“A New Dawn” by Max Schlesser
Title:
- A New Dawn
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Filmmaker, Video Artist, or Animator(s):
Symposium:
Venue(s):
Artist Statement:
A New Dawn is a memoryscape, which takes a critical approach and uses the Aurora Borealis as an audio-visual representation of life out of balance. Imagine the magnetic fields have shifted through climate change and the collision of electronically charged particles would happen in our proximity. The Aurora’s symbolise a geomagnetic storm caused by nature’s exclamation of the ecological crises.
The last shift was worked on the 4 April 1985 and the former ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ turned into an industrial wasteland. The ironworks are not only a symbol of ‘Wertewandel’, the change of values, but also symbolises our addiction to artificial energy and its transformation into wealth. As a side product of the last century’s heavy industry, we are now faced with a climate crisis.
Simultaneously the interpretation of Aurora’s in dreams signifies a positive outlook. A dream with an Aurora means important things will happen and ‘magnetic’ outcomes are about to appear on the horizon. While climate change appears to be a nightmare of the industrial past, this experience hopes to recalibrate our outlook. In Greek mythology Aurora refers to dawn, combining paste and present this memory-scape takes a position to make an argument about an innovative planet and that we must act now in a holistic manner on the climate crises.
The affordances and aesthetic of this experimental screen production are utilised through the viewers presence in a hybrid space; partly dream object and partly architectural requiem. The visuals are interacting with an original soundscape. The moving-image artwork conceptualised spatialised storytelling based on a combination of soundscape and abstract filmmaking. This original method is supported by experimentation with motionscapes. On location an accelerometer microphone was utilized to record the sound of the fabric. Using intellectual montage, the factory was personified and ‘reactivated’ through the placement of visual and audio effects in the filmic space to demonstrate how nature reclaims this architectural requiem.
