follows the general as he paces along the line of soldiers and his repeated questions, are reduced to their pure geometry in Dietmar Offenhuber’s study: Nothing is visible other than various accumulations of points, a line on the ground on which the “spent” frames are counted off in units of 50, and the camera’s movement, though the original sound can be heard. While this represents enough data to identify the take, the scene’s most important element is missing, the physicality, the bodies of the things and people. But at the same time this reduction is in a sense closer to the first industrialized war in history than the images of Kubrick’s film.

In its abstraction the trench reveals the thing it necessarily lacks: experience. The industrialized killing machine dehumanizes, desubstantializes humans per se. The soldiers’ corporality, they become functional values, the trench’s materiality, it becomes a matrix of points, and both are surveyed by the camera’s mechanism, the single-frame transport. Solely the talking remains analog, but this is equally stereotypical, and merely affirmative of the scenography.

Virilio, who frequently mentions the “fraternity” of modern warfare and cinematography, would not be able to get anything from this process. It is precisely the conscious reduction within the film, the purely mechanical, geometric values which are able to reveal the true violence of this war. The fictionalized fact is not necessary, removing the sense from existing images suffices to return to the historically factual qua techno-imagination (Flusser). The viewer sees less but learns more. The new form reveals content which is also more important to the image’s rhetoric.” - Marc Ries, translation: Steve Wilder

“paths of g” in sixpackfilm’s catalog

Credits:
paths of g (1.27 min)
basierend auf “Paths of Glory” (1957), Stanley Kubrik
Animation: Dietmar Offenhuber
Audio: from the original Film

Awards: Jury Award Melbourne International Animation Festival 2007

Screenings, Exhibitions: VISIONary – Innovativer Film aus Österreich – Stadtkino Wien, Moviemento u.a.; Atelier Graphoui, Brussels; Light-Cone, 17.-20.9. Paris; European Media Art Festival 2007; Videonale 11; Resfest, Vienna; London International Animation Festival; electrofringe festival, Australia; Melbourne International Animation Festival 2007; Lille 7th International short film Festival, France; Crossing Europe 2006, Linz; BALKANIMA festival 2006; Diagonale 06, Graz; Seoul International Media Art Biennale 2006

part of edition “abstracts of syn“, published and distributed by kunstverein medienturm

“Urban architecture is a sound box, it shapes a space, wherein the range of sounds which surround us is resounded and reflected. The video STADTMUSIK (“City Music”) by Dietmar Offenhuber (Linz/Boston) and the formation tamtam (Sam Auinger, Hannes Strobl; Berlin) discusses sound in cities by analysing sound structures which are triggered by urban buildings and facilities. They focus on the aspect of movement in the city, which reinforces a dynamic experience of the urban soundscape: particular sounds emerge through movement, sound and its timbre evolve from material and space. The video actually consists of two parts “Kapitel 3” (Chapter 3), “m18 felsen” (“m18 rocks”), each one discussing individually auditory situations in a big city.”

more information on www.stadtmusik.org
m18 felsen (excerpt)

The Munich based label bodensatz came into possession of the tapes, which they kindly made available to us as raw material for our film.

The videofootage has been recorded by seven individuals portraying their private spaces. Technically, a modified videocamera with a mirror ball for recording a 360° image has been used

Credits:
video: dietmar offenhuber, nina wenhart, with recordings from roland keil,peter brandl, birgit benetseder, karl offenhuber
sound: sam auinger with material from the “heinz k. aus h.” sampler bodensatz records (www.bodensatz.de)

special thanks to benno zehetmaier

“It´s subject is not ”natural” perception, but perception put in motion by modern means of transportation, and therefore implicitly the history of an epochal transformation of the way in which time and space is experienced.
It has come to a preliminary end in suitable contexts – for example cities such as Los Angeles, which has been shaped by the history of motorization – where moving perception now seems to be regarded as integral to natural perception.
The thesis presented by besenbahn in this regard would therefore be that the specifically aesthetic quality of such animated perception is absent from the forms of audiovisual representation which are already considered natural (such as indicating movement by means of a tracking shot): In its fragmentation of the continuum of perception, the “subjective geometry which defines space through intervals of time” (Dietmar Offenhuber) illustrates a manner of experience which could remain submerged because it is already so familiar” – Vrääth Öhner

2001, 10 min
music: tamtam (Sam Auinger, Hannes Strobl)
more information on www.stadtmusik.org
video: Dietmar Offenhuber