Potsdam – revolutions, civil wars, Comet impacts: mobile videos have long found your way on the evening news. The voyeuristic appeal have also unspectacular video snapshots, shows the exhibition “Frame by frame”, which today evening in the Potsdam laundry opens.
There are cinematic everyday considerations from young people who collect Eva Paulitsch and Uta Weyrich and turn into video installations. “It has something incredibly intimate, when I play back a third-party video on my own phone”, says Eva Paulitsch. For seven years, the two Stuttgart save artists mobile videos before the quick “delete” delete, as they say.
Now they have gained more than 1000 private short films in its archive, skaters lanes, before fast-food restaurants or in youth clubs in all of Germany and of Switzerland: “Because often make great talks about modern art arise when we ask the young people to their videos”, says Uta Weyrich. From the resulting pool they draw again and again for their ideas.
Because in the exhibition, the films are not simply projected on the wall. The show is divided into two rooms, a light and a dark. In the bright room, initially only oversized QR codes are to know how to find it now often in newspapers and magazines.
It reads the pixel formations with a Smartphone, a video is played out. “The QR codes in itself already resemble abstract art, they are actually just a carrier,” says Uta Weyrich. However, visitors to the exhibition provided a reader.
In the second, the dark room, one needs only his eyes. The 20 foam board hanging from the ceiling in adventurous angles. The translucent plates serve as canvases and are illuminated by three projectors from different directions.
The cell phone videos of young people provide only the raw material. Artists sometimes cut them together, shorten it or vary the playback speed. Films are shown in finally as infinite loops – with some hypnotic effect. “It comes us not to document a certain youth culture”, says Eva Paulitsch. “It should be at the end actually no longer to see who made the original videos.”
Even if the material comes largely by young people between Hamburg and Munich: the “finished” films seem emerged all over the world to be. A surreal flickering Eiffel Tower, a drive through the canyons of a big city, a military exercise or a scene at a sidewalk café. “We always try to solve the videos from their original context and to make new interpret for the Viewer”, Uta Weyrich explained.
Their Potsdam exhibition Eva Paulitsch and Uta Weyrich have brought for support by the media artist Philipp CONTAG-LADA is: “We have made a highly technical show on its feet with little money”, says the 42-year old, who otherwise often works for theatre productions.
The artists, who have been studying and working together for ten years, now also think beyond Europe: “We want to gather soon in China and Japan mobile videos” they tell. “This is certainly exciting to see how young people there filming.” (By Martin Kalani)
Image courtesy of Eva Rinaldi Celebrity and Live Music Photographer