Keep That Dream Burning

Experimental short film by Rainer Kohlberger

In the sixth great mass mortality of the earth, humankind became extinct. Their technology had recently progressed so far as to deconstruct the algorithms of evolution and allow artificial life to develop on Earth.

Emergence Collapse, the collaborative project of Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Rainer Kohlberger and Viennese electronic music producer Jung An Tagen is nearly beyond description (and perception): An assault on the senses that is at once euphoric and harrowing, at once completely alien and uncannily evocative, their work is perhaps the perfect artistic manifestation of existential angst. Jung An Tagens frighteningly frenetic and earsplitting dissonance is complimented perfectly by Rainer Kohlbergers constantly evolving, neon-tinged visual freak-out. The result is relentless and painfully overwhelming, but like a horror movie, Emergence Collapse demands – and ultimately rewards – your attention.

A strong laserbeam is deflected by two mirrors oscillating at very high speeds. The human eye perceives a stable image as long as they move fast enough. White Light / White Heat operates at the threshold of this rate. A constant modulation is introduced, flicker and envelopes modulate basic geometric shapes and waveforms.

Humans and other animals that have their eyes attached towards the front of their bodies see the world with binocular vision. Stereoscopic seeing enables a precise perception of depth. This film challenges this perceptual apparatus that interacts with the brain to generate a coherent image of the surroundings. (Rainer Kohlberger)

Rainer Kohlberger attends to “let the possibles roam free” by negotiating not noise itself, but the exchange between noise and form, multiplicity and individuation, order and chaos.

Moon Blink was entirely generated by complex software, no camera was used. The result of this formal method is an abstract digital artwork that not only manages to convince thanks to its mathematical precision, but primarily also due to its incredible beauty and surprising narrative structure. Comparison to the classic abstract films from the 1920s by, for instance, Ruttmann, seems justified.

Visuals for Edgar Varèse’s Arcana. Performed by the Bruckner Orchestra Linz under the direction of Argentine conductor and composer Dante Anzolini.

RBB invited 30 film makers to create works in their own 4 walls while in lockdown due to the impact of Corona virus. Each one is 120 seconds long. Here is my contribution ›deviation‹ with sound by Jung an Tagen.

a minimalistic audio visual composition you can play yourself.

Rainer Kohlberger is prepared to go far when it comes to the physical experiences he evokes with his work. Answering the Sun demands the utmost from its audience. The invitation is to squint our eyes and allow the most amazing trips to unfold – just like when we were children letting the sun come in. However, the work is simultaneously a 60-minute bombardment of coloured fields and a wall of sound, followed by a hallucinatory, silent inky-black sequence.

'Grauer Sand' by Pole, track taken from the new album 'Tempus'.

In Kohlberger’s second film that could be considered narrative driven, the artist fashions a dystopian fiction from the remnants of cinema’s past. Drawing on excerpts from obscure sci-fi films, The Electric Kiss imagines a world not unlike our own, in which people plug their brains into a kind of neuro-network that connects the whole of human consciousness. As cyberpunk imagery draped in VHS textures alternates with passages of prismatic visual noise (achieved, in trademark style, by feeding footage through self trained machine learning algorithms), a quasi-plot emerges: a man in a VR headset, literally and figuratively lost in space, subjects himself to a mysterious procedure to alleviate the ill effects of this new technology on the mind.

Rainer Kohlberger’s abstract film was created entirely without a camera. Through digital algorithms, he precisely arranged a rhythm of light and shadow that pulsates off the screen into our physical space with blinding intensity. The presence of light is almost felt as we are sucked into the image to become its ghostly accomplice. As we leave the theatre, the optical vibrations continue to haunt us.

DCP, color and b / w

The catastrophe is tirelessly repeated in Hollywood cinema. The genre of the disaster movie hints at the collective psyche of the respective historical epochs. The perspective of a postmodern longing for moments of spectacular destruction, which briefly interrupts the dull monotony in late capitalist consumerism, shows how contradictory postmodern pop culture is. The disaster movie is symptomatic for the longing to overturn the status quo as well as the opposite desire to find it instantly restored.