20160815
Is there life after HD? And most of all: will awareness begin to revolt at some time when HD is implanted in all of our minds as a standard without alternative? Such questions seem to be at the conceptual base of Tina Frank´s 20160815. This is not the first time that she has collaborated with Pita (Peter Rehberg), whose track, "20150609" congenially elevates Frank´s eruptive pop-approach to a higher, shared, techno-visionary level. In doing so, both share the intention of radically undermining the smooth, unquestioned aspects of digital culture. That is, they intend to help a rawness and roughness, which we have learned to deliberately omit in the course of increasingly finer-grained dispositifs of seeing and hearing, attain new brilliance and topicality.
Thus, lines of coarse pixels - the nightmare of every high-definition vision - jolt into the image, to suddenly break out in a gaudy storm of color surfaces. Alien-like, impetuous, and amorphous, as though forcing the common screen matrix to confront its inherent irregularities, even its immanent failure. Again and again, old-school video test strips slip into the background - mementos of a world of not so long ago in which the pixel was not yet microscopically small. Meanwhile, it creaks and groans in Pita´s overdriven machine barrage, as though the ear, too, must have the harshness of the auditory granulate driven in once again. In this way, 20160815 delivers all HD and crystal-clear fetishes a decided rejection, even counters them with a captivating and likewise dynamic, irrepressible caricature. Will we, or future androids one day protest against the dictate of liquid crystal viewing? If so, the result will look like this, or something similar. (Christian Höller)
Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt
20160815
2016
Austria
3 min