Sonic Cinema presents Rainer Kohlberger’s Answering the Sun – a maximal, stroboscopic colour odyssey to the limits of human perception. Riffing on the optical phenomenon that occurs when staring at the sun, Kohlberger’s first feature adeptly modernises avant-garde cinema’s long tradition of visual music and flicker in a 60-minute bombardment of coloured fields, Op art geometry, hallucinatory passages, and a wall of sound.
‘Rainer Kohlberger’s work speaks of seduction, an overstimulation and deception of the senses, monochrome-pumping color surfaces, powerful drones. Strong light signals create afterimages on the retina, while specific acoustic stimuli stimulate the ear to generate sounds on its own, and the entire body is affected with an implicit loss of control. And in all the dizzying flickering, throbbing, and pulsating, a sun appears, largely bathed in vibrant colors.’ (Regina Schlagnitweit)
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Rainer Kohlberger hosted by Dr Eleni Ikoniadou
Programmed by Oliver Dickens. Generously supported by Austrian Cultural Forum London, Goethe-Institut London and Sixpackfilm, Vienna
TICKETS: https://www.ica.art/films/sonic-cinema-answering-the-sun
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Rainer Kohlberger is an Austrian born visual artist and film maker living in Berlin. His work is primarily based on algorithmic compositions with reductionistic aesthetics influenced by flatness, drones and interference. Within his works there always lies a layer of noise, that fascinates him as a sense of the infinite, which is both the ultimate abstraction and inveterately fuzzy. In his films, installations and live performances maximum forms of intensities come into play. His work has screened widely internationally including at Rotterdam Film Festival, Vienna Filmmuseum, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Prismatic Ground, Anthology Film Archives, Open City Documentary Festival, and London Short Film Festival. His work is distributed by sixpackfilm.
Eleni Ikoniadou is Reader in Digital Culture and Sonic Arts at the Royal College of Art. She is founder and co-editor of the Media Philosophy Series (Rowman & Littlefield), co-editor of Unsound: Undead (Urbanomic, 2019), author of The Rhythmic Event: Art, Media and the Sonic (The MIT Press, 2014) and resident host on Movement Radio Athens.
Sonic Cinema is a research project and event series by Oliver Dickens, exploring the intersection of moving image, sound art and music practice. It is dedicated to the memory of Louis Benassi. www.soniccinema.org
