Station Rose Jingle 2011 „Cliffhanger“
The evolution of cybernetics is being driven forward, announced Gary Danner of the artist group Station Rose, because even after more than twenty years of digital, the possibilities of cyberspace are not exhausted for Danner and Elisa Rose. Station Rose summed up their first two decades on the Internet with the monograph "20 Digital Years Plus", which was published last year as a book with DVD and CD by Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg. On Tuesday, April 26th 2011, Station Rose will be guests with an installation and a lecture in the art space COCO at Bauernmarkt 9, 1010 Vienna.
Every year the media art avant-garde artists Gary Danner and Elisa Rose, who have been working together since the 1980s, produce a so-called jingle for art radio. While a jingle in the media language is an advertising clip of a few seconds, Station Rose are redefining this format: the jingle can fill an entire program and is not used for announcement or advertising, but for radiophonic reflection of the past, present and future.
The first annual jingle of this kind was produced for Kunstradio in 1988, and the title “Neue Umbedingungen” heralded the dawn of a new age: the digital age. The year 1988 brought some changes, innovations and openings for Elisa Rose and Gary Danner: in a narrow street in Vienna-Wieden, they opened a multimedia art station called Station Rose, which was to become a hub in Vienna's avant-garde art. And, in addition to this physical space, Danner and Rose also moved into the virtual space: "Cyberspace is our land" they announced when the Internet was still a space reserved for insiders, inventors and artists that had to be discovered and defined.
At the beginning of the 1990s, Gary Danner and Elisa Rose moved from Vienna, which was perceived as dreary and backward, to the techno capital Frankfurt. There, with their audiovisual performances, they created total works of art with sound, light, space and the internet that shaped the club culture. With "Dave" they also had a commercial hit in 1992, which was played up and down at the Love Parade. In the mid-1990s, Station Rose withdrew from the club scene into their digital homes, into the Internet nest and sent their messages to the world via web stream.
At that time, cyberspace was their main residence for Elisa Rose and Gary Danner, Frankfurt a secondary residence and they had another branch in Vienna. This weighting has now changed: with 300 moving boxes, Rose and Danner have changed their place of residence and have closed the Frankfurt branch until further notice. The move from Frankfurt to Vienna is also addressed in the new Rose Jingle station, as is the reasons why Frankfurt is no longer worth living for them. In Frankfurt, explain Elisa Rose and Gary Danner, there is a lack of opportunities for artistic development - the city has fallen victim to the financial sharks, subcultural life stands still and as a banking metropolis, Frankfurt is a refuge for a concentration of tendencies that are endangering humanity. Station Rose have designed their annual airtime in the art radio of the public broadcaster accordingly politically. You can hear, for example, lists of company names, cynical-sounding contractual clauses and allusions to the hardship of the relocation.
The new station Rose Jingle was partly created in the studio in Frankfurt, which is ready for dismantling, partly in the studio in Vienna, which has just been connected to the internet, and probably somewhere on the transit routes between the two cities. This year, the jingle turned out to be extremely musical, as Gary Danner thinks, because despite the excursions into virtual worlds, the musician, who has recently increasingly picked up the guitar, still cares about his artistic roots in Great Britain in the 1960s. Unlike in previous editions of the radio jingle, the 2011 version got its own title: “Cliffhanger” indicates that Station Rose is at a turning point in their artistic work and private life. What follows remains open.