The Subject Changes
The Subject Changes is a poetic live simulation of an unsettled character, endlessly shape-shifting while negotiating his/her ambiguous world. The character sets out on an indefinite dérive – a frantic exploration – where fragile relationships with the world-cum-stage and its occupants are established or broken down. His/her state is ornately reflected in a constantly mutating attire, a fluctuating embodied masquerade — the virtual body as an encoded aesthetic artefact. commissioned by sound:frame 2022 The Subject Changes @ LEV – Metaverses / Nave 0, Matadero, Madrid, 22.09.2022 – 29.01.2023 The Subject Changes (Video) @ Ars Electronica Animation Festival / AEC, Linz, 07.09.2022 – 09.09.2022 The Subject Changes @ Meta.space / Francisco Carolinum, Linz, 31.08.2022 – 08.01.2023 The Subject Changes @ CIVA Festival / Belvedere21, Vienna, 18.02–26.02.2022
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The Entropy Gardens (in progress)
work in progress commissioned by sound:frame, funded by the Vienna Business Agency & BKA (Pixel, Bytes & Film) The Entropy Gardens is an artistic VR experience that explores one of humanity’s most archetypical artforms – garden making. It challenges its myths, aesthetics and modes of perception. Like a garden, The Entropy Gardens attempts to become a spatiotemporal poem — a poetic organism. In the form of a sprawling journey it constructs a hermetic, virtual garden as a poetic ecosystem — a psychic landscape that is foremost a complex audiovisual experience. It admits the visitor into a place that is equally challenging and contemplative (and of course profoundly weird). Exhibtions: The Entropy Gardens @ MUTEK virtual exhibition, Montreal, 08.09–20.09.2020 TALK @ Expanded Animations / Real Time “Virtual Gardening”, Hagenberg/Streaming, 12.9.2020 The Entropy Gardens @ LEV Matadero, Madrid, 24.09 – 27.09.2020 The Entropy Gardens @ AIL x sound:frame “Navigating the Postdigital”, Vienna, AT, 15.1–17.1.2020 The Entropy Gardens @ Elevate Festival, Graz, AT, 4.3–7.3.2020 The Entropy Gardens @ Choreographing the public, OnCurating Projects Space Zurich, CH, 21.11.–23.11.2019
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The Lacuna Shifts
The Lacuna Shifts is a spatio-poetic VR Experience The Lacuna is a volatile room that keeps changing around its guest – shifting in scale and mutating its architectural features – while revealing traces of poetic narratives. Loosely inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice books The Lacuna shifts combines sound, text and imagery into an alternate surreality. Disembodied, the viewer’s gaze becomes the only instrument of connecting to this space - it leaves traces, activates and builds structures. Instead of travelling through a world the world shifts around the spectator, at times covertly behind the back, sometimes in plain sight. The Lacuna's architecture rejects its passive role as a trusted, immutable shelter and permits a physically impossible experience of poetic space and a reflection about the fragile relation of the beholder to her/his environment Through the procedural nature of The Lacuna shifts you cannot enter the same room twice. Each viewer will experience a different "journey", manifesting different aspects based on her/his behaviour and the world's own erratic character. Similar to current walking-simulators and narrative-exploration-games the virtual space becomes a mysteriously unpredictable parallel world in an area between deceiving spatial perception, acoustic hallucinations and hermetic wordplay. commissioned by sound:frame in cooperation with O.K. - Offenes Kulturhaus OÖ and Metro Kino Wien […]
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Rebus Cumulations
Rebus Cumulations is an audiovisual work dealing with the accumulation of objects and the resulting collages of meaning and denotation build-ups.In the line of classic still life paintings and their symbolic charging, about 120 arrangements were built from everyday objects, cataloged and systematized via a lexical database.Rebus Cumulation is constantly on the verge between the mundane and the surreal and is building an enigmatic alchemy of things through an semantic system for poetry generation. Commissioned by soundcloud it analyses realtime usage data and relates its development to the movements and energetic states of the tableaux vivants. The installation is presented on a triptych of three 46" screens.Mounted on a wooden case with concealed speakers Measurements: 3m x 1.6m x 30cm Press Release and further details Made with VVVV & Reaktor © by depart (Leonhard Lass & Gregor Ladenhauf) 2014 Soundcloud data interface & engineering by Sean Sean Braithwaite. commissioned by Soundcloud permanently installed at Soundcloud HQ / Factory Rheinsberger Str. 76/77 10115 Berlin, Germany Thanks to Marco Zinz (installing, transport, etc), Tristan (Magic Tricks), Merlin König & Mimu Merz & Volkmar Geiblinger (camera equipment), Lisi Lang (textiles), Woeshi Lean (VVVV support, consulting and equipment), Christian Stoppacher (Light)
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The House Of Drift
