music videos by Yoshi Sodeoka

"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.

Artist website.

Works of Bill Etra

Narcissikon (1973)



This was my first Rutt-Etra piece. I replicated Louise’s image four times, in groups of two.

The initial picture is Louise sitting against a black background. She’s got an output monitor she can watch, and I put it in a circle wipe, feed it into the Rutt-Etra synthesizer, get a white line wipe, put Louise’s face into that, take it out of the Rutt-Etra, and outline it in the synthesizer, and Louise is on the intercom, and she’s talking to me and I’m talking to her, and we actually ran through it twice.

This is a real museum piece, very sensual. They wouldn’t play it on Channel Five because it was too sensual. They won’t play it on WNET unless we put music in the background, because everyone will think their set is broken.


Heartbeat (1973)




Abstractions on a Bedsheet (1973)




Lady of the Lake (1974)



I set up the technological thing, and Louise executed it. What it is, she’s sitting in a pool of light, and whenever she moves, it increases the amount of light on her. It appears to distort what is actually the whole TV screen—that’s the lower part. Then there are ripples of reflection off her silk blouse.

More info.

Ryoji Ikeda: the Planck universe

Ryoji Ikeda is well known for his large-scale media projects, triggered in some way from his post-digital sound. This project ran at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany last summer. In two parts.

Want to look cool? Flash the lights.

"Logos" (Jane Conger Belson, 1957)

From Wikipedia:

Jane Conger Belson Shimané was born in Missouri. She studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she met the artist Jordan Belson. Though she used his name, they never legally married. Her first film, Logos, premiered in 1957 and was screened at festivals in North America, Europe, and Latin America. The animated film featured an electronic score by Henry Jacobs, a sound artist who also collaborated with her husband on the groundbreaking 'Vortex' light shows.

"Commercial Entertainment Product" from The Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN)

Excerpt from the VHS tape released 1992.

"Media are a weapon," says EBN front man Josh Pearson. And he means just that, as the performance of the five media guerillas from Rhode Island proves. They point this weapon at those who normally wield it. Politicians, television companies and time and again the military are the target, the victims, of the brilliant video samplings of EBN. With hard beats, brutal cutting and an uncompromising live performance, EBN shows the way forward to a pro-active attitude in the age of information that not only challenges the image of the media, but can also transform it.

With revolutions every minute in entertainment and creative technology; audio-visual manipulation software, the advances brought about by digital encoding, optical transfer and digital storage and the new entertainment systems that these advances are creating, there has to be a new take on what is providing the entertainment. It’s all very well having flat screen surround audio-visual in every room of your house, operated from a remote control and beamed direct into your control box by a satellite that’s transmitting the signal from an optical disc being accessed in Houston, but are you really going to get excited by another Rolling Stone reunion plastered all over your walls once the millennium is just a memory of a well spent defence budget?

Enter Emergency Broadcast Network, the first of a new strain, perched somewhere between a band, a DJ and MTV. They’ve been under construction since Pearson met Gardner Post [Systems Manager] at Rhode Island School Of Design over ten years ago, where they began collaborating on multimedia "press conferences" featuring painting, sculpture and video. Their ideas came closer to fruition, though, when Ron O’Donnel, a DJ, introduced himself at one of their seminars in 1990. Taking the role of "Spin Control", O’Donnel offered the duo a focus for their visual experiments.

This is the key to what makes EBN so different. Unlike many new acts who spend their formative years cutting and pasting tape loops and samples of their favourite records, EBN spend theirs cutting, pasting and sampling their favourite videos, using as source material a cataloque of tapes they’ve been collecting since the early ’80s. So, unlike any conventional group, who compose and create their music, then making a visual to go with it, EBN painstakingly create their music on threequarter inch offline, frame by frame, note by note, thus making a soundtrack that is already completely interactive with an array of provoking, stimulating and entertaining video footage.

And unlike a band that might tour toilets for years before attracting a record company, EBN converted an ’80s Chevy Impala truck into the Emergency Broadcast Vehicle, complete with projector and screen in the form of a satellite dish mounted on its roof, which they took on the 1991 Lollapalooza tour, broadcasting their first messages to a bemused new audience.

"What we’re doing is a direct parody of a major broadcast system, hence the name – to point out all of its absurdities and its methods of control over people, at the same time as entertaining and stimulating them", concludes Pearson.

Clip from an ORF documentary about Ars Electronica 1996 follows.

"Great Good Places IV" (2011) by Ailbhe Ní Bhriain

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain's "Great Good Places IV" borrows its title from the Henry James short story. It draws on the slippage between dream and reality captured in the story and its strange atmosphere – at once mundane and hallucinatory. James's "Great Good Place" is an impossible but obscurely familiar refuge to which the overworked and the overwhelmed find themselves magically transported. This work reimagines a series of generic settings as such sites of suspension and displacement. It uses simple collage devices alongside CGI and chromakeyed elements to combine locations and play with the uncertainty of image-space. In a sense it proposes the image itself as a Great Good Place - a displaced elsewhere and an imaginative escape.

