Visual Music Archive

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Oval: Dowhile 

(1995) 

by Sebastian Oschatz is the 24-minute opener of 94 Diskont by the electronic music group Oval from Germany, arguably one of the most radical electronic albums of the 1990s.

Oval equally drew praise and controversy for their assault on techno's restrictions by literally deconstructing music and digital audio by using X-acto knives, paint, and tape to damage the surfaces of CDs, only to stitch it back together in loops of melody punctuated by the CD's physical skips. The group – then composed of conceptual mastermind Markus Popp and comrades Sebastian Oschatz and Frank Metzger – were one of the earliest proponents of the now-quaint subgenre glitch.

 

Source: Stylus

 

 

Oval: Dowhile, *****, Video Clip

Reading

META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (2007) by pioneering digital artist Mark Amerika mixes (and remixes) personal memoir, net art theory, fictional narrative, satirical reportage, scholarly history, and network-infused language art. META/DATA is a playful, improvisatory, multitrack digital sampling of Amerika's writing from 1993 to 2005 that tells the early history of a net art world gone wild while simultaneously constructing a parallel poetics of net art that complements Amerika's own artistic practice. (The MIT Press)

Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film 1910-1975 (1979) is a catalogue of an exhibition held at the Hayward Gallery in London from 3 May until 17 June 1979 on rare, essential and controversial avant-garde film history.

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)

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SEE ALSO

Chris Cunningham (1970) is an English music video film director and video artist. He was born in Reading, Berkshire and grew up in Lakenheath, Suffolk. Chris Cunningham has had close ties to Warp Records since his first production for Autechre. Videos for Aphex Twin's Come to Daddy and Windowlicker are perhaps his best known. His video for Björk's All Is Full of Love won multiple awards, including an MTV music video award for "Breakthrough Video" and was nominated for a Grammy for "Best Short Form" Music Video. His video for Aphex Twin's Windowlicker was nominated for the "Best Video" award at the Brit Awards 2000. He also directed Madonna's Frozen video. (Wikipedia)

See this Sound (2009) by Liz Kotz (Author), Cosima Rainer (Editor), Stella Rollig (Editor), Dieter Daniels (Editor), Manuela Ammer (Editor) compiles a huge number of artists, filmmakers, composers and performers, reaching back into the early twentieth century and into the present to survey overlaps between not only sound and art, sound and film, and the metaphor of cinema as rhythm or symphony. Proceeding chronologically, the book takes the early cinematic eye music of Hans Richter as a starting point, noting parallel works by Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger; moving into the postwar period, the art/cinema/ music experiments of Peter Kubelka, Valie Export and Michael Snow are discussed, establishing precedents to similar work by Rodney Graham, Carsten Nicolai, Jeremy Deller and many others. (Artbook)

Len Lye: A biography (2001) by Roger Horrock tells for the first time the story of an extraordinary New Zealander, a brilliant artist with an international career who never lost the informality, the energy, the independence of spirit of his South Pacific origins. Len Lye began as an unsettled working-class kid with limited prospects and became a leading modernist artist in London and New York. Roger Horrocks's exhaustive study of Lye has taken many years and is based on interviews with many of those close to the artist as well as on voluminous documentary sources. (Govett-Brewster Art Gallery)

Alex Rutterford is a British director and graphic designer working mostly on music videos. He studied graphic design at the Croydon School of Art and graduated in 1991. His most well-known works include the videos for Gantz Graf by Autechre, Verbal by Amon Tobin and Go to Sleep by Radiohead. (Wikipedia)

Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1939) - The four-minute, hand-painted Dufaycolor film with a colour accompaniment by Len Lye, matches visual motifs to musical instruments: diagonals introduce piano phrases, circles express drum beats, wavy horizontals represent guitars licks, vertical lines map base parts, etc. Primary red, blue and deep green colour fields are rendered frameless by upwardly cascading kite shapes, luminous tapered stripes, and batik-like patterns. (Senses of Cinema)