360° VIDEO WORK
Markus Hanakam & Roswitha Schuller
Tower of Jewels (Re—Cut 2021) 2d— Animation, HD— Video, circular Letterbox, Colour, ASMR Sound, Loop 2015—2021
The video animation Tower of Jewels (2015, Re-Cut 2021) is based on scans of our plastic objects. These rotating bodies gain spatial depth and blurriness through the scanning process. We arrange them digitally in concentric circles and animate them rotating and in different scales. We obtain the sound exclusively from sound recordings of the plastic objects, which also function as sound pickups in addition to the visual. To do this, we scrape the individual objects along a stone surface (bricks), also in rotating movements. The acoustic effect that results from this process is now increasingly used in social media as Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (abbreviated ASMR). ASMR refers to the experience of a tingling sensation on the skin (so-called tingles). ASMR is often triggered by acoustic, visual and tactile sensory stimuli (so-called triggers), but the strength or weakness of the experience varies from person to person. https://vimeo.com/506771300/78a98a5df0
"Artist brain is our creative, holistic brain. It thinks in patterns and shadings. It sees a fall forest and thinks: Wow! Leaf bouquet! Pretty! Gold-gilt-shimmery-earthskin-king's- carpet!"
“Sphere of Truth”, video-animation, PAL 16:9, Full HD, Stereo, Colour, 16min. 2013
Hanakam & Schuller's recent video work Sphere of Truth is a follow up project to their 2012 work Crystal Cathedral, where they dealt with the marketing speak and mechanism of US-American megachurch models. The artists are working with a suggestive, nearly meditative Voice Over, but not dealing with the signification of a religious subject but with the issue of self-development and esoterism as a marketing based strategy of so-called healing and/or evolving.The assemblage of the Voice Over text deconstructs the language of prototypical self- development texts in being contradictory and juxtaposing. The vector graphic animation elaborates the idea of a "magic" sphere. The picture ratio is a square format to support the impression of the spheric shape. Hanakam & Schuller do relate on fantasy role game playing -the Sphere of Truth is one artifact of the "Magic" trading game series- in the same way as to esoteric picture production or historical phenomena like 19th century Theosophy or Goethes idea of Morphology. All kind of fields that surely had a strong visual impact of the aesthetics of new age design and contemporary well-beeing industries.
On the end of the screenings, Andrea Cvitan, Introducing Astronomy Center Rijeka