ATMOSPHERIC OFFENCE : 2025
HD video
Using previously discussed Dream Analysis techniques, this study of Noir era serial-killing focuses on the threshold of modern-period killing seen on the screen and the dream world of individuals fascinated and repelled by these horrors. How do these images and concepts become re-imagined as we sleep? How do these visuospatial imageries go from screen to dreaming? Hester Austenberg
Notes on the Film Atmospheric Offense:
Atmospheric Offense is an interpretation of Ida Lupino’s 1953 Noir Thriller The Hitch-Hiker that explores how narrative both remains and disappears when exposed to avant-garde techniques, which include removing dialogue, jarring and destructive ellipses, the creation of loops to focus on certain elements, reimagining of time, exaggeration of a certain sinister aesthetic, and a push toward a dream like quality.
Narrative remains, but with a bastardized and disoriented aftereffect, which transforms aesthetics and experience. The spree killings of Billy Cook (portrayed in Lupina’s film by the actor William Talman, and renamed Emmett Myers) are looked at more as a moment in time that begins and ends with vague qualities much like a dream, or an experience of weather in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.
The viewer also simply finds themselves, much like when dreaming, in an experience that is so vivid yet formless that space and time are manipulated before us in a similar way investigated by the surrealist artists or the visionaries of the psychedelic experience.
This is part viii from the series, Dreams.
Notes on the Music An Inquiry into Serial Murdering:
In addition to the visual component Atmospheric Offense, a sonic element is offered; An Inquiry into Serial Murdering, which further explores Lupino’s Noir tones using both sounds from the original film (exclusively used in Atmospheric Offense) and loops, melodic lines, tones and textures that were formed whilst in a comparable mood/dream states as found in Atmospheric Offense. An Inquiry focuses on peripheral auras situated around the dreamer’s atmospheric vessel in an attempt to reduce its qualities into something further unrecognized and disorienting.
One important guide for Atmospheric Offense was the video inquiry section in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 masterpiece Solaris, where beeps are used as strange and inconsistent punctuation indicators. These sonic elements interact with the visuals in a way that Robert Bresson would have called relay and transformation of sound and image “What is for the eye must not duplicate what is for the ear”.
In this sonic exploration, sound design is influenced by field recordings, Sabbath inspired melodic lines, minimal techno bastardizations, beeps become fog horns, cult anti-leader chantings, and drunken guitar left/right multi-tracking.