Founded in 2002, ON AIR is the Berlin based production company of Frauke Havemann and Eric Schefter. Over the years they have created films, performances and installations developed in collaboration with various authors, filmmakers and performers.
Simon Brückner (filmmaker) on the work of ON AIR
Focused, precise yet playful, they design minimalist parallel universes which are fully autonomous in their own laws and logic – in which people talk in and with machines, stage settings meld with screen projections, linguistic signs with visuals. Performers appear inside and out of electronic equipment, they meet their own images, turn each other on and off, are looped, deleted. They meet as looks between screens, as heads without bodies, as bodies and voices mute in the darkness; as thoughts, presences, in often alienated, displaced and, at the same time, immediate ways. Highly technical, almost formal, yet profoundly human, and therefore unsettling, even comically, absurd. And so do the characters encounter time, the weather, and, again and again, themselves.