Writing in Millennium Film Journal in 2014, cultural critic Ara Osterweil proposed that American artist James Turrell’s careerlong Light and Space project is not only kindred with experimental film, but could rescue the cinema from mounting fears of its impending extinction and bury the theoretical obsessions with medium specificity that have obscured its redemptive potential. Divorced from market-dictated determinations, his work extricates us from a social world that Jonathan Crary describes as “non-stop,” conformed to the mechanical modes of production demanded by 21st century capitalism. In such a domain, “distinctions between day and night, between light and dark, between action and repose” can no longer be undermined. Once again, we truly see. Turrell, though, doesn’t use a camera or any other cinema apparatus to produce or present his work; rather, he needs nothing more than natural and artificial luminance and the architecture that contains it. Reflecting on the artist’s PS1 installation, Meeting (1980-86)—a room with a geometric opening in its ceiling to frame the exposed sky for viewers’contemplation, characteristic of his signature Skyspace works—Osterweil details how the piece not only ofers a meditational, cosmic experience but also the ability to “re-frame the ordinary world, [thus restoring] it to perceptibility,” an efect she compares to that ofered by the Lumières’ early actualités. The sky is the image and the object in Meeting, and so fulfills cinema’s expanded perceptual potential without abandoning Bazin’s core fantasies for the medium.

 

What we have, then, is a line: one of infinite trajectories that could have been mapped out to unite the past and future of cinema, from Turrell to the Lumières and straight on back to Plato. It passes through the first panoptic scope of Cinerama displays, and Dwinell Grant’s Color Sequence (1943), and the monochromatic reverie that is Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), while piercing through Stan Brakhage’s retinal odysseys, the colourful stroboscopics of Paul Sharits, and certain Peter Kubelka and Tony Conrad flicks along the way. Eventually this line reaches the present, and if lengthened onward into eternity—from Meeting to the end of images—somewhere between Turrell and the hypothetically imminent technological singularity lies the work of Austrian-born, Berlin-based multimedia artist Rainer Kohlberger, one of the most exciting image creators to emerge in the 2010s.

 

Like Turrell’s, Kohlberger’s is a practice described by light. Across a resumé comprising short videos, live audio-visual performances, iOS apps, album art, and large-scale installations, his anti-images sever us from anything material or spatial. Because of its angular,aggressively digital aesthetic and an extreme reliance on code, his output is tempting to discuss within the boundaries of Generative Art. Unlike most time-based media built exclusively from algorithms, though, Kohlberger’s work mitigates the autonomy of his computational processes: he produces his pieces with dataflow programming (using the somewhat obscure vvvv toolkit for video synthesis, which he describes as an abstract version of a modular synthesizer), a workflow that allows him to create feedback loops and manipulate code-generated images with pixel shaders in real time before creating his montage in an editing suite. This methodology, which he likens to the production of improvised music, creates an uncanny synthesis between machine formalism and his own impulses and intuition.

 

Kohlberger prefers to classify his process as noise. A fittingly open and paradoxical aesthetic principle, noise connotes both nothing and everything—chaotic absence and overwhelming presence. It is the unignorable trace of the distant (e.g., highway ambience), the unwanted (e.g., digital artifacts), and the broken (e.g., fading radio signals). It is (a)chromatic, technological, primal, aural, and optical—a cacophonous medium that precludes communication. When he recalls his infatuation with noise, Kohlberger often speaks of his childhood fascination with staring into old cathode ray-tube TV screens when the channel had lost its reception. “I turned it on anyways, looked into the ‘snow,’ and controlled the knobs to modulate the noise”—perhaps not inadvertently aligning his younger self with Poltergeist’s young Carol Anne Freeling, who likewise fancied a conflicted light: a harbinger of novelty and death, an icon of the sacred and the chthonic.

 

This ambivalence is manifested in two of Kohlberger’s earliest and most stroboscopic short films, humming, fast and slow (2013) and moon blink (2015). Running nine and ten minutes, respectively, each film begins with a pure white screen, flattened and soft until minute vibrations and folds emerge on its surface. Moving in tandem with warbling, synthesized drones composed by Kohlberger in Ableton Live (according to him,always after he has finished composing the image), the whites become nebulous greys as darker tones quiver into the mix. In humming, this fluttering escalates quickly into a phasing efect, as the succeeding frames sweep through an array of horizontal white-to-black gradations. Whatinitially evokes a dying fluorescentlight bulb soon becomes a scrolling wave of monochromatic tones, moving rightward (unless I blink, in which case the movement may immediately transfer to the opposite direction). The screen gets vertically segmented into neatly divided halves and then a multitude of narrower panels, its kinesthetic force disrupted and complicated as the partitions isolate the distinct illusions. Throughout this two-minute sequence, the screen space remains admirably flat, staving of perspectival intrusions even as my orientation in the room around me becomes perpetually heightened and deranged.