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Funkstörung: Dirt Empire 

(2004) 

- From a vague anticipation of blurry haze in the beginning graphical patterns evolve into more and more concrete forms. In the course of the video by Mate Steinforth these shapes form parts of contemporary architecture.

The track Dirt Empire by Funkstörung somewhat breathes the air of 1960s psychedelic music and so the images in the video too quote the 60s psychedelic art. The buildings and houses zoom out to show a city's skyline. The tranformation from organic form to square shaped buildings symbolizes the distance to our origins in today's first world culture. Made of dirt are our cities, for we are the Dirt Empire.

 

Source: Mate Steinforth on Vimeo

 

 

Funkstörung: Dirt Empire, jazz, architecture, Video Clip

Reading

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)

Audiovisuology: See this sound (2010) - An Interdisciplinary Compendium of Audiovisual Culture. This all-embracing compendium brings together texts on various art forms in which the relationship between sound and image plays a significant role and the techniques used in linking the two. The entire spectrum of audiovisual art and phenomena is presented in 35 dictionary entries. (Cornerhouse)

VJam Theory: Collective Writings on Realtime Visual Performance (2008) presents the major concerns of practitioners and theorists of realtime media under the categories of performance, performer and interactors, audiences and participators. The volume is experimental in its attempt to produce a collective theoretical text with a focus on a new criticality based on practitioner/ artist theory in which artist/ practitioners utilise theoretical models to debate their practices. (VJ Theory)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

Scanner: Light Turned Down (2001) by London-based D-Fuse is a performance focusing on the rhythmic relationship between light and sound as well as a live interchange between artists charting a conversational movement of colour, musical fragments, texture and image. (D-Fuse on Vimeo)

Synken (2007) by Berlin based Transforma is a fantastically spaced out, darkly romantic image-world. On a journey through splintering landscapes, strange characters try to make sense of their surroundings. A mysterious vagabond works as a medium between parallel worlds. Audio by O.S.T.. (Transforma on Vimeo)

Audio Kinematics (2007) is an audio/video installation by Jost Muxfeldt. Audio Kinematics works with the phenomenology of sound and space, and how a listener is manifest in that space. Formally, it plays with the idea of kinematic relations on the level of sound: a virtual audio sculpture. It utilizes the spatial relations and proportions of a mechanical structure to determine various parameters of a sound composition, and creates a kind of virtual kinetic sound sculpture. (Jost Muxfeldt)

Koyaanisqatsi (1982) [ˈkɔɪɑːnɪsˌkɑːtsiː], also known as Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance, is a 1982 film directed by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke. The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse photography of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. (Wikipedia)

PMP is an audio-visual collective based in Singapore that focuses on the synaesthetic experience where sound and visuals interact in real time, steering away from the notion that audio and visuals are often the by-products of one another. Started in 2009 by Ivan, Felix and Bin, PMP’s music takes the form of minimal electronic music that fuses microsound, glitches and the sound of acoustic instruments. Visually, it is highly distinctive with generative visuals that reacts or controlled in real time. (PMP)