Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Roswitha Schuller, Markus Hanakam

Mobile

Vidéo expérimentale | 0 | couleur | 8:0 | Autriche | 2017

In the pieces by Hanakam & Schuller, the device is a recurring motif. That is to say, all that apparatus that is used to render optical imagery and also generate their specific formats, to control or trigger images or even manipulate them. The device - or gadget - is a type of artifact, a functional object that is charged with both everyday and mystical meaning. In their recent video piece Mobile, two hands move one object after the other into focus, creating an endless sequence of object chains. In his allegorical reference to a kind of Jacob’s ladder of the media, the video in the loop becomes a sort of perpetuum mobile. The mobile can also be understood as a mobile. The mobile device allows data to flow and data to be exchanged. The accompanying voice over with a computer-simulated voice reproduces several tracks from Tree of Technologies of the classic computer game Civilization that was released again in 2016, revealing the absurdity of the strictly linear development of technology and culture, as illustrated here by the game.

Many of the artifacts of Hanakam & Schuller, an artist duo that lives in Vienna, are shapeshifters, changing their outer form and then reappearing in a variety of contexts. As artists and explorers, Markus Hanakam and Roswitha Schuller redesign the rules of the fine arts for their own purposes and create unconventional arrangements and new world designs in videos and objects. They also work with applied artforms. Their works have been shown in Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Eyebeam art and technology center in New York, Paris’ Palais de Tokyo, Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Culture, Vienna’s MAK, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, and Tokyo’s National Art Center.