ALL MUSIC: Cosmopolitan Cyborg 

(2007) 

is a series of Station IDs by Gabriel Shalom and commissioned by the ALL MUSIC Italian music television channel.

Given the goal of creating an entertaining and cutting edge new station identity campaign for the Italian music network All Music, two words stood out as key concepts:

Cyborg: A human who has certain physiological processes aided or controlled by mechanical or electronic devices.

Cosmopolitan: 1. Pertinent or common to the whole world. 2. Having constituent elements from all over the world or from many different parts of the world.

 

Young people today are more connected to new technologies than ever before. Computers, mobile phones, and mp3 players are just some of the array of gadgets that define the aesthetics of the contemporary youth culture. Today’s young person can be viewed as a cyborg, as many processes which were formerly time consuming real world events are now done virtually with the click of a button.

Globalization has accelerated the mixing and mashing of cultures, producing hybrid forms of art and music. Today’s young person is connected through the internet to large networks of creative influence from all over the world, with an identity that is as digital as it is cosmopolitan.

 

To express these aspects of the contemporary digital landscape, I proposed to create a personality emblematic of these qualities his/herself: the Cosmopolitan Cyborg. He/she is a hypercubist composite personality made up of the faces and voices of the All Music network's own VJs. Using only original sounds recorded with the human voice, elaborate yet recognizable genres of contemporary music are synthesized. The result is a concrete answer to the tired world of lip-sync found in music videos. I call it videomusic.

 

The payoff, which translates to: "All Music, a republic founded on music", as spoken from the mouth of the Cosmopolitan Cyborg, reads as an intriguing commentary on contemporary Italian music culture, simultaneously conscious of the past and yet boldly jumping into the future of digital aesthetics.

 

In the future I hope to be able to work with musicians, bands and composers in this manner to create a new definition for music videos befitting our contemporary era of hypercubist aesthetics.

 

Source: Quantum Cinema blog

 

 

ALL MUSIC: Cosmopolitan Cyborg, editing, people, Commercial

Reading

Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994) by French critic and composer Michel Chion reassesses audiovisual media since the revolutionary 1927 debut of recorded sound in cinema, shedding crucial light on the mutual relationship between sound and image in audiovisual perception. (Colombia University Press)

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)

 

SEE ALSO

DJ Hell: Teufelswerk Tourvisuals (2008) - In support of DJ Hell's new album Teufelswerk Lichtfront used an impressively huge 3D mask as a projection screen for the visuals. (Vimeo)

Mouthface (2007) by Antonin De Bemels is a music video freely inspired by the track On the floor by Michael Fakesch, from his solo album Dos. (Videomedeja)

Volkan Ergen is a Turkish drummer, producer and visual artist. He graduated from the Istanbul Technical University's Concervatory Instrument Production Department. As a drummer he accompanied many musicians on numerous albums and worked as a producer. (The Only Constant)

Antonin De Bemels (*1975) discovered video art and experimental cinema at Ecole de Recherche Graphique, from 1993 to 1997. His main areas of interest are movement and the human body, and the dynamic relationship between sounds and images. Since 1997, he has made more than 15 short videos that were screened all around the world. He also creates video backgrounds and soundtracks for contemporary dance pieces, and occasionally performs as a VJ. (Videomedeja)

Hexstatic is a UK music duo, consisting of Stuart Warren Hill and Robin Brunson, that specializes in creating "quirky audio visual electro." Formed in 1997 after Hill and Brunson met while producing visuals at the Channel Five launch party, they decided to take over for the original members of the Ninja Tune multimedia collective Hex that had disbanded around the same time. They soon collaborated with Coldcut for the Natural Rhythms Trilogy, including the critically acclaimed A/V single Timber. (Wikipedia)