Not Still

Synopsis

"The source for the pictures and sounds in Not Still is a vinyl record. Initially, a sample dominates: the scratching of a record player needle in an endless loop. While the viewer remains stuck in the hypnotic soundtrack from electronic musicians dieb13 and eRikm, video artist Billy Roisz shifts massively enlarged photos of spinning record grooves from the dark into the picture. Roisz uses various types of cameras, including a coarse-grained microscope camera to 'illuminate' the record (often declared dead) by truly forcing her way inside it. Not Still forms an abstract visual landscape in shades of monochrome colors, from green to red, in which found footage on celluloid flares up like a quotation from the nether world.

Alienated classical film scores howl in Not Still's minimalist techno soundscape, overlapping with the main motif of the record in all of its varied visual structures. VJ Roisz mistreats this just as uninhibitedly as the DJ mistreats his records. Roisz shows brief shots of film macros, tracks of animated films and a horror movie, to then unexpectedly have the leaping picture strip swallow them again. As though in a séance in all degrees of its intensity, flaring up are scraps of memory of a pop culture media history. Not Still enacts a clash of media in gruesome disquiet and poetic ambiance.

By means of artistic manipulation and in interplay with technology's industrial expiry date, Billy Roisz evokes the sense that analogue sound and picture carriers still have long to go before they breathe their last." – Petra Erdmann (Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt)