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Love Songs #1

Art Jones

2001 00:12:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3

Description

Love Songs #1 is composed of three pieces that pose questions about urban culture, race, and politics. Found footage images are manipulated and juxtaposed with popular music; the effects are unsettling, ironic, and sometimes humorous.

Blow #2 is a description of digitized female forms juxtaposed with text and set to a Delfonics classic. The pixilated visual environment eventually crystallizes into an image of potential violence/beauty. Nurture is a meditation on the anthropomorphic trends in “hardcore” hip-hop. In the video, rappers become animals, animals become rappers, all in a context of mediated nihilism and the environmental trend toward self-destruction. Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s classic 1996 song “Brooklyn Zoo” is the engine for our discovery channel nightmare. Riotously ironic and self consciously deployed, the director poses the question: “Where my dogs at?” Over Above is about the physical and social distances through which everyday horror is seen. Airplanes, buses, and helicopters: these provide the windows that filter our perceptions of early 21st Century America, where not quite seeing has become the dominant mode of vision. The visual “effect” is two fold: the first, composited through a helicopter window, is the beating of Thomas Jones by the Philadelphia police on July 12, 2000. The second is a view of a scene from a bus window. With music by Cibo Matto.

About Art Jones

Art Jones is an image/sound manipulator working with film, digital video, and hybrid media. His films/videos, CD-ROMs, live audio/videomixes and installations often concern the inter-relationships between popular music, visual culture, history, and power. As a VJ he has performed with a variety of musicians and artists, including Soundlab, DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, DJ T-Ina, Amiri Baraka, Femmes with Fatal Breaks, and Alec Empire and Phillip Virus. He has completed a trilogy of music videos and a CD-ROM, and continues to perform at various locations. He is from the Bronx and lives and works in New York.