One field of research are audiovisual tendencies. travellab provides lectures based on the research and is involved in the setup of different spaces for experimental production (summer academy salzburg, uks oslo, spletizizers.net - lab, int. shortfilmfestival grimstad, digitale 99 cologne, diagonale festival of austrian film, transmediale berlin, sound and files vienna, ..)

Some projects with the involvement/cooperation of members of travellab:

One example - the video-compilation "Austrian Abstracts - Audiovisions", curated by Juergen Moritz and Norbert Pfaffenbichler:

A selection, that was first compiled for the festival 'diagonale' in Graz 1999. austrian abstracts are a snapshot of works of the new breed of austrian video artists.

Their videos are dialogues of picture and sound, with sometimes very minimalistic approaches, their visual language often highly abstract and purely graphics.

> audiovisions - audiovisual tendencies in austria

The Austrian film in general may still be rather unknown- except for insiders of course. But it is exactly the Austrian avant-garde and the experimental film that is extremely impressing and worth mentioning. Since the 1950ies, the medium film as an autonomous art form has been developed in a manifold way.

Thanks to names like Peter Kubelka, Kurt Kren and Valie Export or Lisl Ponger, Peter Tscherkassky and Gustav Deutsch - representatives of the so-called "third generation" who, between 1975 and 1985, used the medium film as an artistic means of expression - Austrian productions were able to find international acclaim. All these artists have found a very own, distinctive form of artistic expression. In their works, you can notice that they have not explored the options offered in the medium film formally or even technically, they have challenged this medium in order to find an individual form of expression.

In today's productions though, even more divergent and most vivid trends can be diagnosed. On the one hand, you have cross-over productions: films using an experimental film language and which cannot easily be assigned to a specific genre. And this does not only apply to films which tend to be more narrative but also to documentaries. And on the other hand you have films that represent the interest in the fundamental possibilities and the fascination in the techniques.

And yet there another interesting trend that can be noticed in the last few years. For quite a while, the Austrian avant-garde has traditionally been bound to the use and exploration of the medium film. The medium video, however, as well as the new forms of digital networking and multimedia now have extended the audio-visual realm of possibilities. Digital image production and processing have become more and more important throughout the entire world.

At the same time, since the 90ies, an innovative crowd of people working in the field of electronic music has evolved in Vienna. The growing importance of music related to film/video has resulted in a number of co-operations between artists working in the most different areas. The abstract and non-narrative videos you can find in the compilation AudioVisions are a selection of some of the most exciting works being produced within this field of electronic expression.

Overlapping levels of abstraction and direct links between sound/image interfaces move to the foreground, working off conventional editing, systems of reference, and relations to representation. Influences from avantgarde film are found as well as processes of alteration and transference from that tradition.

In most of the works images as well as sounds are computer-processed and treated as information of equal value. Hierarchy of sound and images has definitely been abolished. Sound here is not always the starting point of the images. Both, visual and sound material interact, and the editing, the manipulation is done on the computer: anything can be produced, deconstructed and put together again in many new and different ways. Synthesis is obligatory, the computer becomes another tool. The medium is the presence. Abstract design is a process.

Text by J. Moritz

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