Arthur Lipsett is one of the few filmmakers—alongside Alanis Obomsawin, Kathleen Shannon, Norman McLaren and Willie Dunn—who will forever reside in the pantheon of NFB artists. One of the most enigmatic yet celebrated directors who ever worked at the Board, Lipsett was born in Montreal on May 13, 1936, and died in the same city only 50 years later. He received a credit for animation, photography, sound recording/mixing, scriptwriting, producing, directing or editing on a total of 26 NFB titles. [...] His body of work can be divided into two streams: collage/found-footage films and academic research films.
You could say Brakhage puts the “anima” back into animation, reanimating the dead, painstakingly affixing the remains of dead insects, leaves and the like onto the film strip, and feeding it through the projector back to life. Of course, the principle of film projection is the illusion of life through light, with the audience gathering to watch like moths attracted to a lamp: the beauty of Mothlight is the way Brakhage evokes the moth not through cartoon mimicry, but by the fragile sensation of its movement, batting against the screen, hurtling in descent. The effect is exhilarating and terrifying.
I've had the idea to make some type of version of this video for about ten years, for whatever reason I haven't had the chance to get it done until now. When I heard 'Circular' for the first time and read the statement about it, as well as the combined ideas for 'Yearning for the infinite', I immediately thought that this is a place where this video idea could work. After some discussion with Max we got going on it.
The idea for the video initially came from a thought about Obsession (the vicious cycle.)
I think we often find ourselves getting caught up in routines, letting small problems become unnecessarily overwhelming and consuming so much of our time.It seems so easy to let this happen. At the same time I think it is often some form of obsession that drives people to do what they love, find people they love etc, it's quite a strange old thing...
Using the Circle as a symbol of an inescapable and never ending notion, I tried to evoke a feeling of the infinite, and the idea of a reoccurring and self made predicament...
I used circles as the main subject matter as circles have an infinite symmetry, they can be rotated by any amount and always look the same, they’re the only 2D shape with infinite symmetry. It's amazing how a simple circle can be so complicated! I suppose there is a reason why the circle is one of the classic representations of infinity. Also I really love the shape :)
Epoch is a visual representation of our connection to earth and it's vulnerable glory. Our time here is esoteric, limited and intangible. The fragility which exists in all aspects of life is one thing that is certain. We are brittle, and so is Mother Earth.
Film and sound design by Kevin McGloughlin Selected images : Google Earth Audio samples : Nasa
This music video was created by Ksawery Kirklewski to accompany the single "bamb00" by wh0wh0 (Polish drummer Jacek Proscinski). This was further developed into an interactive website, where different versions of the video can be performed in real time. when I heard Jacek’s ”bamb00” for the first time, I immediately got it that this task would require a special approach. Jacek’s music is insanely dynamic and sounds different on every show. Sometimes some parts take longer than usual. That’s why I started with thinking of how to make the video generative. There are so many levels and notes going on in that – for a proper visualisation – I decided to try something that would give me possibilies and also be a new thing for me: playing with 3D. Moreover, it had to work real-time for the live shows, best if 60 fps, which meant that it should be light to render and designed in a simple way.
after the work was done, we were thinking how to present the full experience of this generative feeling. I decided to recode the program for the on-line use and make an interactive website with use of p5.js (”Processing for web”).
"It’s Where The World Ends" (2017) for Indian Wells. From the third album by Italian producer Pietro Iannuzzi.
"Norrin Radd Dreaming" (2018) for Oliver Coates. Taken from the album Shelley's on Zenn-La (released by RVNG Intl.) by London-based cellist and producer Oliver Coates.
"Utopia" (2016) for Digitalism, a Hamburg electronic music duo (Jens "Jence" Moelle and Ismail "Isi" Tüfekçi) formed 2004.
"Elephant" (2012) for Tame Impala, using analog video synthesis.
