Ink Eraser
In 2010, the television show Tatort celebrates its fortieth birthday: no other production has influenced a genre so greatly or been the epitome of popular German culture for such a long time. Veronika Schuberts found footage animation Ink Eraser draws from this rich reservoir. The artists special interest, however, is not in the genre or the medium, but instead, in what the genre and the medium contribute to contemporary visual and linguistic culture. Ink Eraser is a montage of entirely incidentally emerging visual and linguistic clichés and phrases. The genre of constitutive gestures is called on for this: the discovery of a corpse, a telephone conversation, a lying suspect, a confessing murderess, an assurance that it is all routine, is not intentional, etc.; on the other hand, the composition allows the shreds of language and images to also come to unusual, surprising, even humorous insights and points:
Was the dead woman having her period? That would most definitely interest Dr. Eckermann! A bit of coke isnt a big thing
No thanks, Im on duty.
Ink Eraser abstracts a collage from rituals and banalities that define every television crime show, as such, and compiles, quasi literally, a type of blueprint of the genre: ink rather than blood flows through the images. In tedious, finely detailed work, Schubert processed 3,000 individual images with ink and eraser pen. This technique rests on the progression of saturation and emptiness, of blue color that is made visible and invisible, which then appears as white. Tension and intensity thus become immediately visible in icy dark blue images that at some point freeze the blood of their viewers to ice.
(Sylvia Szely)
Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt
Tintenkiller
2009
Austria, Czech Republic
4 min 30 sec