NO CONTENT

F. Bretschneider / P. Warnecke

AV performance

40min

2021

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Contemporary western society is a chaotic place full of contradictory messages of hope, beauty, absurdity, deception and distress. Within this shared world, we all experience from time to time small epiphanies: realizations of how unjust, comical or wondrous an idea, a conversation, an image, an object or even a word can be. These flashes, which sometimes snap us out of our routine, seem to momentarily lift a veil on how an aspect of society functions (or doesn’t) from a larger perspective, allowing us to briefly reflect on our shared condition with humour, elation, depth, or despair.

In NO CONTENT these small subjective moments are gathered and explored through AV microsamples from a broad spectrum of real and virtual social spaces (newspapers, advertising, supermarkets, hospitals, cemeteries, subways, social media, clubs) from which the artists will extract ideas pertaining to science, society, entertainment, politics, religion, shopping and more. These snippets of the mundane, exceptional, droll or detestable are processed until, like semantic satiation, their trance-like repetition forces a loss of meaning, rendering an abstract shape or sound. In this way, the piece looks to break the semiotic connections between meaning, medium, sign and symbol, transforming the real into the surreal, ethereal or hyperreal.

The resulting compositions aim to pull one from a routine experience towards a hypnotic and dissociative space that reveals dark, strange or funny aspects of the banal while pointing to to the potency of media to circulate all types of ideas, images and words through society: from important to incorrect, fake to funny, temporary to timeless.

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