Yoshi Sodeoka is an artist based in New York for over two decades, whose work is characterised by his neo-psychedelic aesthetic and exploration of multiple media and platforms. Primarily comprising of video, GIFs and print his practice also simultaneously inhabits the world of fine art, music, publications, and advertising.
Sodeoka’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at Centre Pompidou, Tate Britain, Museum of Modern Art, Deitch Projects, La Gaîté lyrique, Channel 4 Random Acts UK, Baltimore Museum of Art, OneDotZero, Sonar Festival, Transmediale, Whitney Museum of America's Art Artport. His artworks are in the permanent collections of Museum of the Moving Image as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2013, Sodeoka co-founded the experimental video art collective, Undervolt & Co. He has collaborated with bands like Psychic TV, Tame Impala, Yeasayer, Beck, The Presets, has created art prints for New York Times, Wired Magazine, San Francisco Magazine, Entertainment Weekly and has produced advertising work for brands such as Apple, Samsung and Nike.
Video created by Annabel ("AJ") Jankel and Rocky Morton of Cucumber Studios, London. They had previously worked on commercials and title sequences, moving increasingly into music videos (later for Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, etc.)
Jankel and Morton were co-creators of the fictional AI personality first seen in Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future (1985). Headroom was deliberately created to be, in the words of Morton, "very sterile, arrogant, Western personification of the middle-class, male TV host". The couple went on to direct the feature films DOA (1988) and Super Mario Bros. (1993) plus numerous other titles. AJ Jankel has won many awards for her work.
For "Accidents Will Happen" they had no access to video, but instead sent a photographer to get a 35mm still sequence (shot on motor drive). This was rotoscoped and combined with cel animation. The final sequence was filmed off a computer screen with a Bolex 16mm camera, at an (anonymous) university architecture department. This is considered to be the first computer-generated moving image in a music video.
'Repetition' is an attempt to convey the importance of our endless endeavours toward human development and growth amidst a chaotic and disorienting landscape. The struggle for a fruitful future is challenging with the distractions of everyday life alongside its ever-growing technological 'advancements'. The hope is for humanity to strive through all of this in a meaningful and positive way.
I wanted to make something huge and intense for the new live show, so I went for a project attempting to visualise the infinite and its links to us in our everyday lives. For every chapter of the story I found a different technique to approach it, in this case, the simple idea of repetition. Apply it, and we have a form of infinity. This was also a natural fit for my music, where I had a nice excuse to push the repetitive boat out even more than usual. I kept it very stripped back to focus on the idea, with slow evolution and occasional variants to maintain some melodic engagement.
Visually, I was lucky to get to work with one of my favourite artists, Kevin McGlouglin, where we told the human side of the story, our endless pursuit of growth and "progress", our duplication of built form and expanding cities, looking to an unbounded future of urban sprawl. It was an audio-visualisation encompassing the project title "Yearning for the Infinite". But despite our society-endangering issues around human consumption and sustainability, it wasn't supposed to be a doom scenario. We tried that musically and it didn't seem to fit. There was a back and forth on the ideas and their musical and visual representation, and what worked was something that for me seems more focused on the worth of our endless striving than its possible role in our downfall.
For over thirty years Rebecca Allen has investigated a variety of technological forms of expression including 3-D computer graphic animation, music videos, TV logo production, video games, large-scale performance works, artificial life, multisensory interfaces, interactive installations, and virtual reality. Allen is not interested in technology for its own sake, however. Rather, she is interested in a technoculture that humanizes technology even while maintaining a critical stance toward it. Or perhaps one can say that it is her critical approach toward technology that helps humanize it. Allen demonstrates this critical approach with her concern with artistic quality and the conceptual integrity of her work — a conceptual integrity that stresses the effect on the mind of the immersant/user. Indeed her main concern appears to be the investigation of the perceptual and cognitive processes of the immersant/user in conjunction with the technological apparatus with which she is engaged.
-- Frank Popper, From Technological to Virtual Art
This video was actually created in 1983 at the Institute of Technology in New York, the same year that Allen created a computer-generated human for Twyla Tharp’s The Catherine Wheel. The slow pace of Kraftwerk's work meant there was a three-year gap before release.
