Max Schleser | Australia | 19:49 | VR & 360 Film

Status: Official Selection

Industrial past colliding with artistic futures

Where the river Rhein and Ruhr intersect in Germany, you will find Duisburg. This former industrial city is known for bad football, mafia shootings and the Love Parade disaster. While the heavy industry , which brought prosperity to the port town in 50s and 60s, has demised with the Strukturwandel in the 1980s, steel is still shaping its landscape.

This Cinematic VR experience portrays the city’s public art, the Rhine Orange, Landschaftspark, Love Parade memorial and Tiger Turtle – Magic Mountain through audio-visual abstraction. As a kaleidoscope brings new perspective into interaction through reflection, Steel City aims to change the stereotypical representation of the Steel City. By means of using an accelerometer microphone the sound of these steel sculptures was recorded and provided an inspiration for the visual treatment of the video artwork. Kaleidoscope translates from the ancient Greek for observation in beautiful form. Max Schleser captured these public artworks with an omnidirectional video camera and Simon Longo/Dithernoise’s original soundscape for this audio-visual experience integrates the field recordings, which recorded the sound of the sculptures with an accellerometer. The Cinematic VR experience as much as the public artworks, display the dialectic of change and stagnation.

Spatial audio encoding by Darius Kedros at Sonic State Design in the Garden Studio Melbourne.

Please enjoy with headphones. Available as Third Order Ambisonics on request.

Director Biography – Max Schleser

Max Schleser’s experimental films, moving-image arts and cinematic VR projects are screened at film festivals and exhibited in galleries as well as museums (www.schleser.nz), including FLEFF Film Festival (U.S.A.), Festival de La Imagen (Columbia), Museu da Imagem e do Som do Estado – Museum of Moving-Image (Brazil), London Gallery West, South London Gallery (both U.K.), New Zealand Film Archive – Na Tonga Sound and Vision, Te Papa Tongarewa – Museum of New Zealand (both Aotearoa/New Zealand), Pocket Film Festival and Videoscope (both France). His community engaged documentaries are broadcasted on TV and online (https://www.behance.net/maxschleser). His mobile feature film “Max with a Keitai” (2007) is included in the public film archive in the Forum des Images in Paris and “Frankenstorm” (2014) was screened on CTV, Canterbury Television (2016). He is the Creative Director of collaborative digital storytelling platform 24 Frames 24 Hours (2016) and Viewfinders.gallery (2018). His transmedia project #Nucleus (www.goethe.de/nucleus) won multiple awards internationally.