Champagne Valentine/ Black Material Video from Champagne Valentine on Vimeo.
Amsterdam-based Champagne Valentine is Geoff Lillemon (oculart.com) and Anita Fontaine (anitafontaine.com), injecting fantastic otherworldly insanity into your audiovisual everyday. I’m lucky enough to have learned about their work through hyper-talented cross-media artist Sougwen, who worked with them while holing up in Amsterdam earlier this year.
In miniature videos, we’re getting a number of windows into their world which I hope reveal more soon. Black Material, above, is a forthcoming book and DVD, drawing together NYC artist Robert Knoke and electro producer Spencer Product. The video at top stars Rosalie Canté, with fashion collaboration by “future-freaky couture queen” Lucy McRae. It’ll be coming to design-savvy boutiques near you soon, from Collete to MOMA Design Store.
As a lot of audiovisual releases tend to the derivative, it’s terrific, by contrast, to see some neo-Baroque extravagance.
It’s little wonder this crew are fans of Tim Burton. Here’s a tea party, as staged from remnants of Burton and co’s brains:
Tim Burton Promo for Chello/ UPC from Champagne Valentine on Vimeo.
And yes, sometimes intelligent collaboration can bring the right kind of meetings of the minds.