The stable of amazing musicians on Ghostly International’s roster never fails to impress, and along with the audio they’ve also promoted their artists with consistently beautiful videos.
Their latest, directed by Morgan Beringer and promoting Matthew Dear’s Headcage EP, is a gorgeous, metallic, slithering, opalescent mess of wonderful goo.
The only thing that kinda bums me out is that it reminds me a bit too much of Robert Seidel’s legendary 2006 masterpiece for Zero 7’s Futures.
Quick + Dirty is back with a hot list of videos I think you need to see…
suuns: red song.
galaxie + mathieu cyr: camouflar.
my first earthquake + satan’s pearl horses: we float.
shout out out out out + a.j. bond + chris von szombathy: bad choices.
I first started following photographer/artist/wunderkind Ryan McGinley more than 2 years ago, when I posted about his gorgeous (and still my favourite) photo exhibition “I Know Where The Summer Goes.” Since then McGinley has blown up huge and deservedly so. Expanding his visual scope from photography, he moved into film last year with a short for fashion house Pringle of Scotland starring Tilda Swinton.
Last weekend, in collaboration with LVMH-branded website Nowness, McGinley released an incredibly hot looking short film (shot partially by a Phantom Camera at 1500 fps) called “Entrance Romance (It Felt Like A Kiss).” I’m a big proponent of art not necessarily needing to be “about” something, so this is right up my alley. In the short, supermodel Carolyn Murphy shoots hairspray at a lighter, makes out with a wet dog, and has a few glass objects thrown against her head. I fucking loved it. What’s it about? Don’t know, don’t care. It seems so gleefully confident in it’s abject weird nothingness that I fully bought it.
Though the whole concept of filming shit being thrown at people isn’t original (the work of New York City-based photographer Meg Wachter comes to mind) the production value is through the roof and, plus, Murphy is simply incredible to look at. The look of serene intensity she maintains while knowing, somewhere, that a bowl full of goldfish is hurtling towards her is somehow completely fascinating. However, it’s the sly wave of sadomasochistic discovery that spreads across her face after being drilled in the head with a bottle of Heineken that really makes this worth the price of admission. Except that it was free… but you get my point.
Via Towleroad.
Not only did Zoltán Lányi create this futuristic, fragmented, jolting experimental work to a track by Amon Tobin featuring Bonobo, but he did it while still in school at the Eszterházy Károly College in Eger, Hungary.
To me, the twitching, glitchy POV reminds me of a sort of post-apocalyptic, burned world being studied and leading to the discovery of a whole new level of mechanical life underneath the ruin.
Plus, it’s just really fucking cool.
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Via Ventilate
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There are times when you fall in love faster than you thought you were capable of. All your old signals fade and your plans re-arrange without a word. Your stars align in brand new ways and all the nights you had designed become a dream for your days. Your heart expands and for a time your reality is married to the possibility of everything you can envision. Like a message in a bottle, gently nudged from your shore, this vision travels and, if you’re lucky, the person you love picks it up and carries it with you.
Sweetly, without warning, you construct your potential and in this moment your future and your present melt together. Into an instant eventual, an immediate inevitable. A second where the possibility of love stretches before you like an ocean and you travel through your imagination; vast and epic and filled with hope, the way each wave yearns to curl up and crash back into the same waters it was first pulled away from.
This is that feeling.
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Following their work together on the video for U2’s “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight”, the heart-achingly exquisite “Black Lake” is a collaboration between one of my favourite directors, David O’Reilly, and Jon Klassen and it’s beautiful.
Via Motionographer
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There’s something about the intrinsic freedom and improv history that’s sewn into jazz that lends itself particularly well to experimental visuals. Without words to guide along a pre-determined narrative, we’re left with an ultimate freeflow; we decide for ourselves what the story behind the sounds is, and the director gets an ultimate carte blanche to create whatever visual story he or she wants.
Directed by Japanese director/animator Takafumi Tsuchiya (a.k.a. Takcom) for experimental jazz outfit Samurai Jazz Quintet, “Pico” is twitchy, graphic, dimension-shifting animation gem. It follows no convention or boundaries, just visualizes, with complete abandon, the sounds it has merged with.
