robert seidel: _grau hd.

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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robert seidel: vellum.

German animator, motion designer, and artist Robert Seidel is one of my all time faves. For me, he mixes the organic with the technologic in way no one else does. It’s like retro-futurist, his work often feels like a highly-advanced digital society remembering or re-interpreting the biological. His stuff is so far ahead it’s come back again. 

I recently posted about the new compression artifact technique datamoshing. Always a visionary, Seidel was playing around with what we’re know starting to call datamoshing  in his video (and one of my fave videos of all time) for Zero 7’s “Futures”… back in 2006. The vid was rejected at the time for being too futuristic and outside of the box. Clearly, Seidel is way, way ahead of the curve. 

In his latest work, “Vellum”, Seidel has created a large scale video installation for the COMO/Nabi Art Center in Seoul. A huge, multi-LED screen world, the visuals are aching and secretively beautiful. Like a lot of Seidel’s work, he brings to life an alluring but almost unnerving feeling; of things that seem familiar and comfortable – flowers, seeds, bones, feathers, earth – but which are behaving in ways we don’t understand. Again, with his hallmark air of an altered organic; of mutations and evolutions and natural elements that we think should be completely understood by us but which, for some reason, are behaving just outside of our experience. So intimate, but so alien. 

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Seidel says of the work “The perceived interpenetration f skeletal architecture and unrolled landscapes reveal textures of the man-made restructuring of nature. Their different granular perspectives create a fibrous volume of possibilities fusing past, present and future. In their flatness the visible sculptural slices are reminiscent to our accelerated life, shifting into technology and transcending the physical body. The perceived transformation is based on the sculpture wandering through the building seen from a fixed point of view. In vellum motion is form and form is motion…”

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robert seidel.

I’m a big time fan of Robert Seidel. Blurring the traditional lines between film-making and animation, his organic and ebullient work teems with an almost living energy as he studies the shapes and patterns created by an environment and then overlays that with his own graphic style. The resulting mix, an other-worldy visual evolution of nature and technology, is always beautiful and shockingly unique. They are so rooted in experience that they seem familiar, but at the same time we know we’re looking at something we’ve never seen before. It’s almost jarring, but incredibly so.

His latest work is no exception. “Human Paint” is a stunning new identity for England’s Channel 5, while “Dream Mountains” was commissioned by Hong Kong’s IdN Magazine for part of its upcoming anniversary.

I first discovered Seidel in 2006 when he directed one of my favourite videos to one of my favourite songs of all time. It’s a lot of favourite, I know, but the sleek, moody perfection that is his video for Zero 7‘s “Futures” is undeniable. Watch it and let your jaw drop.

Deservedly so, Seidel is also part of the motion design dream team that have created pieces for Universal Everything’s amazing Advanced Beauty HD-DVD project. Seidel’s contribution, “Appearing Disappearance”, is crazy beautiful and the teaser below looks unbelieveable…

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Continuing to push and innovate, this year Seidel took his work off the screen and into the real world. In “Processes: Living Paintings” he projeted a 15 x 36 metre projection onto the side of the Phyletics Museum in Jena, Germany. Transferring his swirling, elemntal style from animation into light, he created an installation of strobbing, rippling, shifting colour that’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before. As with all his work, it’s more like he managed to make something inanimate come alive, rather than