Visual Music Archive

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The Drowning 

(2009) 

by Kasumi explores the impressions running through a man’s mind in the moments before his death: the sensation of time slowing down, of heightened bodily perceptions, and the simultaneous unreeling of an internal cinema of images.

Image/sound: Kasumi

Dancer: Chan U Hong

 

3 video channels, 6 audio channels (mixed down for Vimeo)

 

"The Drowning is a shorter version of my work MO-SO, an EMPAC DANCE MOViES Commission 2009-2010, supported by the Jaffe Fund for Experimental Media and Performing Arts, Experimental Media and Performing Arts, Rensselear Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.

 

In The Drowning, I wanted to explore the impressions running through a man’s mind in the moments before his death: the sensation of time slowing down, of heightened bodily perceptions, and the simultaneous unreeling of an internal cinema of images – seemingly unrelated – that create an unconscious narrative of personal history and emotion. The story in his head changes in the last seconds as the oxygen-deprived brain starts shutting down, speeding faster and faster, turning into a surreal, psychedelic collage of colors and primary symbols, the foundations of learned experience reduced to their individual blocks of information, electrified and dispersing like split atoms or dying stars."

 

Source: Kasumi on Vimeo

 

 

The Drowning, choreography, multi projection, Installation

Reading

Expanded Cinema (1970) - In a brilliant and far-ranging study, Gene Youngblood traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. New technological extensions of the medium have become necessary. Thus he concentrates on the advanced image-making technologies of computer films, television experiments, laser movies, and multiple-projection environments. Outstanding works in each field are analyzed in detail. Methods of production are meticulously described, including interviews with artists and technologists. (John Coulthart)

Rewind, Play, Fast Forward (2010) – The Past, Present and Future of the Music Video by Henry Keazor, Thorsten Wübbena (eds.) brings together different disciplines as well as journalists, museum curators and gallery owners in order to take a discussion of the past and present of the music video as an opportunity to reflect upon suited methodological approaches to this genre and to allow a glimpse into its future. (transcript Verlag)

The Art of Projectionism (2007) by Frederick Baker (in German) sets out the principles behind his use of projectors in the film making process. He defines a projectionist school of filmmaking and media art. In this publication he also presented Ambient film, a surround experience that can be shown in specially developed cinemas. (Wikipedia)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

Paul Sharits (1943-1993) is widely known for his structural films, the use of multiple projectors, infinite film loops, experimental soundtracks, and interventions at the level of the filmstrip in order to realize his elemental mode of cinematic presentation. Trained initially as a painter, and a prolific theoretical writer, Paul Sharits' art-making was in fact wide-ranging, evidenced by his early involvement with Fluxus artists in New York. His many works on paper — from diagrams to abstract film scores, fashion drawings, and hallucinogenic illustrations — have yet to be fully integrated into his better-known body of work. (paulsharits.com)

Monolake: Infinite Snow Edit II (2010) is an ongoing research project which is about the exploration of audiovisual surround possibilities in a club context. Within this project, Robert Henke (Monolake) does the surround audio part while Tarik Barri works with multiscreen video projections. (Tarik Barri)

Telefante is formed by Luis Negrón van Grieken and Juan Carlos Orozco Velásquez. They put all kinds of media, new, old, forgotten, obsolete, overused, commercial, useless, all over the table, as if we were making a transversal cut through history. Simply it is about tell stories (new and old) through several media (new and old), with the aim to forget this unproductive dialectic and be able to capture the most difficult: the present. (Telefante)

Animal (2011) by Arnaud Gillette and Yannick Jacquet is a desire of contrast, a graphic point of view on a subject in variable curves, a show where the equestrian universe tells the classic space of the theater stage. The main actors of this part into dialogue with digital and music art are four horses, using lights and video installations. (Arnaud Gillette)

Hy Hirsh (1911-1960) was born in Philadelphia. He lived in Los Angeles between 1916 and 1937, and began working with still photography in 1932, according to a curriculum vitae he prepared in 1961. He worked as a motion picture cameraman between 1930 and 1936, moved to San Francisco in 1937, then to Europe in 1955 where he spent the last years of his life in Amsterdam and Paris. (Cindy Keefer: "Hy Hirsh Preservation: History And Mystery" in "KINETICA 3: Abstraction, Animation, Music - Featuring Hy Hirsh and the Fifties - Jazz and Abstraction in Beat Ear Film", Los Angeles, 2001)