Hagebölling Explores New Intermedia

“Media scenography,” a term coined by Heide Hagebölling, is the union of two classical Greek root words. Hagebölling, who gave a lecture—“Media Scenography: Creative Approaches in Intermedia and Public Art”—at the Carpenter Center last Thursday evening, is a professor at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. “‘Sceno,’” she explained, “is the architectural aspect of the ancient Greek theatre, or the mise en scene of a film or play.” “‘Graphy,’” she continued, “means virtuosity, or the skill of descriptive, pictorial art.” The term, however, does not simply describe virtuoso set design. Media scenography labels an entirely new fusion of visual and auditory creation that reaches far beyond the classical theatre into modern performance spaces. It is, in its own way, a form of “multimedia storytelling,” according to Hagebölling.

The Academy of Media Arts, which she co-founded in 1988, has established a unique curriculum. Whereas elsewhere visual art fields are largely taught separately, the Academy advocates the integrated teaching of film, television, art, design, and theory. After studying at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach, the Annenberg School of Communication, and the Tisch School of the Arts, Hagebölling decided to synthesize these media into one field of study: Audiovisual Media. “Light, kinetics, space, performance, energy—these are the roots of the work we are doing at the Academy,” Hagebölling said.

According to Hagebölling, the goal of the Academy is to create installations that allow “collaborative work with musicians, dancers, and museums.” She clarified the interdisciplinary work of the Academy with photographs and videos of installations that have emerged from the school.

The first project that Hagebölling presented was “Percussive Planet,” a collaboration with musician Martin Grubingers in Bonn that combined live digital animation with the pieces of 35 classical and contemporary composers. Grubinger’s musicians played together on stage against a backdrop of flashing animation created by VJ software, the same kind used in today’s nightclubs and bars. Enormous multi-colored shapes and lines streamed across the screen, all created in real-time by Hagebölling’s students as a visual response to Grubingers’ musical selections. The mood created by these animations was explosive—the popping lights of the final piece transported the viewers from the concert hall to the heart of a dance club.

Hagebölling next presented “Roll Over Beethoven,” an array of installations made for the Bonn International Beethoven Festival in 2006. The piece, Hagebölling said, “aimed to meaningfully translate classical music” through use of audiovisual media.

Eva Kehl-Cremers’s “Architektique” was an enormous spiraling cylindrical structure that hung from the gallery ceiling. The structure served as a canvas for her light animation and enveloped her viewers, who stood in the spiral, in an “audio-visual” experience. Animated waves of light oscillated up and down the spiral, as if choreographed to the sound of Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata for piano. Although more traditional listeners may have cringed at this reinterpretation of one of Beethoven’s most famed works, Hagebölling said that her goal was to “give listeners a totally new experience… to allow viewers to understand the music on a different level.”

”Roll Over Beethoven” also featured Kualshen Auson’s whimsical installation, “Scratching Beethoven.” Auson’s project harnessed the movement of ant colonies through a network of glass boxes to mechanically rotate a turntable playing Beethoven’s opera “Fidelio.” “The dissonant sound horrified Beethoven-lovers,” Hagebölling laughed, “but it amused the children.”

Hagebölling then exhibited the projects she directed with Andreas Marat, who leads the Water Museum Mülheim in Cologne. They involved a series of installations housed inside the gallery space of a large water tower-turned-museum. One installation measured the magnetic field surrounding visitors who entered the space, which in turn caused glowing water to flow across a large disk on the gallery floor.

Hagebölling ended her lecture with an ethereal film of European ballet dancers dancing underwater, captured to music composed by the filmmaker.

Praising the student creators of the evening’s installations, Hagebölling said, “Media scenography is exciting for young people today because of the openness of the field and the new technological developments in media... We are constantly looking back to see what we can learn and what we can expand, but it is also important to change our attitudes and styles.”