Mashups. Sampling a President named Bush. Bah. In the early 90s, life was better. Multimedia collective Emergency Broadcast Network was sampling found footage in truly clever ways — using VHS, artifacts and all. And driving around in massive projection assault vehicles with rotating satellite dishes. And building rockets into golf bags. Really. Now that’s my […]

It’s a feverish, pounding acid nightmare – in a kathartic way. Get knocked back in your chair for Vee’s “Litha” on Failed Units, as we meet the artists.

Few electronic labels or acts have an identity as well defined as raster-noton, and its co-founders Bytone (Olaf Bender) and alva noto (Carsten Nicolai). And I don’t just mean single cycle waveforms or quick bursts of noise, hard-edged projected high contrast geometries or digital aesthetics, though those associations will certainly spring to mind. Even as […]

In a world of machine weapons, construction equipment waging destruction, mechanized warfare and economic mayhem, maybe giant sound machines are a friendlier alternative. Nik Novak certainly has a way of giving sound physical being. And ironically, if some of his creations might appear to assault the senses, his own sensibilities came from the frightening experience […]

How do you expose live visual culture to larger audiences? Even as club visuals have become more commonplace, and – evidently – some US$10 million in gear sold last year, the awareness of the medium itself is both limited and, very often, contentious. Producer and CDM reader Yaniv Fituci sends along one new entry, a […]

As with music, there’s not really a dominant style of live visuals or audiovisuals; it ranges from the ambient and generative to Emergency Broadcast Network-style A/V cutups. DJ Yoda is an A/V mash artist in the traditional mold, but the results are nothing if not diverting. They’re quite simply fun, and the fact that the […]

the Books – A Cold Freezin’ Night from Paul de Jong / Nick Zammuto on Vimeo. The Books do sound sampling cut-up like no one else, so visuals sliced up via the same mad genius come as little surprise. Heavily indebted to the work of pioneers like Emergency Broadcast Network, their videos still have the […]

Wait for it… It’s a sculptural monument to waiting and the wait cursor, controlled by an iPad. This doesn’t count as the first iPad-controlled art, as I was part of a show last month on that theme; documentation of that soon. But is a fascinating homage to an iconic image of our age, and time […]

One of the things I admire about audiovisual duo Eclectic Method is the way they work with audiovisual materials, slicing and mapping visual materials as though they’re sonic loops, all within the rhythmic grid. They’re also, as visualists go, able to carry a party on their own in a way that’s truly rare. So even […]

It’s striking how audiovisualism has broken into maximalist and minimalist streams, toward DJ-style cut-ups and mash-ups of video at one end of the spectrum and geometric generative animation at the other. Firmly planted in the maximalist, Emergency Broadcast Network-descended sliced-and-scratched popular culture, we have Eclectic Method. The duo does audiovisual pop-fragmentation better than anyone right […]