Extensive installation project commissioned by sound:frame festival 2013 including cooperation with costume designers, architects, dancers and a photographer 3 channel Video Installation (3 x 6min, synced loops), FullHD Exhibition at MAK Vienna 05.04 - 21.04.2013 Credits Direction, Concept & AV Installation: Depart (Leonhard Lass, Gregor Ladenhauf) Project Management & Production Laura Welzenbach, sound:frame Fashion/Costume Department Lisi Lang (Lead), Anita Steinwidder, Martin Baumann, Mäx Mareš, Su Noya, Tea Jgenti, Armin Schmelz, Katharina Haring, Moana Stemberger, Julia Hausberger, Julia Högler, Mara Verlić Film & Photoshooting Andreas Waldschütz (Lead), Volkmar Geiblinger (Camera & Light), Merlin König (Assistant & Light), Thomas Mairitsch (Helper), Lisi Lang (Costume), Su Noya (Costume Assistant), Steffi Lamm (Hair & Makeup), Adia Trischler (Styling), Lauren Cooke (Styling Assistant), Robert Hack (Documentation), Michael Merzlikar (Documentation) Performer Sebastijan Geč (Lead), Asher O’Gorman, Milan Loviška, Otto Krause, Raphael Nicholas, Mana Malek, Malika Fankha, Katrin Blantar, Laura Welzenbach, Gregor Ladenhauf, Silvio Canazei Exhibition Architecture Gerald Moser, Christina Simmel Video Tech & Installation Bildwerk (Benjamin & Leonard Pokropek) Additional Credits Polypod (VFX Consulting, Tracking and Rendering Facilities) Melanie Cichos, Laura Welzenbach, Franziska Niemand (Paper Folding)
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The Cloud Chamber Diaries
Cloud Chamber Diaries is based upon a vis-a-vis situation of two mirror-images - two screens facing each other - where causalities seem to shift constantly. The protagonist (scientist-cum-medicine man-cum-pantomime) inhabits this space where he seemingly observes and/or controls a cloud like entity or vice versa in a virtual ritual. The viewer is situated in the midst of the two screens, therefore takes part in the equation and is limited to viewing only one side of the situation properly, while the other lures at her/his back. The work is loosely inspired by Schoenberg's War-Cloud-Diary, in which he tries systematically to relate cloud formations to day by day war developments. commissioned by ACF New York 2 channel Video Installation 10m34s, loop FullHD Additional Credits Andreas Waldschütz, Camera & Photography Jasmin Simak, Hair & Make Up Thomas Rath, Color Grading Austrian Cultural Forum New York (Sep 13, 2012 - Jan 6, 2013)
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The Flood Panels
The Flood Panels is a 16m panoramic installation which deals predominantly with periodic movement. The tides, alongside the appearances of sun and moon and seasonal change are one of the most archaic rhythmical structures in human life and perception besides the human body itself. At the same time, the flood is almost like an antagonist to the substructures of buildings and settlements built by human beings directly into or close to large bodies of open water. It is playfully flowing around and scouring them, constantly challenging the structures’ stability. As a figure of speech, the flood in its biblical context is synonymous with new beginnings and also the survival of a chosen group of species. Given the gloomy doomsday warnings surrounding the year 2012, this topical analogy may be regarded as a rather cheeky commentary on the artists’ behalf. The Flood Panels is part of the work cycle Perpetual Verge. The Flood Panels was commissioned by sound:frame. The sculptural screen was created by Gerald Moser. The ocean as a medium of the flood and source of all life is another important factor in this virtual drama, with all its romantic implications and elemental force. As much as the […]
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Glyph
Glyph is a projection sculpture with references to ritual monuments such as obelisks or stelas. It deals with cyclic change and constantly regenerates itself. An alphabet based on fundamental geometric shapes (rectangle, circle and triangle) acts as an communication device as well as a pure aesthetic element. All texts displayed are permanently evolving and restructured based on linguistic rules. The installation runs in realtime - the video shows a random segment recorded at schmiede 2011. Made with Processing & Reaktor supported by Subnet AiR, Schmiede, Polypod / Michael Großauer, Waldschuetz Photography, Show2Go
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Δ Aurigæ
Δ Aurigæ (Delta Aurigae) is an installation which deals with the periodic coalescence of opposite aggregate states, based on and structured by the rhythm of a double star system like the constellation Auriga. A world populated by meanders and monoliths, meteors and menhirs that draws inspiration from ancient astrology which was using rock formations and natural objects to decipher the universe and measure it’s cycles. Delta Aurigae is a hybrid between installation and performance, a stage with a life of its own. In idle mode it shows a slow and majestic flow like a glacier, where fringes blur and relations vanish. A monolith itself, Delta Aurigae is a 4.5m high triangle with a real-time projection. Made with VVVV & Reaktor.
