Experimental short film by Rainer Kohlberger

Snares

Rainer Kohlberger applied various algorithms to extract the noise from a vast number of action films and used this to reduce the dramaturgy of the narrative to its essence. keep that dream burning oscillates between maximum abstraction and pure blur. Within the blurriness, objects form and disappear. The surface allows the space to be conceived.

Keep That Dream Burning

In the sixth great mass mortality of the earth, humankind became extinct. Their technology had recently progressed so far as to deconstruct the algorithms of evolution and allow artificial life to develop on Earth.

It has to be lived once and dreamed twice

Emergence Collapse, the collaborative project of Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Rainer Kohlberger and Viennese electronic music producer Jung An Tagen is nearly beyond description (and perception): An assault on the senses that is at once euphoric and harrowing, at once completely alien and uncannily evocative, their work is perhaps the perfect artistic manifestation of existential angst. Jung An Tagens frighteningly frenetic and earsplitting dissonance is complimented perfectly by Rainer Kohlbergers constantly evolving, neon-tinged visual freak-out. The result is relentless and painfully overwhelming, but like a horror movie, Emergence Collapse demands – and ultimately rewards – your attention.

Emergence Collapse

Rainer Kohlberger’s abstract film was created entirely without a camera. Through digital algorithms, he precisely arranged a rhythm of light and shadow that pulsates off the screen into our physical space with blinding intensity. The presence of light is almost felt as we are sucked into the image to become its ghostly accomplice. As we leave the theatre, the optical vibrations continue to haunt us.

Not Even Nothing Can Be Free of Ghosts

Rainer Kohlberger is prepared to go far when it comes to the physical experiences he evokes with his work. Answering the Sun demands the utmost from its audience. The invitation is to squint our eyes and allow the most amazing trips to unfold – just like when we were children letting the sun come in. However, the work is simultaneously a 60-minute bombardment of coloured fields and a wall of sound, followed by a hallucinatory, silent inky-black sequence.

Answering the Sun

In Kohlberger’s second film that could be considered narrative driven, the artist fashions a dystopian fiction from the remnants of cinema’s past. Drawing on excerpts from obscure sci-fi films, The Electric Kiss imagines a world not unlike our own, in which people plug their brains into a kind of neuro-network that connects the whole of human consciousness. As cyberpunk imagery draped in VHS textures alternates with passages of prismatic visual noise (achieved, in trademark style, by feeding footage through self trained machine learning algorithms), a quasi-plot emerges: a man in a VR headset, literally and figuratively lost in space, subjects himself to a mysterious procedure to alleviate the ill effects of this new technology on the mind.