"Great Good Places" has been staged in different contexts, most frequently as a four-screen installation. Each film features its own soundtrack, mixing instrumental and natural sounds. The four films are looped and of varying length, creating a changing soundscape and set of image combinations.

09:28 min, Video & CGI composite, colour, looped, sound by Pádraig Murphy

artist website

News flash: Ailbhe Ní Bhriain wins 2020 Golden Fleece Award

"Live in Bruxelles" by 242.pilots

242.pilots were a live video improvisation group, active 2001-4. Comprising HC Gilje (Norway), Lukasz Lysakowski (Poland), Kurt Ralske (USA). On 20 February 2002 they performed with sound artist Justin Benett (UK/Netherlands) at Theatre Mercelis, Brussels. This was released on DVD as "Live in Brussels" (CarPark Records) and won the "Image" award at Transmediale 2003, Berlin. The jury statement:

The work is convincing above all in the play of collective live production, the presentation mode of large-scale image production, the contextualisation of live images in the scope of a contemporary image culture and the development of specific technological production tools as well as their distribution. The combined introduction of all of these "production strands" in the space of a collective process finally relativises the still prevalent myth of the image as a form of subjective and subject-centered activity. 242.pilots through their work, translate in a thoroughly convincing manner the multifarious aspects of image production under the conditions of digital, interactive and network-based media.



Utilizing their own custom software, 242.pilots expressively improvise rich, layered video works in real-time (both as a trio and as soloists). The performance software created by HC Gilje, Lukasz Lysakowski, and Kurt Ralske (formerly of 4AD group Ultra Vivid Scene and late 90s electronic outfit Cathars) allows video to be controlled on-the-fly in a direct and fluid manner. Improvising as a group, the three artists respond and interact with each other’s images in a subtle and intuitive way. Images are layered, contrasted, merged,and transformed. The degree of interplay and unspoken communication between the artists is akin the best free jazz ensembles. The end product is a complex visual conversation: a quasi-narrative exploring degrees of abstraction; a mesmerizing, immersive journey through diverse landscapes; or just raw retinal delight.

242.pilots have performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, Tranmediale.02 Festival in Berlin, Impakt Festival in Utrecht (NL), Steim in Amsterdam, and Kunstlerhaus Dortmund (DE). They have also performed at other museums, galleries, and theaters in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Canada, and USA.

refs:
artist website
Medien Kunst Netz
Car Park Records

"Atemporal" by The Light Surgeons

"Atemporal" is a new experimental live AV set by UK live cinema pioneers The Light Surgeons which has been specially put together for Testcard. Performed by audio visual artists Tim Cowie and Christopher Thomas Allen, it will weave together existing and previously unseen work into a poetic, contemplative live audio visual essay that explores the themes of memory, time and space.

Its draws on a collection of visual material originally created for a one-off performance at Graphic Festival with Cinematic Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House, audio visual elements from their critically acclaimed SuperEverything* live cinema performance and new audio visual material developed through a residency at Oddstream in the Netherlands.

These different sonic and visual elements are fused together and contextualised with the words of novelist, painter and poet John Berger who sadly passed away in January this year.

The Light Surgeons website

interactive dance performance by Juladi

For the VJ Festival, Nuremberg, Germany, 2014. Music by Miktek.

I left it afterwards as an interactive installation for the guests.

Juladi website.

visuals for "air india [redacted]" (2015) by John Galvin

The opera air india [redacted] was presented by Turning Point Ensemble (Vancouver) in 2015. Composed by Jurgen Simpson, directed by Tom Creed, libretto by Renee Sarojini Saklikar. Visuals by John Galvin.

artist website

"Ink Mapping: Video Mapping Projection on Tattoos" by Oskar & Gaspar

The first live event of Tattoo Video Mapping. No post-production was used. Created and Produced by Oskar & Gaspar.

Agency: FunnyHow? Powered by Desperados. Original soundtrack: "Love Live", by Dj Ride & Holly. Tattoos by Eduardo Cavellucci + Igor Gama from Queen of Hearts Tattoos

"Gantz Graf" by Alex Rutterford

Something of a classic. Music by Autechre. Video painstakingly created by Alex Rutterford. There are no generative elements; it's all synchronised manually.

"Chronomops" (2005) by Tina Frank

The doors of perception, electronic style. Tina Frank’s Chronomops opens doors to truly different dimensions: different than digital art’s reductionist studies so common today, different than the serially laid out minimalist images, and different than the omnipresent filtering and layering experiments.

