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 Stephen Cornford
Programmed by Oliver Dickens. Generously supported by Austrian Cultural Forum London, Goethe-Institut London and Sixpackfilm, Vienna
TICKETS: https://cubecinema.com/programme/event/answering-the-sun,13019/
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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.
Stephen Cornford is a media artist and researcher whose current work is concerned with the toxicity of digital media and relationships between planetary and photographic space. He is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Winchester School of Art. His work has been exhibited internationally for the last 15 years in venues including ZKM Karlsruhe, ICC Tokyo, Haus der Electronische Kunst Basel and the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki. His writing has been published in the Journal of Visual Culture and Cultural Politics. His forthcoming artist monograph Petrified Media will be published in 2023 by The Eriskay Connection.
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
