The title of this article is as bizarre as the video itself. I found this over on Bruce Sterling’s blog Beyond The Beyond and it is a wondrously brain melting bit of video wizardry that dissects and reassembles the images and sound of the formerly linear presentation of media – much like the Yooouuutube site I blogged about earlier.
That it uses one of my favourites and the best movie musical of all time – “Singin’ In The Rain” – only helps but it also serves to reinforce the ideas behind the technique since it incorporates dance and music. Have a lookey-loo and I’ll rant at ya after you’ve had your head opened up just a little bit.
Now at first blush this might seem like just a weird and trippy gimmick – and it could certainly remain as such. But consider the choices made in the creation of this little gem – it’s not arbitrary work. The repetition of the lyrics, the overlapping layers of the melody, the attendant visuals that are given focus at the requisite moment(s) in time – it’s just fucking brilliant. Check out their otherwork.
And not just as a mashup. The images and sounds drip like rain water upon a pane of glass. This is poetry, folks.
At the risk of hauling out the old adage poetry in motion – it is just that. Regardless of whether the content is repurposed or original, this is a stunning example of where our culture is heading.
I hear you say: “What the fuck are you on about, Robbo?”
Fair enough. Just this:
We are emerging from a culture that has been dominated by visuals – motion visuals. The moving image has become the lingua franca of the past century – it defines us and it defines our world. The power once held by a painted image, a photograph or a sound bite has long ago relinquished its hold upon the minds of our culture – and in its place is the moving image.
Technological and market forces decreed that such images would always come from a combined creative and business elite – a one-way and top-down conversation. The democratization of this technology is allowing the once passive viewer to speak back to those once hierarchal images – to craft a response in a myriad of forms – to redefine our culture by adopting the language of moving pictures and transforming them into poetry. We also get to speak to each other in this way – transforming the culture further by adopting the methods of what was once voices from above to our own voices from within.
Poetry.
Giambattista Vico postulated – back in the early 1700′s – a recurring cycle of three ages of culture: The Poetic, The Mnemotic & The Vulgar. It doesn’t take a great mind to look about and realize what age we are currently wallowing our way through. Vulgar doesn’t even begin to describe it.
But it is a cycle.
The wheel turns – slowly, yes – but it does turn.
And thus we enter an age where the content of our former culture becomes transformed into the poetic. McLuhan oft stated the content of new media was the media of old. This is but one of the reasons why fighting to retain public access to common culture is important. Our voices stem from our ability to speak of what once was by using the voices of that recent time past.
Blah blah blah blah blah blah.
I easily foresee a culture that speaks like the video above. Songs, stories, music, dance, narrative, marketing, instruction – the whole gamut of human communication – parlayed through what now would be perceived as an incoherent too-well-stirred pot of media.
We shall speak in video.
And this speech will not merely be regarded as art or a sub-culture of hipster dialect, Daddio – it will be how we converse.
Just as easily as I type – and you read – these words.
Welcome to the future.
Say what?
Cheers.
P.S. This reminds me of the work of Graham Smith, who I used to hang out with a bit in the early ’80′s when he was at OCA creating his photography based work Skinned and messing around with early experiments in video and cludgey virtual reality simulations. He’s currently deep into the telepresence and immersive video world but still crafting very compelling images.
Tags: art, bruce sterling, dance, gene kelly, I always knew the future would be weird but this is fucking amazing, in the the future we won't need drugs, mcluhan, mnemotic, music, poetic, poetry, singin in the rain, slitscan, speaking of vulgar - i had a huge dump this morning and I swear to god it looked like Glenn Beck's head, vico, video, vulgar
I’ve often thought that people love film and the movies as it is a more realistic representation of their own lives and emotions. Avatar is a hit partly because Cameron made the world so believable and photorealistic. We’ve adored poetry and literature and visual arts but there is something to be said for the folk art. The traditional song. Filmmaking seems to be able to straddle both sides (at it’s best).
I also think it has to do with time. A short film can encompass a big idea and an avant garde audience. Can you do this in an hour or an hour and a half?
Mark!
These are the odd and necessary questions.
In the very early days of cinema no one anticipated it could work as a longer form of entertainment past the equivalent of today’s YouTube videos. Sure, Edison played around with hand-tinted footage and a connected wax audio cylinder to give colour and sound – but it was still a large hand cranked device one had to use with their eyes pressed to a viewer and stethoscope tubes jammed in the ears. One can easily imagine a steam-punk retro dimension where this rudimentary analogue technology was refined to become a hand held device – possibly with a wind-up spring – maybe a small illuminated screen and a more slender pair of ear tubes – thus becoming the equivalent of the iPhone.
But that didn’t happen.
Moving pictures grew into a larger form despite the naysayers. Editorial conventions became accepted as part of the visual vocabulary shared with the audience. Viewing times increased. Distribution and exhibition methods altered not only how pictures were watched but also how the industry itself was viewed – no longer a shabby arcade past-time but a true art form.
Cinema itself grew from the existing traditions of narrative storytelling. Avant garde forays oft times proclaimed themselves the new future – only to succumb to popular disinterest – and yet still exert an influence in how the mass movement of cinema arts were received by the larger world wide audience.
Regardless of how much any popular medium may cling to, or extend itself from, all that came before there is always an evolution in how narrative is presented and received. Camp fire legends. Street Theatre. The Legitimate Stage. Radio. Cinema. Television. Home Theatre. The Net. Within each and all of these are numerous forms that rise and fall from favour. Each contain those that came before – and yet each were profoundly distinct in their own way.
The distinction of where we are now is how these prior forms are being consumed and internalized by the emerging media. The means of general communication: “Hi, how are ya? What’s new?” are now the distribution mechanism of the technical media that once defined our narrative culture. This in itself is going to alter the way we tell stories – the way we receive stories – and even the way in which we just simply speak to each other. Mix in the massive deluge of information about our world (physically and temporally) with this conversational narrative and then layer it with AR visuals that inform, influence, distort and feed our metaphoric, virtual and real views of the worlds we choose to immerse ourselves in – it then becomes a little more conceivable (to me at least) how we could evolve our means of telling and participating in stories into methods and patterns that today would make no fucking sense at all.
I’d like to think Mozart could have been able to listen to the Ramones and immediately rock out. Most others from his time would have run screaming from the room. The use of language (aural, visual & tactile) will always be put in service of telling the tales with which we define ourselves – it has always been thus – but would we today be capable of understanding the languages of a further tomorrow?
Look back to the past.
Today’s audiences do not have the patience or discipline required to watch a black and white silent film – short or long – which requires more involvement, a greater level of participation, of the viewer than the full onslaught of colour and sound information we are now accustomed to. It’s perceived as “boring” or (more accurately) “tiring”. You have to work at it. Parallels to the active involvement of gaming abound, confirm and contradict. It’s the same and it’s different.
Things change.
I trust there will be enough that is recognizable in the future for us to be able to pass through the veil of time and not feel as though we have landed within a completely alien culture. I also trust the ways and means of human communication will always seek to define that which exists within us – and that is the most fundamental of survival processes: Where are we? What is trying to kill us? How can we survive? – and, when we feel safe enough to rest and ponder such things: Why are we?
But does that mean the future of visual storytelling must adhere to the precepts that have only recently been established in our cultural psyche? Is our currently accepted language of cinema the *only* way in which a tale – of any length – may be told and accepted by a mass audeince? I’d also like to think that Eisenstein and Griffith would have been astute enough to say: “No. Whatever it becomes, it will be new and it will be different.”
And at the same time – yes – it will be the same.
cheers