The streaming platform GPC Online Screen was created in May 2020 as a rapid response to the COVID restrictions on the opening of cultural spaces. Designed and developed in collaboration with the Colombian collective Lagentedelcomún, GPC Online Screen has showcased a diverse range of video screenings and lectures since its inception. Mimicking the temporal limitations of in-person screenings, the platform’s programs are available for free only at their scheduled times, adjusted to the user’s time zone.
GPC Online Screen has been showing the curated film series ‘GPC STREAMS’ since 2022. Each edition is based on a recent moving image work by a member of the cooperative and expands on this with a thematically coordinated programme of works by international contemporary artists.
The aim of the series is to place the content-related issues of the cooperative in a broader international context and to bring them into dialogue with other artistic perspectives.
The current programme can be found here on the website.
■ MARLIES PÖSCHL: DATA GARDEN
4-part site-specific video installation, 360-degree video, color, binaural sound, total approx. 10 min., 2021
A young scientist from Gui’an, China, has developed a method by which she can store data in the DNA of plants, as an alternative to existing data centers. Thus, a mysterious plant arrives in St. Gilgen, whose DNA contains stored information, and which represents the beginning of the Data Garden, a hidden library. The plant contains memory fragments about a group of migrant workers in a Chinese electronics factory. Those people who assemble our mobile phones appear hauntingly in St. Gilgen. The reality of the production conditions overlays the place we see as “Augmented Reality”.
The scenes are based on the poems of Zheng Xiaoqiong, a Chinese author who portrays migrant workers and their living and working conditions. Thus, Data Garden addresses how the effects of globally unequal production relations are inscribed in plants, migrate with them, and become anchored in collective memory.
Direction, Editing, Production: Marlies Pöschl
Poems: Zheng Xiaoqiong
Translation: Lea Schneider, Martin Winter, Zhou Yangchun: Daniela Chen
Voice Over: Kun Jing
Choir: Xingchen Liu, Haili Luo, Ying Qui-Zhang, Jiayi Steiner, Sissi Qi Wang, Yu Li Ya, Guanpei Zhou
Assistant Director: Sophie Averkamp
Camera: David Rabeder
Sound Sound Design: Simon Rabeder
Costume: sandy wetcliff vienna
Thanks TO: Xie Feru, Felix Rank, Meni Böhm, Christof Krainthaler, Stiegl
■ MARLIES PÖSCHL: DATA GARDEN
2-part video installation, consisting of 4 videos and salt licks, 4K, color, live sound, total approx. 11 min., 2021
This video features six albino animals in various locations in Austria and Germany: in zoos, wildlife enclosures, and even an animal rescue center. In fiction, the albino animals travel as ghosts of the future into the present, thus representing a collective memory of the present from the perspective of the future. These images are framed by a poem by the German cultural producer and educator Marion von Osten. In Human Animal Song (2017), von Osten lists what humans do to animals and thus criticizes human dominance in human-animal relationships. This poem was recited by several young people. They are part of a group of students with whom Nathalie Koger has been working since September 2020 on a reinterpretation of Erich Kästner’s The Conference of the Animals. The children represent the future, the animals show us the present. The four videos presented here form the prologue of this film project.
In the original text, all animals of the world act as agents of transformation for a better future for humanity. “How can The Conference of the Animals be transferred to the present and rethought as a film with children?”, asks Nathalie Koger in this participatory artistic project. The aim is to develop a cinematic fairy tale in which the children – unlike in Kästner’s original – act as agents of the animals.
DIRECTION, 2ND CAMERA, EDITING, PRODUCTION: Nathalie Koger
CAMERA: Mathias Windelberg
POEM: Marion von Osten
TRANSLATION: Ivana Milos
COLOR GRADING: Andreas Lautil
CONSULTATION: Konstantin Sautier/Nymphenburger Schulen, Christine Lang
THANKS TO: Sabine Öfner, Rainer Zöchling, Uwe Ringelhan, Thomas Knauer und Guneet Toor, Sarah Krohnfeld, Clement King, Linus Rieger, Alexander Sentenstein, Magnus Clausing, Moritz Funk, Marina Weiß, Noah Alibaba, Luca Rupp, Eleonora Berger, Shivali Shrungarkar und Saranda Azemi, Nymphenburger Schulen
■ LISA TRUTTMANN: TRACKS I–III
3-channel video installation for three mobile phones, 3 x HD, color, 3 x stereo sound, approx. 10 min., 2021
At the beginning of film history, rapidly passing landscape images haunted the first cinemas as “Phantom Rides”. While initially it was cameras mounted on trains visually conquering supposedly untouched areas at top speeds, now mobile radio signals also steer our technologized gaze and open up landscapes. Tracks I-III goes in search of traces and follows, fragmentarily and associatively, the former section of the Ischler Bahn between Mondsee and Strobl. In a digital ghost train of the present, we traverse the landscape, search for clues, and look both forward and back. We ask how invisible radio signals travel, how they manifest in moving images, and why we are now looking at our phones and not sitting in a cinema.
INTERVIEW WITH: Alfred Wiener
CONCEPT, CAMERA, EDITING: Lisa Truttmann
SOUND RECORDINGS: Gerald Roßbacher
DRONE PILOT: Daniel Ausweger
■ KATHARINA SWOBODA: STONES
Single-channel video installation, 4K, color, sound, 5 min., 2021
Many components of a smartphone’s building blocks are first laboriously extracted from the earth in the form of rocks before being further processed with thermal and chemical processes. Some of these raw rocks, from which elements such as palladium, tantalum, lithium, or rare earth metals can be extracted, are shown in the video. A scientist examines these stones under a microscope, and with her, we cast an abstracted gaze upon the “inner landscapes” of a smartphone. The video concludes with an experiment – after the rocks have referenced the beginning of the smartphone raw material chain, the experiment addresses the end of the device’s lifespan.
CONCEPT, DIRECTION, PRODUCTION: Katharina Swoboda
CAMERA: Sonja Vonderklamm
SOUND: Sara Pinheiro
PERFORMER: Christine Murkovic
THANKS TO: Kamen Stoyanov, Iris Blauensteiner, Dr. Bernd Moser/Chief Curator of Mineralogy Joanneum Graz, Dr. Michael Murkovic/TU Graz
■ SIMONE OBERHOLZER: PERFECT PARTICLES (x kWh)
3-channel video installation for three mobile phones, 3 x HD, color, 3 x stereo sound, approx. 10 min., 2021
At the beginning of film history, rapidly passing landscape images haunted the first cinemas as “Phantom Rides”. While initially it was cameras mounted on trains visually conquering supposedly untouched areas at top speeds, now mobile radio signals also steer our technologized gaze and open up landscapes. Tracks I-III goes in search of traces and follows, fragmentarily and associatively, the former section of the Ischler Bahn between Mondsee and Strobl. In a digital ghost train of the present, we traverse the landscape, search for clues, and look both forward and back. We ask how invisible radio signals travel, how they manifest in moving images, and why we are now looking at our phones and not sitting in a cinema.
INTERVIEW: Alfred Wiener
CONCEPT, CAMERA, EDITING: Lisa Truttmann
SOUND RECORDINGS: Gerald Roßbacher
DRONE PILOT: Daniel Ausweger
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