Karl Kliem (1969-) is based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and creates video work under the name Dienstelle. He has worked with Jan Jelinek, Burial, Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto, Mouse on Mars, and others.
Mai is a pseudonym for the composer/musician/producer Steve McCourt. Originally from Dublin, he lives in Shanghai where he is making music combining electronic with traditional Chinese instruments. He has completed a pair of albums titled Arcadia, released on Stolen Mirror in 2018 and 2019. These fuse acoustic and electronic elements into lovely compositions that foreground subtle harmonic changes. Artist website.
This video was created from footage manipulated in the Fusion component of DaVinci Resolve.
CS4040 Advanced Digital Video is a third-year module in Music, Media & Performance Technology BSc., offered at the University of Limerick. For this project, students created an experimental film to accompany music. They used both their own clips and found footage.
Excerpts from: “Not a Bongo” Daniel Horgan “B-52” John Breen “Coastal Reflections” Adam Kennedy “TVWave” Sean O'Flaherty Falconer “Refresh” Colin Ryan
Thanks to all the students! Check out dmarc.ie and csis.ul.ie for more information.
The music video for the Radiohead song "House of Cards"was created without the use of a camera. Instead, two different techniques were used to gather data, the Geometric Information System (structured light) and Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR). This data was then rendered as visuals, using Processing. The data along with Aaron Koblin's code is available. For a time, a Youtube group existed, where people could upload their own interpretations. Koblin's website is also useful.
You can watch a short documentary on the making of this music video, or read a chapter in the bookBeautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions (Toby Segaran, and Jeff Hammerbacher).
Short musical films had been made from the earliest days of sound film, particularly by Lee de Forest in 1923 and 1924. But the "soundie" ushered in a self-contained, single-form music visual that could be watched at the viewer's discretion, almost exactly like contemporary music videos.
Soundies were three-minute 16mm films containing musical performances, produced in the USA between 1940-46. They were played on the Panoram, a coin-operated film jukebox that was available in nightclubs, restaurants, etc.
Louis Jordan (1908–1975) was an extraordinarily popular musician (vocalist and saxophonist) producing 57 hits between 1942 and 1951. His style of “jump blues” featured a larger-than-life persona, risqué humour, and elements that were precursors to both rock'n'roll and rap. His first soundies date to 1942.
Louis Jordan & His Tympany Band: “Old Man Mose” (dir. John C. Graham, 1942)
The Beatles were the first to produce a “filmed insert” in 1964. Not wishing to be present for Top Of The Pops, which was broadcast live, they entered BBC Riverside studios in advance. There they filmed performances of “Can't Buy Me Love” and “You Can't Do That”, which were inserted into the broadcast on 25 March 1964.
A more developed filmed insert, now quite famous, was produced the following year by Dylan.
Bob Dylan: “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (dir. D. A. Pennebaker, 1967):
In 1967 The Beatles pioneered an aesthetic taken from experimental film. They produced films for two songs, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” with director Peter Goldman. These were followed by the film “Magical Mystery Tour" (dir. The Beatles, 1967), created as a television special. These films use avant garde aesthetics, including reversed film, slow motion, and post-production filters. They are wilfully obscure, eschewing narrative altogether. Indeed, they barely acknowledge the song.
