NYC – Im Puls des Entkernten
Creative forms
2 Video Visiographies (2011, rev. 2020)
Sound and image compositions
Part I – “14 Street – Late Nights On Local Track” (30‘59)
Part II – “Surrender” (14‘18)
Dedicated to my son Hanno
Still from NYC Part II
These two new versions of my New York City Video Visiographies from 2009/2011, carefully revised in 2020, are stylistically and conceptually at home in a different world than my present art, yet frighteningly topical*) **)
What happens in Manhattan’s centers of power
What happens in Manhattan’s centers of power shapes worldwide economic and financial events - tightly clocked, absorbing everything.
Despite all breathlessness, in the end only repetitions are produced, as ever new variants of processes resembling one another. The rhythm arising from the combination of speed at a standstill and repetition levels everything with violent force into a mask-like cipher: increasing pressure builds up, in which living social relationships, inner calm or the unfolding of one’s own center in freedom and lightness are more and more lost in hollowing out: the path to collapse into a merely functional shell – a paradox that finds its concentrated mirror in the metaphor of the hard-circling sound/image structures of the videos.
Part I – “14 Street – Late Nights On Local Track”
A scene from the 14 Street subway station leads increasingly into the immediate experience of seemingly endlessly growing pressure, culminating in the awareness of powerlessness: in the image metaphor, flooding paralyzes New York’s infrastructure.
With Hurricane “Sandy”, this disaster scenario then became bitter reality in 2012 (1 year after the completion of the Video Visiography).*)
Part II – “Surrender”
The urgent pulsing of the city is more and more perverted into rigid formulas of emptiness circling around itself. The electronic music for the video incorporates original sound recordings of American military news. At the end of the composition, a vocal fragment detaches itself, as if from afar, liberatingly from the rigid scenario of doom.**)
The reality
*) 2012: New York under water
"Die Welt" reports on 30.10.2012: "North America’s longest road tunnel, which connects Manhattan with Brooklyn over three kilometers, filled up with torrents. Storm 'Sandy' had hurled itself on New York with deafening noise and turned the supposedly never-sleeping metropolis into a dark ghost town. Gusts of wind whipped through the city, sirens could be heard again and again. Seven subway shafts were flooded by the masses of water. According to the transit authority MTA, this was the worst disaster in this area in more than one hundred years. 'The New York subway is 108 years old, but it has never been confronted with a disaster as devastating as the one we experienced last night', said Joseph Lhota, the head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority."
**) 2020 Suppression and de-democratization
The current autocratic upheavals in political events, with lies, violence and the hollowing out of democratic structures in the face of the Corona crisis and of the resistance against racism, up to the deployment of the National Guard for "pacification", make the upheavals stylized in the video at that time appear frighteningly real.
English translation of the German original. Deutsche Fassung