Chronomops opens up a shimmering, colorful space that is simultaneously an excess of color, frenzy of perception, and pop carousel. An abstract architecture of vertical color bars is set in endless rotation, whereby the modules and building blocks fly around themselves—and the entire system likewise rotates. The forced movement forms a digital maelstrom whose suction pulls the observer deep into it.

A system surfacing as though out of a void, steadily plunging through its own dynamic into new excesses of mobility, while adventurously hopping axes, temporarily dissolving into two-dimensional stripes, then lapsing again into a prismatic staccato of light and color, tending towards a 90 degree angle, sideward— leaving an extreme dizzying feeling in its wake. Chronomops, accompanied by music from General Magic, which is also composed as a slip stream, thus shows what the pop psychedelics always knew to be true: that the “other” side looms right around the corner of the perfect groove, a labyrinth of colors and forms set in irregular motion, which merely has to be raised from its invisibility and liberated from its incomprehensible state. Electronic music’s inner life has seldom appeared so colorful and captivating.

artist website

Lumia 18 (2018) by ANNIE/M/me

Simulations of the future are done by using memories of the past. Immerse yourself in an experience that imprints you with the meditative memories of another dimension.

Transported to a parallel time, you find yourself in a hypnotic environment of sound and light that bends, distorts and reshapes into complex networks of continuously morphing displays.

Take the experience with you in your mind’s eye. Use it as a tool. Recall the movements, the rhythms, the colors, the energy moving through you bringing you to a meditative state by simply remembering.


ANNIE/M/me (Annie Mitchell) is a light artist with a background in UX. Website.

electr°cute°1 (2014) by Kasia Justka

Independent multimedia artist and live performer.

Creating audio-visual performances, interactive installations, videos, music and objects.

Experimenting with physical aspects of the signal; sound, image, light. Manipulating its waveform and digging into its aesthetic and educational potential.

Composing initial chaos into synchronized, narrative form during tense, cinematic, absolute actions based on her own emotions and feelings.

With her intuitive and personal works she tries to stimulate imagination and sensitivity of the audience by breaking the comfort zone, through the clash of primitive entropy of the media, experiment, knowledge, art and science.

Running an independent hackspace and workshop - MonoShop.

artist website

Sound Atoms (2011) by Pedro Santos

An improvisation with an audiovisual synthesizer I've built using Max/MSP/Jitter. Performed and captured in real-time.

A real-time experiment I've done in 2009 using a synthesizer made with Reaktor. Through Open Sound Control communication, many synth parameters are sent to Max/MSP/Jitter, responsible for the visualization.

"Still Not Still" (2002) by SUE-C

A very early piece, featured in the video show "Air Portugal" at Pond Gallery in March 2002 in San Francisco. It is made from a handful of original photography prints and animated using a Jitter patch.

artist website

"40thousand3hundred20memories" (2005) SUE-C and AGF

This short experimental film follows a girl piecing together her own life memories from found photographs and mental imagery. The score is a composition by AGF that also serves as the storyline - and the source material for an audio CD. The movie contains 40,320 images - stills, drawings, live animations, video and many things in between.

artist website

"Messa di Voce (Bounce)" by Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman

Performed by sound poet Jaap Blonk.

Jaap emits a stream of bubbles by making a cheek-flapping sound. But the resulting cloud of jostling sound-bubbles is unstable. When they crash to the ground, the bubbles release the sounds which Jaap recorded into them.

Developed 2003 / Performed 23 February 2009 in "The Human Voice in a New World Concert Series", Frederick Loewe Theater, New York University. Presented by the Electronic Music Foundation.

Golan Levin website

"UnityGain sampler" (2000) by Benton C Bainbridge

UNITYGAIN is not:
a “show” in the usual theatrical sense of the word…
nor can it be strictly defined as a “concert” or “installation…”
it is certainly not a “band…” (digital or otherwise)
it is not even a fixed work of art authored or produced by any particular individual or fixed group of individuals…
( & the hausofouch is not a promotional organ but an idea about what can happen in lieu of one…)

reclaimer—-

UNITYGAIN is:
an ongoing live electronic media performance platform/environment inviting a diverse consensual group of sound and image makers to “plug in” to a unifying spacio-temporal technological matrix designed to promote balanced spontaneous synergistic interactivity among all constituent elements over time in co-relationship to a participating audience within shared social space amid “pooled” production resources. UG is, foremost, an idea in the direction of an ongoing social experiment among a shifting group of participating artists geared to test and explore new models for interacting in the face of other more prominent vastly unsatisfying commercial and institutional normalsies…

No two unitygain events are ever that much alike, although some aspects remain remarkably consistent over a broad range of variables in space, time, and participating individual artists…
we hope it stays that way…

project website