Make it real! On the development of post-digital aesthetics in music video
Lecture by Holger Lund
Location and Date: Raum 210, Altes Theater (Marktstraße 13/15), 88212 Ravensburg
Monday, February 10, 2014, 20:00
If the “real” of the analog is contained in the indiscreet continuum of values, such as acoustic, visual and haptic values, then with the increasing digitalization of so many areas of life, in which everything is broken down into the binary, discrete code of the digital, there is a growing need not to lose that real, undivided whole. To this end, we either return to analog, as evidenced in music and video by the return to analog synthesizers and handicraft aesthetics, or analogity is simulated digitally, for example with digital simulations of analog synthesizers and handicraft aesthetics. The result of the survey by the software company Ableton for the most popular sound preset of the Live 8 software was: the acoustic piano. Even Zalando and Ebay, which are now unexpectedly opening actual store stores, are becoming “real,” touchable, approachable, undivided matter. The degree of digitalization thus seems to have progressed so far that, in parallel, the post-digital age has already begun as re-analogization.
This development also affects the music video, can be read from it. And quite early, in fact. Probably because digitization has already affected music much earlier than other areas of life. Recognizable digital imagery, which actually goes so well with digitally based music, did not last much beyond the 2000s. Then, slowly but surely, even the avant-garde of digital music increasingly demanded visualizations of their music that showed traits of the analog handmade or consisted entirely of it. Paper and cardboard, scissors and pen make their way into music videos, Polaroid and Super-8 look appear, machines and technoid futurisms are supplemented with landscapes and animals or even displaced by them. An aesthetic of “handmade-digital” develops, which in turn now reflects its own post-digitality: as a paradoxical, computer-generated or -assisted attempt to get the undivided real and real analog with the means of authenticity and reality dividing digitality. However: perhaps precisely in this paradoxical effort lies a new “realness”?
Published: http://post-digital-culture.org/hlund-eng/
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Abb. Transforma, Asynthome, 2010
