YOU have to have more than an ordinary amount of dedication to view the artwork of three Austrian video artists currently running, in Arthouse's video wall. While the monitors nestle, snugly in the building's warm interior, viewers have to suffer icy temperatures outdoors, as well as having to dodge the cherry pickers and avoid the fine concrete dust falling from the overhead work on the building.
Perhaps seen in ultra closeup, the same falling dust would resemble the rain of capsules in Christoph Hinterhuber's 3D animations, Blast Off or indeed, a purple spiky cybernetic, microbe rotating in dark, empty space in Cosmic. The works are fluid and mildly hypnotic, but they do suggest that Hinterhuber is still busy outlining the flexibility of digital animation, when others have long since moved on to explore its communicative possibilities.
Rosa Brueckl and Gregor Schmoll's Situation Humaine shows a young woman's (in fact, Brueckl's) head in various poses alongside a pair of feet against a blue screen. A bare description may make the work sound dull, but within its limited form, the piece has a strikingly opulent feel, aided by precise lighting and staging, with the dangling feet keeping the tone uncertain. Godard appears to be a reference point, given the French title and Brueckl's Jean Seberg haircut, and the piece seems to be parodying the multiple transformations of the body that lens media may produce, even if that seems rather an extravagant claim for so simple a work.
Of the three works on show, Problem by artists working under the group title You Never Know, appears to have the most direct relationship to a record of a performance, but does not suffer because of that. In the distance of a room, a black object can be seen shuffling about, lolling from side to side, changing shape and direction. At first the form appears to be that of a black refuse sack inside which a body is struggling, and this proves to be the case as the object moves closer to the camera, until it collides with the rigid objective lens. The "problem here" - the one which it seems we might safely ignore, but will eventually force its way to the head of all problem check lists - is our tendency to fill ever larger numbers of black plastic refuse sacks, presumably offered here as a sign for both the wider impact of human society on its planet, and for the psychologically necessary business of forgetting.
