OASE 

Although it looks abstract and could be mistaken for a digital animation, the video footage used to create Oase (2022) was filmed on location in Berlin in the laboratory of the now defunct GDR lighting company Narva with a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K. Although still used in outdoor settings and military bases, sodium vapour lighting is becoming an obsolete technology. When sodium vapour lamps are turned on, they change colour, graduating from a deep red to a monochromatic yellow hue, like a sunrise. Once yellow, they have the eerie effect of bleaching the colour spectrum from objects they illuminate, turning everything into shades of grey. It is this characteristic that made this type of lighting the forerunner of the blue and green screens used for special effects. A yellow-screen, for instance, was famously used in Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic film The Birds (1963). In editing, Stein cropped, serialized and time-shifted footage of the lamps into a composition of vertical stripes or bands, adding a layer of compositional narrative of abstracted absences, appearances and disappearances. 

Stein worked closely with composer and producer Carlo Heller to create the sound components, which become a fused unity with the visual elements. The aim was to create an experiential installation that functioned like an immaterial sculpture, completely immersing a viewer in a sensorial event. The sound evolved from research into psychoacoustics and recordings made in an anechoic chamber, which are completely insulated against external noise and absorb almost all the sound within them. Through this near absolute silence, all one can hear is one’s own body – a heartbeat, for example. In addition, synthesizer and stringed instruments are a sonic translation of these extreme audio conditions. The sound of shattering glass in the chamber has been arranged into a particle-like cloud of sound that thematizes the fragility of glass and echoes the tubes of the vapour lamps. 

Stein writes about the work: “Although I know the work has aesthetic resonances of art like mid-twentieth century abstract painting, or experimental structural film, in fact conceptually the odd starting point for this work was reading philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks 1914-1916, which he wrote while he was on the front in WWI spotting for enemy fire. In order not to lose his mind, he kept a diary during the day to document his philosophical thoughts, but also his most private and sexual ones. Against the backdrop of the global pandemic, his writing made me think about social and sensorial deprivation and isolation. The paradox which I hope is my work OASE is how it might be possible to use conditions and phenomena which initially entail the dramatic restriction of the senses, but which, in doing so create a work which rewards those same senses with a heightened experience. This brings me to the title, which I have borrowed from an eponymous club in Maastricht, which I loved and where I once danced all night.”[1]

[1] The artist statement was provided by Stein.