An Object(ive) World - three Sixpack shorts

Program:

Water and Clearing, Siegfried Fruhauf, 2018, 5 min

It hast to be lived once and dreamed twice, Rainer Kohlberger, 2019, 29 min

Extra-Terrestrial Ecologies (Retroflectors: the astronaut, the robot, the alien), Ralo Mayer, 2018, 43 min

All films produced by artists themselves. Distribution: sixpackfilm  
sixpackfilm was founded in 1990 as a non-profit organization. The task undertaken by sixpackfilm is to secure an audience for Austrian film and video art, both inside Austria and abroad.


An Object(ive) World

A “phantom ride” along a cable car.  A bucket is carried to a spot where it is filled and later emptied. Siegfried Fruhauf’s intercutting frame by frame with images from the surrounding fields and woods, a full sound design, rapid flashing between colour and high-contrast black-and-white forms an audiovisual study that reformulates our powers of perception. It seems as if nature itself holds control of the dramaturgy.

Common in all the various theoretical thoughts of a New Materialism is the overcoming of a certain Anthropocentrism, which is used to enlighten a superiority of mankind over nature and other forms of life on earth.

The end of the human dominated age becomes visible and obvious in the recent crises, from global climate change to robots and other post-human intelligent entities taking place.  Next to political implications, artists also adopt critical positions shifting from human centrism towards an equality of all forms of life. But what determines “life?”

Rainer Kohlberger conceived his work as a post-apocalyptic science fiction film. The story tells us of the imminent hegemony of artificial intelligence, of mind and body, electricity and computer, spirituality and technology, and the age-old narrative of love and fear and the question of identity.

Finally Ralo Mayer´s witty essay,  imbued with associations, traverses materials that look and feel like residues from a history of space ecology and experiments in biospheres: videos from laboratories, television snippets with news from the world of science, movie scenes sedimented in children´s consumer cultures. It is all about auto repair – the self-healing of the Earth.

The three films grab along traces of the Anthropocene and postulate a review and a new reading of images and at the same time they celebrate the resilience of a material world.

Gerald Weber