The media-art collective farmersmanual synthesizes electronic music with digital visuals - frequently generated live - to multimedia performances, in which other authors can participate as well. Through its experimental arrangements, farmersmanual explores the aesthetic and above all the cultural potential of digital technology.
Most members of the Vienna electronic music scene depend on Tina Frank's "advanced design - greater tranquillity" when it comes to CD covers, flyers and websites. She acts as incorruptible graphic-design conscience for her home-base MEGO label. Together with Mathias Gmachl of farmersmanual, Tina Frank founded the video band skot, whose sounds and images can be downloaded from the Net.
Famous for his collaboration with Neville Brody on the already legendary visual representation of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation ORF, Oliver Kartak now concentrates almost exclusively on the moving image, returning to the print-format only when dealing with labels such as uptight, kleinrecords or G-Stone, for whom he creates cover designs and music videos. The "Peace Orchestra", for instance, is indebted to the OKA-Lab for its congenial visual style, a Viennese reference to Woodstock.
The website http://lia.sil.at offers a glimpse of the highly suggestive, freely mutating world of graphic experiments. These Shockwave Screens can be partially navigated on-line and also react to musical impulses in modified programming. For this reason, lia uses them in concert, such as during performances together with the musicians of @c.
Shockwave required
The film director and multimedia producer works both in "old" and new media, though his passion lies in cinema, having already shot a feature film. The most recent product of his versatile "Copy Shop" involves the fusion of both fields: the short "original copy-film" is a Kafkaesque study of the outdated reproduction process, based mainly on digital possibilities of alteration.
