Crude Carrier

collaboration with Bernd Härpfer

video
PAL 16:9, stereo
6 min 31 sec
2009

Crude Carrier, film version

In the background, an overcast skyline on the shore. A pan to the left begins slowly and accelerates increasingly. Soon the panorama turns out to be an endless strip of mirrored image sections.

A huge oil tanker enters the scene from the right. However, it does not mirrored at the axes of reflexion, but floats on, unaffected by the unreal surroundings, until the accelerating camera movement does not catch up with it any longer. So it disappears again, while the cityscape passes by with increasing speed. Then the ship suddenly reappears from the opposite direction.

Unaffected by the known laws of physics, the ship pulls its course and continues its journey into unknown realms ahead of it.

The tanker remains as a verisimilar object, while the pictorial space as a whole is transformed. This is based on a deep intervention in the footage, a restructuring similar to the slit-scan technique, which time transforms the image slot by slot, precisely analysing the initial movement. This preserves the spatial continuity of the overall scenario. The result is an alienation at the limits of the perceptible. The aesthetic tension created in this way is further enhanced by the soundtrack. The music develops from the analysis of the original sound, which is transformed alongside the visual action, first subliminally and then more and more strikingly. Noises are orchestrated and thus become flexible elements of a multi-layered sound composition that oscillates between dazzling complexity and clear harmonics.

Crude Carrier, 3 channel video installation