Alpha-Ville 09
It is not often that the generating thrust of a sociocultural occurrence will defy the invasively unimaginative trend of corporate mentality, that will somehow wrongfoot your bored expectations to disclose creational spaces where drunk and bovine ‘togetherness’ is not a must. Alpha-Ville 09 loomed forward as the sonic ghost of a distant yet plausible mutagent willing to sublimate the frustrated potential of transmeaningful connections lost in the inurban atomization of a town kept alive by the phonoblasts of its dissident entities. Being granted the elegant ‘privilege’ of a cobblestoned location trapped in the melancholy of a remotely central vision surely plays its part, but the rest is left entirely to the human trajectories converging in.
Jumpstarting with a sensorial effluvium of visual asynchronicles recounting the dyslexia of an era struggling to represent its pulsing self with images - suffocated by censors and resisted via sensors – the festival shorts prelude is concluded by an extemporary masterpiece of modern image-making. Oszczedzanie by K. Kijer & P.
Adamski is in fact an aesthetic eruption in the face of a society paralysed by greed and hypnotized by paranoia. The two Polish video agitators Carpenterized a cinematic ambush at the expenses of ‘common sense’ and residual alternatives conjuring up the carnal urgency of a fututopia where there will not be a greener world but surely enough, a greener green, an impossible possibility of (un)sustainable life. Vain and schooling is the attempt to look elsewhere for (under)development or (un)civilization in spite of the filmic blackmailing of narrative empathy…
The syncretic essence surmised by the festival banner (Advanced Electronic Music Digital Media Visuals et al) comes into schematic focus with the performing cognition of Manekinekod + Graphset delivering a skeletal pamphlet of their own stylistic agenda without ever releasing the abstract lyricism lurking behind the telescreened notes.
Motion slides into emotionless, the live feed proper to such performative strategies never evades the layered structuralism that, if on the one hand entertains through its very externalizing tactics, on the other hand ends up sounding unsurprising and chromatically anaemic.
Markedly tuned on a more soundscaped vent suggesting a specular coalescence between aural matter and visual reminiscence is the tandem Arbol + Testphase. They alchemically fuse the unicity and multiplicity of the confabulatory screen calibrated against its melodious syntax; this levitating duo offers the ebriety of flight deprived of any feasible landing thus confining the listener in a status of perennial and forward craving. The spatial limits of the frame are expanded via the orchestration of a mounting melody sublimating the a-temporal condition of (live) video art into psychic fluxes of sonic desire that despite the abrupt and early ending keep wafting through the room after the creators have been unplugged.
Godspeed you Alpha-Ville!
Images by Sandy Ko
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