What we wrote at the time…

Both singularly respected across a wide swathe of the contemporary arts; Köner for the blizzard-swept tundra and desolate elegance of his painstakingly assembled and researched minimal techno, [informed by Neubauten’s “aesthetic of decline”] and his award winning media art; Reble for his pioneering film work, kicking off with the collective Schmelzdahin and spanning a 25 year career of alchemical filmic invention. His hand-developed films about creation, evolution and destruction, about nature and natural science celebrate celluloid and emulsion through atmospheric corrosion, buffing, punching, carving, chiselling, scraping, weathering and chemical treatment during and after development. Their collaborative performance, Tabula Smaragdina sees Reble conducting dual customised projectors, firing out pulsating shards of film, heavily treated in crystallized salts and dyes whose superimposed images modulate into kaleidoscopic mosaics, the multiple layers in the film emulsion producing odd spatial depth. Köner, working in tandem and taking the whirring of the projectors and optical sound as a source builds condensed and distilled particles of sound, which fall like drops on the ground and decay into a deep, circulating silence before reforming anew.