DE/EN Crista Brandstaetter’s video projects deal intensively with the aspects of light, motion and colour. She traces the transformation of various light sources by factors of motion and spreads a spectrum of floating light effects. While the light sources alienated by elements of motion draw fascinating figures, the remaining area of the screen is immersed in abstract coloured surfaces which partially provide a transcendent impression. The horizontal or vertical coloured stripes which are included in the image sequences, emphasize the “basic colouring” of the videos. Crista Brandstaetter uses the potential of the videos not solely for representation of naturalistic – realistic images of a given world of objects, but creates a new conspicuousness normally not accessible to human perception. In cases where the video is documentary (and each video recording is basically documentary), this is not meant in the sense of a document of the external reality, but rather in a sense of a documentation of the genesis of unknown ways of appearance of this reality. The possibility of the process of generating such new ways of appearances is mainly predetermined by the technical potential of the medium (including of the possibility of digital post- processing). In Crista Brandstaetter’s videos this potential of the medium is used deliberately for the generation of new ways of visualization. Action and image language partially tend to an extreme reduction of form and content. This reduction of aspects of form and content is, on the one hand, the necessary precondition for generating such novel sequences of images and perception and, on the other hand, enables a more intensive attentiveness to qualitative elements which are, otherwise, easily overlooked or which barely exceed the threshold of perception. In the present videos the very “pictorial” characteristic could be considered as a successful aspect of video sequences – as if Crista Brandstaetter tries to paint with the video camera and not with the brush. Any reduction, be it of real objects to selected details, e.g. an eye in the moving light and reflection on a water surface or of a cigarette to its glowing tip, or every formal reduction represents a step into abstraction as a precondition for new experience of visualisation. When the basically stationary night illumination of houses is recorded by a walking person and by this transformed into wavelike phenomena which are contrary to the stationary light source, one thing becomes apparent beyond any aesthetic stimulus: the relative character of our perception and the changeableness of appearances of objects. The videos achieve an additional level of abstraction by their serial, assembly-line character, culminating in an endless loop. The acoustic addition to the videos represents a corresponding dimension, an acoustic transcription of the visual to make the conspicuous also audible. Text by Mag. Dr. phil. Erwin Fiala