Audio-Visual Work

Inspired by various collaborations with film makers and video artists Bernhard Loibner started about 2003 to work on is own audio-visual pieces. It seemed logical to start working with processed moving images to create something that works alongside his experimental electronic soundscapes. The initial idea with these pieces is to treat music and video as equally important elements supporting and reflecting each other.

The first resulting series of sound-video compositions where published on the DVD Fragmented Memory in 2004. The DVD contains 8 sound-video pieces which where (and still are) presented on various festivals for experimental video, electronic music and media arts all over the world.

The visual layer of the short piece Far Field from 2006 browses abstract surfaces and textures with fragments of a human face repeatedly appearing as some kind of "tromp l'oeil". The sound defines the flow and dynamic range with the music being closely entangled with the visual events. Far Field has been also been shown on numerous festivals for video and media art.

The latest piece he created is titled Meltdown and is the first one done for video and live music. The piece combines 40 minutes of textural, abstract video with abstract electronic live music. For the video part of Meltdown some sequences of an old b&w film by the french philospoher Guy Debord were digitally re-processed and re-synthesized where the re-processing refers to ideas Debord used in his original film. He called this technique "dètournement"; the recontextualisation of various elements of other films, TV advertising etc. to create new combinations and open new insights being built out of these "detourned" elements. The electronic live music part of the piece does reflect the textural nature of the visual elements but still has to be much more than background music for the visuals. It does develop a life of its own and raises the stimulus of the observer in a significant way by creating a dense atmosphere. Meltdown has first been presented at the Moving Closer Festival in Warsaw, Poland in June 2007. A reworked trio version featuring the musicians Clementine Gasser (5-string cello) and Mikolaj Trzsaka (bass-clarinet) was presented at the Museum Sammlung Essl in Klosterneuburg near Vienna in May 2008 and at Artacts Festival in St.Johann/Tirol, Austria in 2009.

Selection of Festivals and Museums which presented Audio-Visual work

Artacts Festival, St.Johann in Tirol, Austria, 2009
MMK, Museum for Contemporary Art, Klgenfurt, 2008
Sammlung Essl, Museum for Contemporary Art, Klosterneuburg, Austria
Moving Closer Festival, Warsaw, Poland, 2007
Wormhole Saloon V, The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, UK, 2006
Videomedeja, Novi Sad, Serbia, 2006
Athens Video Art Festival, Athens, Greece, 2006
Videoformes Festival, Clermond-Ferrand, France, 2006+2007
Kortfilmfestival, Leuven, Belgium, 2005
VAD Video and Digital Arts International Festival, Girona, Spain, 2005+2006
File HIPERSÔNICA 2005, Galeria do Ses, Sao Paolo, Brazil, 2005+2007
Electrofringe Festival, Newcastle, NSW, Australia, 2005
Sonoimagenes 2005, Buenos Aires, Argentinia, 2005
2. Media Arts Festival Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia, 2005
Sonic Arts Network Expo 966, Hull, UK, 2005
Thailand New Media Arts Festival, Bangkok, Thailand, 2005
Spark Contemporary Art Space, Syracuse, USA, 2003
Cybersonica 2003, Institute For Contemporary Arts, London, 2003 ...