Artist: Susanne Schuda

The Countdown to Visual Rebirth
A Family Saga as Aesthetical-Political Disposition

Susanne Schuda’s videos of her two-part internet novella “The Schudas” show the computer-animated sociotope of a dramaturgically staged family saga. We enter the navigation of the sequences of part 1 “The Schudas, the Progress” (2005/06) and part 2 “The Bir(d)th, the Schudas reloaded” (2007/08) by mouse-click. The two-part video “The Schudas” as a cinema 4-D internet novella functions interactively through navigable zones on the web page http://www.dieschudas.at. While we zoom in on “The Schudas, the Progress“ (2005/06) through their virtual living rooms and pass chronologically through stories around the themes of family, neighbourhood and media consumption, the second part “The Bir(d)th, the Schudas reloaded” (2007/08) is designed more interactively: the viewer can change the perspective and control the speed and sequence of sound and picture recordings.
As a way in to her family saga “The Schudas, the Progress“ (2005/06), Susanne Schuda attributes distinct character traits to her protagonists through the interplay of animated photo collages and constructed narrative texts. Not least through his passion for progress, Henry Schuda clearly embodies the creative part. In contrast, the suicidal Betty emits schizoid alarm signals in the face of a supposedly beautiful ideal world. While the Schudas’ female neighbour Ms. Riedl pursues her unshaken belief in the economy, her husband Hörbiger has long since put reality behind him.
In the first part of the series, Susanne Schuda interweaves visually and through texts the increasing isolation of particular individuals, the social disaster, depressions, fears, repressions and sex as the last refuge. Her hybrid design of the protagonists through picture collages makes them appear as apodictic mutants of emotional states of emergency. The exaggerated affect-laden poses of her animations in space play with the social design of our media culture and its gestures of transference and allow us to advance into extended media spaces by clicking on a virtual television set.
Susanne Schuda dares to go into animation with interferences and overlappings of the sort of language systems we know from Elfriede Jelinek’s or Marlene Streeruwitz’s writings. A new understanding of authorship is generated through capturing media, literary and philosophical language- and picture constructions and deconstructing them. Finally they acquire a new focus. The linguistic rhetoric of her characters and the reversal of visual media codes provides clear evidence of Susanne Schuda’s virtuosity as critical analyst of society. 
“Infotainment shows” in which candidates are subjected to various evaluation criteria on the basis of external, superficial qualities or have to undergo a psycho-strip by outing themselves are sharply countered with a pointed, polished language. The increasingly distressing abstraction of human existence through neoliberal, global distortions exercises a major influence on the visual design of the animation marked by template-like traits. During the talk directed by the talk-show host “Mr. Destiny”, the dealing with the fear used by the media, politics and business becomes a paradoxical target. Another sequence of “The Schudas” starts with the off-stage shout of “This is not the end of the world”, while Frank Sinatra’s song “I’ve got the world on a string” is played. Another animation starts, on the other hand, with a sideswipe at celebrity culture by addressing the latent cynicism of charity parties.
Part 1 “The Schudas, the Progress” (2005/06) ends with Henry Schuda’s eccentric announcement: “I let down the beds”. Part 2 directly links to this phrase with “The Bir(d)th, a.k.a. die Schudas reloaded, I let down the beds”. In her transition from the eloquent figures to the silent bodies Susanne Schuda accomplishes a complex interplay of animation, collage and narration and in this way extends the interactive scope of the internet user. The movement sequences of Henry and Betty Schuda come into a complex interplay with the accentuated compositions of the electronic sounds by Florian Schmeiser. As in a dance performance – a Tango Mortale – the body collages circle around each other, become immersed in a virtual sex play, transform themselves into animalistic lovers and beauty queens. When the animation simulates orgasm, we are drawn into Betty’s body through a virtually abstract drive and glide through a galaxy of fiery red and orange tones. The movement in space becomes a visual event that we can experience as users through the playback by internet web page as a kind of visual “rebirth”, as Susanne Schuda puts it.

Ursula Maria Probst, 2009