The starting point of the installations are Italian postcards showing housing estates in Arezzo in the 1960s, songs by the Italian singer Mina, recorded in the same decade, and texts by Michelangelo Antonioni – sketches for films never made.
The postcards were scanned and, by electronic processing, transformed into a virtual film set, an artificial space, in which a virtual camera can move. In accordance with the emotionally drastic development of the digitally processed songs by Mina, they are cinematically dissolved (clips, camera work, cut, editing) up to apparently narrative film sequences. The banality and dullness of the housing estates is set in contrast to the clichés in the emotional and yearning songs. Using only sound and deserted pictures, the installation tells a seemingly emotional story. In June 2003 we went to Arezzo to find the places on the postcards and to record the material for the soundscapes.
„Bowling am Tiber” deals with the emotional contents of places, buildings, spaces and the relationship between human beings and space. The actors’ texts by Michelangelo Antonioni describe rooms, places, and the people in these places. Due to the extremely high resolution it is possible to zoom right into the grain patterns of offset printing – ornamental surfaces – and into the digital pixel structure without any intergradations. Abstract colour spaces develop out of at first apparently semantically concrete visual material. Parallel to that we work with an extreme slowdown of the sound material – some kind of acoustic interpolation letting the cinematic/musical dramaturgies freeze as „abstract” acoustic as well as light/colour spaces. Spaces emerge that are open for the projection of the feelings developed in the cinematic narration. The close-up zooming through the subject-matter is congealed in this overexpansion of sound into standstill, thus becoming „devoid time”; an overexpanded in-between of narrated time.
„Bowling am Tiber” is a cooperation between the director Peter Carp and the artist and composer Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag. Their cooperation started during a study residence in the Akademie Schloss Solitude in 1999/2000. It is a mixture of theatre and media installation and was continued in 2001 with the production „Abenteuer
in Sachen Haut” at the Hebbel-Theater Berlin and at the festival “steirischer herbst”.
Credits
Idea, concept, direction, video:Peter Carp
Concept, video-sound-space installation:
Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag
Programming/cut:
Thomas Plöntzke
Costumes:
Gertrud Rindler-Schantl
Actors:
Anna Stieblich, Henry Meyer
Composition:
Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag
Tenor/bass trombone:
Marsyas
Double-bass:
Andre Neygenfind
Guitar:
Harry Kügler
Drumset:
Oliver Sonntag
Soundscaping, programming/electronics, production:
Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag
Processed parts of songs by MINA studios: N-Solab (Berlin), Musikplant (Lübeck) Software development, realisation of the installation: N-Solab
Technical assistance:
F18 (Hamburg), Jens Bakenhus, Harald Kügler
Images: a series of six postcards from the 1960s showing sites in Arezzo
Parts of text/sketches for films never realised by Michelangelo Antonioni
Production:
Carp/Sonntag, steirischer herbst (Graz) co-production hartware medien kunst verein (Dortmund), Gare du Nord (Basel ), Trans-Media-Akademie Hellerau e.V.
All soundscapes were recorded in June 2003 at the original sites in Arezzo displayed on the postcards.
Supported by
the Culture foundation of Germany (Kulturstiftung des Bundes).