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Via No Fat Clips
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I love the artistic study of the collision between the digital and organic, and the idea of a point where our physical evolution meets mutation and takes a shocking genetic leap forward. I’m drawn to depictions of that intersection where our microchips merge with our bodies, and how we’re forced to consider how the rest of us may react when the first of us transcend the boundary of the human and the mechanical and transform into an unimaginable new hybrid.
The new video for amazing alt-electronic outfit Delphic’s “Doubt” is a stunning physical metaphor for emotional mutation. Their faces and bodies crystalize, galvanize, and alchemize themselves against their emotional trauma and manifest into a physical protection for, and even aggression against, their new emotional world. Like second skins, metallic armours and cellular defenses slowly spread across their bodies.
Reminding me of the amazing genetic mutational imaginings of Lucyandbart, the vid is directed by another artist with experience in visualizing the future.I first discovered Andy Huang over two years ago with his spectacular short film “Doll Face”, a story of robotic narcissism that has to be seen to be believed, which he followed up with his sinister and disturbing “The Gloaming.”
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Via No Zap
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“Homunculus” is a bizarrely absurd twist on two concepts; one ancient and one psychological. The first of an annual series of experimental shorts from HumbleTV’s in-house team Hydra, “Homunculus” begins as a study of things too small to be seen and too slow to be known. Air and gas and bacteria that slowly rot, pulling at the molecules and fibres of the natural world until they decay. Time, slowly pulling away at the insides of everything alive.
After that, things get really nasty.
Described by Hydra as “…taking its title from the Latin word for “Little Human”, the piece is an associative mashup between the two concepts behind the word: The first being middle-age alchemical beliefs that “little men” could be spontaneous generated from dead or decaying matter. The second being Carl Jung’s usage as a personification of pure id. These ideas, combined with our love of Dutch still life’s “beautiful decay,” sowed the seeds for this unique little monster of a film.”
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They began be sealing off an entire still life inside a plexiglass box and used multiple DSLRs shot a frame every 5 minutes for 11 days to document the slow (and noble!) rot. After that the entire Hydra team spent 4 months, from character conception to scoring, to complete the final HD short.
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Prepare to have your mind blown. I couldn’t be any more thrilled about this. My first post of 2010 kicks off the year in epic style with the HD re-release of Robert Seidel’s 2004 masterpiece “_Grau.”
Seidel is one of my absolute favourite digital artists in the entire world. I’ve posted before, with my adoration, about his groundbreaking video for Zero 7’s “Futures”, his amazing large-scale outdoor projection “Processes: Living Paintings”, and his gorgeous video installation “Vellum.”
Posted publicly for the first time in HD, “_Grau” has only been seen before at this level of quality and detail at galleries and festivals. To me it’s a trailblazing work, that perfectly personifies Seidel’s digital/organic style clash and attention to detail that first made me fall in love with his work.
Seidel describes it himself as “… a personal reflection on memories coming up during a car accident, where past events emerge, fuse, erode and finally vanish ethereally… various real sources were distorted, filtered and fitted into a sculptural structure to create not a plain abstract, but a very private snapshot of a whole life within its last seconds…”
“Grau” roughly translates into English as “greyish – an achromatic color of any lightness between the extremes of black and white.” Here we have Seidel’s vision of the human spirit in limbo, not between extremes of the afterlife but the unknown moment between life and death. In it he structures the human soul into the most beautiful and terrifying embodiments of its own emotions: prismatic light, splintering bone, gnarled despair, silent torrents of hope, and silky liquid lightness that fades away within itself. It magnifies all of our greatest fears and yearnings and is something I’ve never forgotten. Seeing it again now, in its intended detail and nuance, is nothing less than incredible.
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Via Motionographer.
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Ah, beauty. A long, languid, liquidy bit of motion design awesomeness by Esteban Diácono. Musing on the nature of creativity and imagination, the vid features quotes from Einstein, Stefan Sagmeister, Brian Eno, and other various creative types from different media. The song is “Ljósið” by Ólafur Arnalds.
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Via Ventilate
shape+colour 