Visual Music Archive

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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. Audio by O.S.T..

An evolving, resonating journey through splintering landscapes and mysterious characters. Abstractions and forms are reverberated in fragile soundscapes of chaotic planes and unsettling arrhythmic patterns. Is it film or an improvised VJ cut-up? Is it visualized music feeding back into images, or images generating music? SYNKEN pushes the limitations and restrictions of genres. Synchronized sinking as SYNKEN is Transforma and O.S.T.'s collective creative experience.

 

With a mix of abstract images, graphic animation, digital image effects and complex film sequences, SYNKEN creates a fantastically spaced out, darkly romantic image-world. Forests filled with distorted organic forms are contrasted against an architectural abyss, as strange and fantastic characters try to make sense of their surroundings. A mysterious vagabond works as a medium between these parallel worlds, transporting artefacts that become recurring symbols in the dual system and means of communication between the creatures which inhabit them.

 

Produced in parallel to the images, O.S.T.'s arrhythmic crackling electronic 5.1 surround soundtrack bathes the images in an eerily hypnotic flow. As sound and image merge and fall apart again over time, they form a synergy that opens up subtle leads which can never be read only as linear. As plot fragments refract and reoccur, SYNKEN continuously confronts the viewer with a modular narrative that can be potentially combined to create any number of interpretations. in the live performance version, Transforma and O.S.T.'s real-time decisions will use this potential to develop further one-off versions of SYNKEN. 

 

Source: Synken website

 

 

Synken, architecture, Video Art

Reading

VJ: Audio-Visual Art + VJ Culture (2006) edited by D-Fuse. A major change has taken place at dance clubs worldwide: the advent of the VJ. Once the term denoted the presenter who introduced music videos on MTV, but now it defines an artist who creates and mixes video, live and in sync to music, whether at dance clubs and raves or art galleries and festivals. This book is an in-depth look at the artists at the forefront of this dynamic audio-visual experience. (Laurence King Publishing)

‘vE-”jA: Art + Technology of Live Audio-Video (2006) by Xarene Eskander is a global snapshot of an exploding genre of tech-art performance: VJing and live audio-video. The book covers 40 international artists with 400+ colour images and 50+ movies and clips on an accompanying DVD and web downloads. (VJ Book)

VJing (2010) is a reproduction of the Wikipedia article VJing, based upon the revision of July 25th 2010 and was produced as a physical outcome of the wiki-sprint, a collaborative writing workshop that was held 2010 in the frame of Mapping Festival, Geneva. (Greyscale Press)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

D-Fuse are a collective of London based artists who explore a wide range of creative media. Their explorations of live audiovisual performance, mobile media, web print, art and architecture, TV and film, have beend shown internationally. (D-Fuse)

True Fictions: New Adventures in Folklore (2007) by The Light Surgeons is the result of a year long digital performance art project produced and directed by Christopher Thomas Allen and commissioned by EMPAC, The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre in Troy, New York. The final piece was completed and presented in September 2007 and has begun touring to festivals internationally. (The Light Surgeons)

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)

Lichtfront is an design collective based in Cologne, Germany. They have a singular pursuit, and that is to interpret sounds directly through images. This no-bars approach makes it possible to perform live sets and for the VJs to directly react to the rhythm and the feel of the music. The form of the sets corresponds to the handwriting style of each Lichtfront VJ. Therefore there's the incentive, as the set itself demonstrates, to produce for each night a unforgetable visual clip. (bitfilm)

Yannick Jacquet (*1980) lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Originally trained as a graphic artist, he now devotes his time to developing a personal language using video and a wealth of projection techniques. Yannick Jacquet's work is characterised by a desire to break out of the traditional formats of video-projection and finding ways to integrate video into the performance space. These ideas are developed and performed in the form of audiovisual performances, installations and scenography. (Yannick Jacquet)