After Keisha and Lady Gaga, now Rihanna with her own randy and highly psychedelic video clip.
rad times and compression artefacts
1 AugToday I’d like to make the proposal that the aesthetics of “datamoshing” are kinda very psychedelic.
“Datamoshing” is the hip term for the effects achieved by removing keyframes from a videofile. It’s actually a very basic artisic technique in the tradion of randomness and the surfacing display of artistic means. What resurfaces here from the subconscious of the means of production are compression artefacts, objects born from the everyday algorithms of heavy data compression. The focus on compression artefacts sets them apart from other glitch aesthetics.
Not unlike a Rorschach test or psychedelic visuals these alien everyday compression artefacts are capable of expression. They have an emotional quality; they are anarchic smugglers on the border between conscious and subconscious.
The video above associates the compression artefacts with a certain melancholy. It’s an interesting construction of things passed since early objects of desire from 80s tv commercials and videogames are fused with the involuntary gestures of data compression from the internets early days of videostreaming. Just like a search of lost rad time with youtube.
Don’t miss those other two videos by eddie whelan! They are beautiful and no less rad executions of controlled randomness.
Ryan Larkin
31 Jul
Ryan Larkin (1943-2007) was a Canadian animator, who in 1969 was nominated for the Academy Award for is short psychedelic animation “Walking”. Three years later he released the acclaimed film “Street Music”, again, a tripy colorful short film, hand drawn with no narrative, but with a distinct and simple theme.
Soon after that, Larkin fell into severe drug abuse, alcoholism and homelessness. In 2002, another Canadian animator, Chris Landreth, Made this short film about him and won an Oscar for it.
1967 light show – Marc Boyle
31 JulA psychedelic light show from the legendary UFO club in London 1967, done by Marc Boyle who was also responsible for the light shows in some of the Jimi Hendrix and Soft Machine concerts in the Sixties. Here to the sounds of the Pink Floyd, playing Astronomy Domine.
Altered states – Ken Russel 1980
28 Jul
The hero, an Californian anthropologist study the intake of mushroom during a Shamanic ceremony…
Fractal Video Feedback
27 JulOne hell of a trippy ride in this video feedback clip.
(Link: Matan Lipman. Thanks!)
Psychedelic Ke$ha – Your love is my drug
26 JulUltra-capitalistic mega-synthetic pop star Ke$ha has recently released a highly psychedelic video with lots of references to drug culture, psychedelic culture, shamanic culture and hippies.
This time Ke$ha, formerly in love only with the $ sign, wakes in the desert and finds herself in love with some hippie. Throughout the song she is dancing around in the desert, playing with motives of indigenous and shamanic culture (Wearing native-american styled clothing, putting on a totem mask of a tiger, or wearing glowing body painting reminding of shamanic wall and body painting) seeing hallucinations and singing about being addicted to this hippie like a “drug”, referring to herself as a “crackhead”.
Things get really wild around 1:30. In this sequence Ke$ha and the hippie are inside a boat in the middle of the desert, probably hallucinating on the “love drug”, they are trying to stir the boat through the sands when they go into a full fledged hallucination whose style kind of reminds one of “Yellow Submarine” animations and this eventually develops to fractals and more modern style psychedelic imagery.
Has Ke$ha had a new psychedelic revelation or is this just another cash-hallucination on the way to stardom. Time will tell, but we will be hoping for more psychedelic videos from Ke$ha in the future.
You can find an interesting and more world-conspiracy style interpretation of Ke$ha’s video here.
Disney’s Fantasia
25 JulAnother psychedelic classic by Disney. In 1940 Fantasia introduced shimmering abstract figuration morphing to the pulse of music as a subject of public viewing. Synaethetics for the masses.
Alice in Wonderland (1966)
24 Jul
In 1966, the height of the psychedelic revolution, this television-play was made by British theater director Jonathan Miller. There is nothing Disney-like in this film, no talking animals and no flamboyant settings. Still, it has a strong haunting atmosphere of a deep plunge into the unconscious of the Victorian mind. The soundtrack is by Ravi Shankar.
Follow the white rabbit!
Tripmeister Eder – Tutenchamun – Goa Goa MPU, ja!?
23 JulGerman raver parody about a drugged Goa-party goer who encounters a policeman. Just unbelievably funny.
