Start.

Clark

I can’t remember exactly but I was going back and fourth between artists on Soundcloud and sites in my inspiration feed. Somewhere in there I stumbled upon German techno producer Chris Clarks’, then, newly released «To Live And Die in Grantham». The song was pretty aggressive and monotone, looked Clark up.

On his site and on Soundcloud most of his artwork consists of a silhouette of a head filled with different patterns, images or faces.

Clarks visuals is simple yet very consistent.

In the back of my head I remembered Cole Peters tweeting about a Japanese artist that did ultra minimal music and light installations.

This lead me to the next step.

But I could not for the life of me find the tweet. After a bit of bouncing back and fourth between me, Cole and artist Emptyset and developer Neka we concluded that it must have been Ryoji Ikeda that I was looking for.

Ryoji Ikeda

Ryojis visuals is pretty damn brutal but still very mesmerizing. Just look at the images above and you realise the hugeness of the displays in his installation The Transfinite

This lead me directly to Radioheads video for «House of Cards» since it has the same kind of spastic visuals.

Radiohead

In the video cameraman Andre Lopez and director Tim Nackashi uses some really cool techniques to capture and render 3D data into the silhouettes for the video. View the making-of video here.

The next step in this trail then came as a bit of a coincidence.

Marc-Antoine Locatelli

Since the previous Creative Trail about choreography I have posted, Googled and written a bit about dance and choreography. Not much, but I guess enough for Googles and Facebooks algorithms to pick it up. I get more and more dance related suggestions in my feeds.

One early morning Marc-Antoine Locatellis’ Nuance was in my fb feed.

I had no clue what so ever who Marc-Antoine is or what he does, but I watched the video and it’s a brilliant piece of dance, music, choreography and special effects … and it very much used silhouettes as the key component in the video.

When I read up on Marc-Antoine it turns out he is a French director and videographer that does a lot of great stuff.

The main visual element in Nuance is something that Marc-Antoine has added afterwards to complete the idea of the video. This made me think of British band 808 State. When they wrote and produced music they did something similar but completely opposite; they removed the main component in the song in something they called «silhouetting".

808 States’ «silhouetting»

The group [808 State] eschews the standard dance-song formula of big beats and soulful vocals; it also uses a technique it calls “silhouetting”, where a track is built around a sample which is then removed, leaving only a musical ghost image. Zttaat - 808 state does not play no rock ‘N’ roll

End.

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