space and architecture in music clips - examples of striking spatial design on display in the exhibition clip city ................................................................
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'clip city' NAi - the netherlands architecture institute january 26 to april 21, 2002 showing in conjunction with the 31st international rotterdam film festival http://www.nai.nl the pitch-black room that usually accompanies films or videos presented on a large scale is clearly a device meant to keep out any distracting light sources. of course it also does the same job on a social level, enforcing the idea that you are experiencing the work one to one - you, the work, the work, you - in a relationship that might dissolve with any external interference. it encourages you to forget your surroundings, other people and in turn your own physical presence. in ‘clip city’ this ethos and its consequences are playfully disregarded. the NAi isn’t a college and isn’t really a museum but more of an archive. it provides rotterdam - and holland as a whole - with a base for architectural debate and research, regularly accompanied with pertinent exhibitions. in programming ‘clip city’ the selectors from the NAi - femke wolting and linda vlassenrood – have noticed that much of the cutting edge work in contemporary pop promos has involved developing a variety of fictitious constructed spaces, landscapes and cities to accompany the specific track. think of alex gophers text-only new york in ‘the child’, jamiroquai’s ‘virtual insanity’ or the accident-prone future city of air’s ‘radio #1". instead of the internal monologue of the novel or the dialogue of a film pop these videos externalise their emotions into the character of their surroundings. in grouping videos together the selection panel have created an environment mtv never have. taking the acknowledged agenda to redefine public spaces inherent in the selected clips the exhibition designers have informed the layout and architecture of the show with direct reference to the attention patterns and behaviour of the viewing public. set in a long open ended hall of the NAi each end of the room is curtained off with great floor to ceiling strips of transparent vinyl, giving a hazy view of light and shapes before you make your way inside. enter the room and the surprising thing is that your not initially confronted by either the videos or the music. the pivotal gesture of the show is that the main spectacle is now the audience: suspended from the high ceiling are twenty or thirty headphone sets, the long electrical cable attached to the very top of each headband arch. scattered across the floor is the gallery furniture, in this instance, twenty or more large, transparent, bouncing balls, more commonly used in physiotherapy. without the public in the space the view is a formal one, just two sets of multiple objects; the headphones dangle and the balls roll around. once the audience let in and they sit on the chairs and don the headphones each neatly forms one unit, fixed into this caricature of sitting, looking and listening. It gives it the look of some hi-tech interior but with elegantly simple means. the audience has been co-opted into a mediating level between visitor and display, through their use of another contrived public environment. the videos run on four projection screens approximately 8 ft high across the long left-hand wall in total silence. choose one to watch and then pick the nearby headphones, if another one takes your fancy find a closer ball and put on the respective headphones. this choice of screens and viewpoints transforms channel surfing into a physical, engaged act. yet again emphasising that this is not so much an exhibition about presenting work but how and when we look at it. this tactic and along with the specific choice of videos are both simple solutions to the question of how to properly consider the booming art of the pop promo. they occupy a strange position at present as they are at the same time both over and under exposed. on the one hand we have increasing numbers of rolling music channels on digital tv but the individual videos are only ever talked about in design magazines and industry papers. rarely are they paid any attention on a more engaged, considered level. some of the best involve ingenious ideas about how we relate to the real world like no other medium. curious three-minute propositions that take the flavour of the short story and the daydream and yet give it the expertise of a feature film. take a director who fulfils this role perfectly like michel gondry - who although strangely absent from this selection is having his whole output screened at another cinema in the festival. his work on the chemical brothers’ ‘let forever be’ video had a young city girl held captive by outdated camera effects that gondry replicated with nothing more than busby berkley style choreography, multiple stage props and impeccable timing. his video for bjork’s ‘batchelorette’ follows the film within a film edict to its nth degree as her autobiography is continually re-dramatised within the same performance of a play about her life. perhaps a crucial step forward in the maturity of the medium is that this can portray such mixed emotion in contrast to the egotism or sentimentality of earlier pop videos. many of these new works can be utterly satisfying, completely virtuoso and yet totally fulfilled in their short three to four minute time span. as the videos in the show are only loosely grouped around the idea of the city the programme as a whole is neither as authoritative or partial as you might expect. our mixed appreciation of the artform (do we like the song or the video, the technology or the idea) means that overall value judgements are still difficult to establish. it is, however, useful to look at the show as part of the rotterdam film festival as a whole (renowned as being one of the least commercial and most experimental - mike figgis has been remixing his movies live there this year) and specifically within it’s ‘exploding cinema’ strand. their agenda has been to re-evaluate the way video is being made and viewed now that digital technology has given access to so many more situations. ‘clip city’s role in this has been to focus on our own attentive gaze, neatly illustrating the cyclical nature of film: that we record in order to present back to each other. in their use and representation of architecture the curators have shown it to be a convincing parallel discipline of public engagement and open-ended function. reviewed by barry sykes barry@sykes.tc --- --- ------- monthly designboom newsletter ------- ------- ? comments and contact us ? -------	exhibition installation photo by ger van der vlugt exhibition installation photo by ger van der vlugt stills from music video 'don't panic' performing artist: coldplay director: tim hope 'the child' , performing artist: alex gopher director: H5 stills from music video 'I can't get you out of my head' performing artist: kylie minogue director: dawn shadforth