17. “Tonki Gebauer: Song“ (Excerpt)
Richard Wientzek & Rupert Schellenberger: Music & Arr.
Prod. & Mix: Rupert Schellenberger at ultramar labs. 2002


When we came up with that Thomann-inviting-us-to-the-Biennial-idea we thought we would need some more artists to be presented there. One of them was Tonki Gebauer (*1972) who has been working in the field of new electronic music since the 1990s. His project for the exhibition was a critical video remix of Fritz Lang‘s silent movie “Ring der Nibelungen” .
The soundtrack tried to pile up sound clichés from the Viennese electronic scene without giving in to be something as sleazy as mere parody. It’s a brave but forlorn fight with pettiness and arbitrariness for 60 minutes. We selected the opening section here just to give you an idea about what hell 60 minutes can be if disposed to some mediocre sound artist. We had to go through the whole thing again and again when it was infinitely looped in our Biennial white cube. Originally, the film should only facilitate the ad hoc completion of the fourth project. The protocol of the preparation meeting noted on that case: “Something should be going on so that the exhibition seems real. Let’s just put up a monitor and a VCR, that’s cheap anyway”.
Instead of being just a footnote, Gebauer’s film and soundtrack turned out to be the most expensive element of the whole exhibition. We’d like to dedicate it to the international art scene, mainly to curators and schools, which have to go through it, because they simply have to.
We plan to have the complete DVD released regularly if we manage to talk one of the far too many Viennese electro avant-garde scene labels into doing so. But we don’t really want to bring Tonki Gebauers own label HTML Records (mentioned in his biography) to life. No, we won’t do that. No way! Stop looking at us like this… In the meantime it can be downloaded here: www.monochrom.at/videoinstallationsemulation.


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