Billy Roisz

As this year’s collaboration project with Diagonale 10, the Kunsthaus Graz is for the first time showing the installative presentation for the trailer directly linked with the subject matter of an exhibition. The jointly selected Viennese video and music performance artist Billy Roisz will be creating a work for the trailer of Diagonale 2010 specifically for the exhibition Catch Me! Grasping Speed.

In Billy Roisz’s installation brRRMMMWHEee, 4 channels, 8 monitors and 4 different sounds and pictures hurtle towards each other in non-synchronised visual and acoustic loops. What is fast here hardly moves, and yet is faster than the eye can see. Billy Roisz is one of the best-known figures on the Austrian experimental scene. Her ability to translate experimental music into visual memory images is particularly noteworthy, revealing borrowings from minimal art and conceptual art. In brRRMMMWHEee, she sets frequencies oscillating that we can hardly see any more but can hear and interpret.

For Diagonale 2010, Roisz was selected from last year’s prize-winners to produce both the Diagonale trailer and a film installation on the subject of speed for the exhibition Catch Me! at the Kunsthaus Graz. To start with, the result of this commission steals in under the radar and slips on-screen on audiovisual tiptoe, leading us to suspect that it involves material generated by two-way feedback, exploring frequency as a primal form of the absolute speed of digital communication. Roisz talks of a constantly remixed pursuit, “chasing electrons down the cathode tube of an ancient telly, the circuit board of video mixer, the circuits of a computer, the grooves of a disc or a modded tuna tin” so as to catch up with yourself.

She offsets the rigour of the conceptual work with theatrical irony, using wit, self-criticism and an admix of comedy. She presents speed as a deleted track (both sound and picture), and generates colour visions reminiscent of the painted spaces of Ad Reinhardt or Mark Rothko. Using monitors and loudspeakers, she sets up a three-dimensional configuration in the darkness of the billowy Space03 rather like an eight-piece chamber orchestra whose players perform endless reinterpretations of a round. The screens are individual musicians, and as such subject to their own speed in time. They all play their own pictures and sounds of electronic interferences through in constantly changing contexts, where the formations are related but not identical. Even in an age of technology, it seems tempo remains subjective and relative.

brRRMMMWHEee - extended version
Trailer and installation
Concept and realisation: Billy Roisz
Music: Billy Roisz & dieb13
Audio-mastering: Martin Siewert