"Wasteland Passages" is a five-channel video and audio installation with five screens, five projectors and five loudspeakers and the final project of my master's degree. For this work I sorted, edited and arranged films, wrote texts and created sound design and music. The work is based on several Super 8 analogue films that I discovered in a private estate, digitized and placed in a new aesthetic and semantic spatial-installative context. The work attempts to evoke the past and the remembered through staging, to question the forms of these stagings, the theme of travel - in its ambivalence - and reflecting on fear, time and death. My personal relationship to the found films and my own life story are woven into the installative filmic work. The film layer consists of video containers (semantic units with video material spread across five screens in parallel) and blank intermediate tapes, to which texts have been added through the use of subtitles. The texts are of a personal, autobiographical nature and have different sources; they are partly memories or attempts at memory. The linear time of the found material is broken up by editing and parallel visualization on different channels. Repetitions and new combinations of image, text and sound change the perspectives and constantly enable new relations, the work, like a machine (realized via a Max-Patch), has no beginning or end, it constantly reassembles itself - partly through random processes. The form of the work approaches the structure of memory (as incomplete, perspective-dependent, staged).
The written master's thesis focuses on the above-mentioned practical master's project. It describes the genesis of the work and its technical functioning and, starting from considerations on the design criteria of film, music and sound within this work, makes excursions to other Super 8 works and into theories of film and sound design. Reflections are made on forms of narration, the perspectives taken as a viewer, questions about the structure of memory and identification, about the effects of immersion in film and about the perception of image and sound in their interplay and, more generally, about the representation of sound. Various sources from film and media theory and theories on perception, immersion and aesthetics, texts on amateur film, texts on sound design for film and texts on historical forms of experimental film are referenced. The special open form and spatial aesthetics of the installation, which can be understood as a generator of meanings and ambiguities and as a medial search image with regard to the possible narratives that result from its medial components, become more apparent.