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Monday, May 02, 2011

Kinetics / Cory Arcangel's dancing shelves at Hamburger Bahnhof




In january I saw this kinetic installation of 2 pairs of dancing shelves by Cory Arcangel in Hamburger Bahnhof. The 'soundtrack' in the clip is coming from his video installations, one of them featuring Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar. In the clip you see a glimpse of that on a monitor on the wall.
The heart of the exhibition (still up till 28 august 2011) is the two-screen installation 'a couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould' from 2007. Arcangel's video version of the 1st Variation from Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations, entirely constructed from downloaded youtube material.


Cory Arcangel - a couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould, 2007
© Courtesy the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg


"Compiled from over 1100 individual snippets that the artist downloaded off the Internet and edited using software that he himself devised, we are treated to a video version of the 1st variation from Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations. At a bewildering speed, the images alternate from person to person as each individual plays a completely different instrument, each time performing a single note from Bach's composition. The pianist Glenn Gould used the technique of piecing together various recordings to produce his commercial records, something which Archangel takes here to its humorous extreme." (via website Hamburger Bahnhof)


Cory Arcangel - a couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould, 2007
© Courtesy the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris/Salzburg



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

beautiful blog. Thanksssss!

oooriel

(:

mfk said...

thanks oooriel!