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Altar Ego
Altar Ego is a projection sculpture in the form of a stylized winged altar dealing with construction of the Self. Altar Ego’s main focus is the projection as a mechanism of the psyche. Depart mounted portraits of themselves on a mock triptych that represent the Freudian categories id, ego and super-ego and form a psychoanalytical triad, a field of tension in which the futile efforts of Sisyphus meet the tragic vanity of Narcissus. The suppressed inner motive becomes the linchpin that distorts perception and its selfreflection. The central motiv (the super-ego) is both a concetptual and factual projection, that hovers in front of the altar, formed by the light that emerges from the center of the altar. The videos' rhyhthm is deducted from the seemingly random twinkling of the performers' eyes and an enigmatic impuls generator if form of a jumping dot and plays with synchronity in the alternation between two different states: open/closed eyes, concious/unconcious, wake/sleep.
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Chukwa’s Approach
Depart and Stefan Fraunberger present a new Performance in the series REVERB.ON in cooperation with Schmiede and Salzwelten Salzburg: Chukwa’s Approach. Inspired by concepts of Minimal Music and especially by the work of La Monte Young (“The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys”) an orchestra of 53 people was playing a single chord throughout the whole performance. Situated about 100 meters below ground on a lake within a salt-mine the musicians and the audience are invited to experience the vibrancy of a mountain. On their 30 minute walk through the mountain to and from the underground lake the visitors would pass video installations based as well on the prime number structures of the musical chord. Chukwa’s Orchestra: Anlanger Petra, Bacher Clemens, Brachtel Benedikt, Bruckmayr Didi, Eigner Richard, Estrela Paul, Farangis Firozian, Fraunberger Stefan, Grandits Sebastian, Grüner Markus, Hochleitner Gudrun, Hovdkinn Elise, Johnson Oliver, Kargl Sebastian, Karlstetter Simon, Kickinger Max, Kindlinger Florian, Kinschel Anna, Klinger Hanna, Ladenhauf Gregor, Lass Elisabeth, Lass Leonhard, Lercher Daniel, Mayr Timna, Mone Miriam, Movahedi Paul, Nassall Angela, Pfaffenberger Florian, Preuschel Julian, Pusa Saila, Radauer Clemens, Rauch Roman, Rösch Paul, Rosner Willibald, Saudek David, Sauer Birgit, Schabmayr Bernhard, Schauberger Anna, Schlegel Martin, Senz Gerhard, Steiner Johann, Strobl Doris, […]
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Gespraum
45min installation piece (loop: video, sound)
pathos of the inanimate in spatium mutans, rumbling & tumbling biedermeier blowup.
Passers-by look through a window into a (projected) rooom, which is undergoing a constant change. It shows an unstable situation that is seemingly stripped bare of temporality and causality. Furniture, books and other objects are in a tilted state or thrown in the air by unnamed forces, suddenly frozen still. Chairs bursting into flames, salt trickling from the ceiling, black beads bubbling up from an orifice in the parquet…
The constellation of objects in the projected room is changing constantly in such a manner that only the outer frame of the room (walls, doors, windows) is keeping still. A moving picture where often the speed of mutation is barely noticeable. Due to the style of production the video has a kind of slightly unreal quality, a doll’s house aesthetics maybe. There is no real reference of size and so an interpretation of the video as a documentary of real events is also constantly in doubt.
A room as an output of the subconscious. The “Gespraum”, a psychoanalytic talk of a room with itself. No tangible story, no plot can be really exemplified here, only suspected and interpreted
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My Myo Mayhem
platonian cave canem kafkaesque coffin break kammerspiel performance installation piece for three performers, myoelectrical stimulation, a chicken called Tesla, video & sound. duration of one cycle ca. 15 minutes imperial chickensouperpowers for the white room-o-botter groups of 10 people are lead into an anteroom where they are ordered to sit and wait. a strange person behind a counter is giving out questionaries and calling people to the desk in random order. this character is mutating over the duration of the whole piece from casual guy to kafkaesque clerk to lunatic to chicken. every 5 minutes one person is admitted to an adjoining room where an attendant is showing them about. a puppet emperor and his rural adventures are presented on screens while a glimpse into an overhead orifice provides an inverse cage perspective on the confetti chicken. the gloomy atmosphere of the first two rooms is followed by an eery transition to the center stage. There, the “emperor” is performing his private little hatching dance, controlled and hardsynced to the installation soundtrack by a mystical myoelectrical device dangling around his neck. after this shocking galvanic experience, the lounge room is a chill out, big brother-like situation with a cctv tablecloth, […]
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