Ugoku

(2007)

by Kasumi is an experimental film/ animation hybrid, found footage and a live performance. The use of vibrant color, visual rhythm and repetition to flesh out the abrupt juxtapositions of classic montage technique.

"A bizarre legion of ever-evolving characters culled from hundreds of found footage sources move with heart-pounding, eye-popping precision to intense beats while kaleidoscopic arrays of colors explode like digital mescaline. This Warhol meets Escher hybrid film and animation unfolds in a surrealistic, multi-dimensional vortex that gives rock the body a new meaning. Every element of each image: movement, gesture, color, tempo, etc., is reanimated and synchronized to specific sounds in the music, creating layered and hypnotic psychotropic rhythms which in a normal state of consciousness would go otherwise unnoticed. Objects and characters are placed in unexpected contexts and tiers revealing entirely new structural formations, penetrating meanings and subliminal interpretations. 'Like a tool video on acid.'

Premiere screening: Sapporo International Short Film Festival Japan 2007

Portions were screened at SIGGRAPH 2007 and as part of the Visual Music Marathon, created by Northeastern University."

Source: Kasumi on Vimeo

Ugoku, found footage, editing, Live Visuals

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Paul Sharits (2008) edited by Yann Beauvais. Known primarily for his experimental cinema and pictorial works, Paul Sharits developed an oeuvre that evolved around two central themes: one, closely related to music and the world of abstraction, the other, within the psychological and emotional arena of the figurative. This complete monograph, drawn from a recent exhibition, explores the connections between these two practices, and in addition provides a general introduction to a remarkable body of work. Illustrated throughout, the monograph also includes several essays, texts by Paul Sharits and interviews. (les presses du réel)

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)

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Kasumi is a video/sound artist whose interdisciplinary activities have included professional activities as a concert musician, exhibiting painter, published writer, theatrical designer, and film producer. Kasumi is one of the leading innovators of a new art form synthesizing film, sound and video in live performance. She has won global acclaim for her work in venues worldwide: from Lincoln Center with The New York Philharmonic to collaborations with Grandmaster Flash, DJ Spooky and Modeselektor. (Kasumi)

Soundboard (2011) by Kasumi investigates the potential for meaning that adheres in increments of physical movement: the marks it leaves through the materials of motion and sound. Using only the sound created from the dancers’ bodies as they come in contact with the floor and each other, it is a study of the human body as it marks its position in space and time, and the very intimate, organizing rhythms that musical force brings to the equation of world and self. (Kasumi)

Transmissions (2010) by Kasumi captures tiny revelations in small gestures and fleeting facial expressions. The 3-minute shortfilm explores their meanings, translating them into a metaphorical language synthesized from all forms of artistic expression: image, movement, music, shape, light and composition. Kasumi illuminates the mysteries of human thought and behavior on their own terms – viscerally, instinctually – and to trigger viewers’ similarly unconscious feelings through their powers of perception and association. (Kasumi)

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. (Kasumi)

Christian Ernest Marclay (*1955) is a Swiss-American visual artist and composer. Marclay's work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film. A pioneer of using gramophone records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collages, Christian Marclay is, in the words of critic Thom Jurek, perhaps the "unwitting inventor of turntablism." His own use of turntables and records, beginning in the late 1970s, was developed independently of but roughly parallel to hip hop's use of the instrument. (Wikipedia)

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)

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)

The Knife: Like A Pen (2006) is Andreas Nilsson's fourth video for The Knife, taken from their album Silent Shout. A colorful, hysteric journey starring a brown little curved fellow. (The Knife on Vimeo)

Visual Music Archive

Ugoku

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