Just went and saw half of From the Outskirts of Nothing to the Suburbs of the Void, a piece of audio and video from German media artist Thomas Koener.
I say half because I walked out after 50 minutes. It should be noted that this is the first time I've ever walked out of anything in my life. I even sat through all of Swordfish!
From the Outskirts involved a bunch of gradually changing static images (of snowy roads and apartment blocks to start with), accompanied by rumbling drones. At first this seemed pretty good, but the drones didn't do much and got louder and louder, and the images changed too slowly. Boredom began to set in. Eventually more intricate scenes appeared, but the drone thundered on and on. I like to think I have a decent sort of attention span, but after you've sat through a distorted-low-minor-chord-through-a-fistful-of-reverb for 20 minutes, you start getting a little impatient.
The overall result of this AV presentation was a kind of industrial take on Baraka, but without any of the fun(?) that might imply. Koener didn't seem have any interesting ideas when it came to developing the score. I know these drone fests are meant to be uncompromising, but you are allowed some variation in mood and tone.
To be fair the visual element was genuinely intriguing, but there wasn't enough of it, and Koener was reduced to repeating his sequences a couple of times before moving on, with the result that the novelty quickly faded. All up the show (or at least what I sat through) felt twice as long as it needed to be.
Despite being put out I don't want to write the guy off completely. I could see what he was trying to do, and it was worth doing, but in the end there just wasn't enough there to bring the performance off, either aurally or visually.
Posted by stuart at July 24, 2006 7:56 PM