7. “A History of Nothing”
Virtual Vitality / 2019
We’ve entered the flattened out temporality…the Nineties ought to be as distant as the Sixties felt in 1980, but now the Sixties, the Eighties and the Nineties belong to a kind of postmodern curatorial simultaneity.” – Mark Fisher “Don’t start from the good old things but the bad new ones” – Brecht The promise of another, radical future has been replaced by the banality of three decades of “No Alternative” neoliberal capitalism, a day to day banal drudgery punctuated by equally banal escapism on the weekends, a fading xeroxed version of 90s rave hedonism (itself a false dawn). The essence of a vivid, dynamic existence having been drained, slowly but steadily and systematically, from us in Real Life, in Meatspace…we flee to the virtual, to cyberspace seeking an escape. A synthetic simulacra of what is gone and what was promised and what we yearn for. Virtual life, virtual vitality. Rupture with the present state of things seems to be all but impossible, so what is to be done? Take existing phenomena of our late/high-capitalist, fragmented society – or their reflections in culture, and twist/modify/accentuate them; parody of pastiche and pastiche of parody, intensification and sending up of cultural logics. A dissociated alienated voice, engulfed in subjective, affective flux. Distant melodies mimicking both a sense of emotional detachment and an echo of the past reaching through to our truncated present…“the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture“. Radiant bursts of colour momentarily disturb the march of machine rhythm only to be subsumed under its canopy again. Virtual Vitality is a barometer and a mirror of a certain contemporary existence…Within 12 weeks we tried to create a so called "One Hit Wonder". Due to the fact we had to define the band, look and sound on the aspects "dark and grimy" we translated 80‘s wave sound to the 2020‘s. I basically worked out the audiovisual concept by crossing animation with black and white video, creating a walk-through-nightmare, adding different glitch methods to give it an inbetween virtuality and reality look. Using brutalist architecture in the filmed footage was the best way to create an 80‘s based futuristic and dark look sending the observer through a suprematistic depressing dream.
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