The Beatles: “Strawberry Fields Forever” (dir. Peter Goldman, 1967)
Video Weavings is an homage to the ancient art of weaving. It is a reflection of the "warp and weft" of textiles in the horizontal and vertical scan of television. Video Weavings was the first digital video synthesizer designed, built and performed by Steve Beck. The first version of the Video Weaver was assembled as a "bread board" in 1973 using a "bread board" construction. It was first operational in December of 1973 at Beck's studio at the famous 1406 Euclid Avenue apartment building in the north Berkeley Hills. Using a series of cascoded 4 bit up/down counters synchronized to the NTSC vertical and horizontal scan, and clocked by the NTSC color subcarrier 3.57945 MHz, the Video Weaver operated in real time. The digital outputs were routed into the "quad" four channel analog colorizers in the BDVS (Beck Direct Video Synthesizer.) Control of the digital warp and weft and feedback counter paths was via a modified Texas Instruments hand held calculator. Later in 1976 Beck constructed a second Video Weaver using three wire wrap boards with 74C00 series CMOS digital ICs for lower power use. An Intel 80C51 single chip microcontroller was also added to the design for logic control, again via a modified Texas Instruments hand held calculator keyboard. In 1991 Beck was honored with an invitation to participate in the Ars Electronica exhibition "Pioneers of Electronic Art" in Linz Austria. Curated by prominent video artist Woody Vasulka and German scholar Peter Weibel, it was a glorious event, including interactive Laser Video Discs. An excellent catalog was also produced for the exhibition in Linz, Austria. For Ars Electronica Beck constructed a third "Video Weaver (Reincarnated)." This version condensed all of the digital logic ICs (over 300 of them!) into a single digital IC, the Xilinx FPGA (field programmable gate array). However Beck retained the quad analog RGB colorizers. Control of the Video Weaver digital parameters was via a large matrix switch array board. This mimics the warp and weft arrangements found on textile weaving looms. The Video Weaver Reincarnated was again exhibited as a nine screen video sculpture at the first Kwang-ju Biennale "InfoArts" at the invitation of video master Nam June Paik in 1995.
This is from Six Programs for Television: Matrix, Vocabulary, Transformations, Object, Steina, Digital Images, each 29 min.
"No. 19 E-Object"
I always wanted to make an image which would be contained on the surface of a sphere, but I didn't have the instrument. So I used a scan processor to create an object, this diamond-shaped object. By scanning the room with a mirror and with a camera, I imprinted the surrounding space on the surface of this object.
I think this urge of translating image, a two-dimensional image to an object, I think this urge is quite natural or evolutionary to the image, electronic imaging. Since the object does not need any pictorial justification. The object just exists.
"No. 24 Torso" (1977)
It was the most interesting confrontation of a texture, or a tactile translation between the feel, the touch, and the visual transformation of the texture itself. It was psychologically an interesting feeling to see something totally different from the experience of touching.
Binary Lives: Steina and Woody Vasulka (1996 dir. Peter Kirby) includes excerpts from these pieces:
Steina Vasulka:
Violin Power (1970)
Orbital Obsessions (1975)
Allvision (1976)
Summer Salt (1982)
The West (1983)
Geomania (1989)
Violin Power (1991)
Pyroglyphs (1995)
Woody and Steina Vasulka:
Participation (1970)
Vocabulary (1973)
Woody Vasulka:
The Matter (1974)
C-Trend (1974)
Artifacts (1980)
Art of Memory (1987)
Brotherhood No. 3 (1990-98)
Artisode 5.4: Steina & Woody Vasulka was produced by New Mexico PBS. it contains a brief introduction to the Image Articulator (1978), computer-controlled digital image processor, created by Woody Vasulka.
Further details are found in the rough and ready Vasulka worktape (1977). Amusingly, it takes several attempts to boot up the system.
Multiplied and "rippling" across the screen, as if on the surface of an electric liquid, Steina's face appears seen slightly from below. After a few seconds it becomes recognizable, attentively serious,looking out of the screen in our direction. Suddenly from the right edge-of the screen a form intrudes, a form that is Steina's silhouette. From the left edge another form appears, a video camera pointed toward - the opposite face. The image stands like a kind of signature and then is transformed by the recognition that in silhouette we can see how the image that is facing us was made; whether the images in silhouette are the source of the background image is not that important-they could be . What is important is the sense one also gets from looking at Nam June Paik's Video Buddha (who contemplates a video camera pointing at himself). Video is a mirror that permits us to better see ourselves.
-- R. A. Haller
You can grab the working notes for this production from the Vašulka archive.
