NOT STILL

The source for the pictures and sounds in NOT STILL is a vinyl record. Initially, a sample dominates: the scratching of a record player needle in an endless loop. While the viewer remains stuck in the hypnotic soundtrack from electronic musicians dieb13 and eRikm, video artist Billy Roisz shifts massively enlarged photos of spinning record grooves from the dark into the picture. Roisz uses various types of cameras, including a coarse-grained microscope camera to “illuminate” the record (often declared dead) by truly forcing her way inside it.

NOT STILL forms an abstract visual landscape in shades of monochrome colors, from green to red, in which found footage on celluloid flares up like a quotation from the nether world. Alienated classical film scores howl in NOT STILL’s minimalist techno soundscape, overlapping with the main motif of the record in all of its varied visual structures. VJ Roisz mistreats this just as uninhibitedly as the DJ mistreats his records. Roisz shows brief shots of film macros, tracks of animated films and a horror movie, to then unexpectedly have the leaping picture strip swallow them again. As though in a séance in all degrees of its intensity, flaring up are scraps of memory of a pop culture media history. NOT STILL enacts a clash of media in gruesome disquiet and poetic ambiance.

By means of artistic manipulation and in interplay with technology’s industrial expiry date, Billy Roisz evokes the sense that analogue sound and picture carriers still have long to go before they breathe their last. NOT STILL.

(Petra Erdmann)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt

Orig. Title
NOT STILL
Year
2008
Country
Austria
Duration
10 min
Director
Billy Roisz
Category
Avantgarde/Arts
Orig. Language
No Dialogue
Downloads
NOT STILL (Image)
NOT STILL (Image)
NOT STILL (Image)
Credits
Director
Billy Roisz
Sound
eRikm, dieb13
Sound Assembling
Billy Roisz
Supported by
BKA. Kunst
Available Formats
Digital File (prores, h264)
Festivals (Selection)
2008
Graz - Diagonale, Festival des Österreichischen Films
Bochum - Videofestival
Split - Festival of New Film and Video
Zagreb - 25fps Film & Video Festival
Roma - Abstracta Festival
Vilnius - Tindirindis International Animated Film Festival
Jihlava Documentary Film Festival
Cork - Int. Film Festival
2009
Tokyo - Image Forum Festival
2010
Vancouver - Signal & Noise Festival