The Yellow Without Zebra

The Yellow Without Zebra structures the city as a space of perception. An off-camera narrator, who is moving through an urban sphere, attempts to provide a descriptive explanation of this. However, in the midst of the normality of the city, it is impossible to maintain a distance from the surroundings.
In the video The Yellow Without Zebra, a structural analysis connects current urbanity with subjective transformations, which activates the sychological experience. Elements fade in and out; vague gray tones, which offer no solid ground, call forth other striking colours. The superiority of urban organization is thus pierced. Yet, at the same moment, imagination diffuses in the real city, which is in a state of constant movement. Nonetheless, barely noticeable minimal differentiations evoke a disturbance. Images of the unidentifiable city repeat in irregular rhythms in keeping with the descriptive progression. The relationship of image, sound, and serial music condenses the monotone intensity with which these indefinite sites and means of transfer occur as zones of post industrial cities. Only there where the city itself is lost - for example in the the static abstraction of a subway map - is a supposed overview possible. Time intervals of original and found footage intermix in the montage. The subject is on the move in a way similar to the city, which is constantly in a state of movement.
The paradoxes of the city can only be confronted with a draft of an ideal city as a city without a city. One paradox follows another: intensities of emptiness alternate with intensities of ecstasy. The Yellow Without Zebra enables the experience of being in the city and simultaneously being somewhere else.

(Nicola Hirner)

Translation: Steve Wilder