The Visualization of Noise Angel Audio/Video RMX (2002) by Philipp Geist Viola Fissek/Philipp Geist A self-taught artist based in Berlin since 1999, Philipp Geist (VIDEOGEIST) works internationally through the media of video, performance, photography, and painting. In 2008, he projected his video installation Time Fades across the Piazzetta open space of the Kulturforum in Berlin. In 2007, he screened his video installation Time Lines on the facade of the museum for contemporary art Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the center of Rome. His projects are characterized by a complex integration of space, sound, and moving images. Time plays an important conceptual role in his work, in which this apparently fixed and constant variable is repeatedly subjected to variations. Music and sound are central elements of Philipp Geist’s work. He enters into a dialogue with music in many of his creations, and this influences the speed, the intensity of the effects, the degree of abstraction, the colorfulness, and also the content of his images. In the course of this process, visual configurations can emerge that do not necessarily accompany the music, but instead challenge it. The moving image is not given a subordinate role to the music, rather, the two media enjoy equal status. In this way, Geist seeks to overcome the dependency of image on music frequently found in the genre of concert and club visuals. Angel Audio/Video RMX also transcends traditional audiovisual conventions, especially those of the music video. The work is an experimental and new artistic interpretation of a concert performed by Angel, a musical pairing of Ilpo Väisänen (Pan Sonic) and Dirk Dresselhaus (SchneiderTM). Their noise project combines guitar vibrations with electronic sounds, distorted and transformed by means of feedback and deep, long-drawn-out drones. Angel played the duo concert that Geist would work with as part of the Z2000 exhibition in 2000, performing at a factory floor in Berlin. The concert featured monitors showing a video especially created for the music by Geist (Ill. 1). The material point of departure for Angel AudioVideo RMX was a recording of this concert with a handheld camera. Geist cut this footage up into tiny video frames, so that the sound was also fragmented and reassembled. This type of rearrangement is often used in the electronic music scene when doing a remix: artists interpret and transform the work of other musicians in order to create something new. Angel Audio/Video RMX is characterized by a distinctive type of interaction between image and sound, unlike the traditional process of creation for a music video, in which appropriate images are chosen to accompany the piece of music. It is true that in this kind of audiovisual remix, the sequence of sounds is determined by the video editing, but the procedure is nonetheless based on an equivalent status for image and sound—since each editorial decision was based on both the audio and the video tracks. The remix, not unlike Angel’s sound, has an arc of tension that gradually rises, often remains constant for a prolonged phase, and in some parts varies only very slightly. Continuous acceleration and increase in intensity are followed by a pause, and then another escalation, and now the more rapid and increasingly brief segments in black-and-white contrast are joined by the complementary colors red and green. The musicians are shown in different positions, variously sitting or standing. The video track is played backward and forward, and the frames alternate between positive and negative. The drone set is characterized by long notes, humming, and constant buzzing. The occasionally aggressive volume, the perpetual buzzing, and the shrill notes of the noise project are transformed into an intense, almost corporeal visuality capable of producing dizziness or even headaches in the viewer. Geist translates the acute stimulation of the auditory sense into visual irritation. He achieves this not only through a rapid succession of images, in which the eye searches for something to grasp on, but also because the images quiver and the red flickering light becomes more and more intense. Time and space are central to the concept of the remix. The films shown at the concert as visuals, as well as the walls of the old factory and an adjoining installation featured in the exhibition, are all incorporated into the video. So are the spectators: a recording of their applause is cut up and becomes another component of the new chain of sound events. The boundaries between documentation, citation, interpretation, and new composition dissolve both in the visual and in the auditory realms. In addition to the spatial dimension, the temporal dimension is also shifted: the spectators are still applauding one work, but have long become part of another. Angel Audio/Video RMX thus represents a space-time distortion. The real-time duration of the performance is altered in that it is

• published: 26 Mar 2009
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