WORKS
Dara Birnbaum—Kojak/Wang
Arthur Jafa—Love Is The Message, The Message is Death
Ulysses Jenkins—Inconsequential Doggereal
Tony Cokes—Black Celebration
Mathias Müller—The Phoenix Tapes
xenopraxis—We Know What You’re Looking For
Martin Arnold—Passage à l’acte
Martha Rosler—Domination and the Everyday
EXERCISE: 2-MINUTE COMMERCIAL SWAP
Download 10 commercials from YouTube, each lasting 15 seconds. (On YouTube, search for a product you know. It’s likely the company has its own channel.) Your task will be to swap sound and image tracks between the clips.
- Separate the sound and image tracks in your video editor. You will now have 10 imagetracks and 10 soundtracks to play with.
- You will always line up your image and sound tracks so that they begin at the same time. Since they are the same duration, they should end at the same time too.
- Try various experiments, such as copying the same imagetrack 10 times on your timeline, with a different soundtrack each time. Or the same soundtrack 10 times with a different imagetrack each time.
- Note what sticks. What particular effects are occurring in these recombinations? How does the soundtrack change the image, and how does the image change the sound? What kind of alignments happen between sound and image?
- Even when nothing seems to be happening, something is still happening.
- Recombine them through playful experimentation.
- Assemble the combinations that stick out the most into a linear order and export as a 2-minute piece.