Surge
A green shape hops on a red background mildly offbeat to a waltzing rhythm rendered by the alternating sounds of an increasingly slurred high-key ping and deeply resonant bass tone as the green color gradually turns turquoise and spreads out in space. Something awakes and stretches itself, the gravitational center of the image shifts from horizontal to vertical. In the next section a mysterious object – not a UFO – enters from the left and pushes across the image at a Star Wars angle. It is a finely chiseled ghost ship that shape shifts into a gorge and back again to the powerful beat of the music. The voyage of the gorge ship is superimposed with vertical stripes. These glitches serve as an allusion to disturbed analog signals and interfere with a circumspect deciphering of what is seen, thereby triggering the imagination. The next sequence returns us to abstraction, circumscribing an inner world conjured by bass notes – the insistent beating of a heart cradled within the ghost ship. It resolves into the slow-motion dance of a phosphorescent fade-out.
The nautical horror Billy Roisz and Dieter Kovačič associate with Surge by schtum (Manu Mayr & Robert Pockfuß) recalls their dark opus THE (2015). Something sinister is happening, something difficult to put into words. It unfolds aesthetically on a sound and image level through an ephemeral sense of dread, a staggering beauty and the extreme over-modulated deployment of contrasting pairs – high/ low, shuttered/ torn open, organic/ two-dimensional. Recommendation: Play it full blast in the darkest room! (Melanie Letschnig)
Translation: Eve Heller
Viennale Katalogtext 2019
Surge
2019
Austria
5 min
Experimental, Animation, music video
No Dialogue