A video that destroys itself while you watch it
Chris Turner shot a performance, played it back on a CRT, filmed the CRT, played that back on something worse, and kept going until the image fell apart. No plugins. The decay is real and it is happening in the room.
Play itYouTubeAlmost every "degraded" video you have seen this year was degraded in software, after the fact, by someone who owns a VHS plugin. This one was not.
Chris Turner, working as Favourite Colour: Black with DP Luke Scully for Octopus Inc., shot Suede's "Disintegrate" in black and white and then ran it through a generational loss loop: play it back on a CRT monitor, film the monitor, play that back on progressively worse equipment, film it again, and manipulate the cables while doing it. By the end of three minutes the band is barely there.
Worship the glitch!
Turner's own description of it:
"Fantastic track by a fantastic band. Black and white, lo-fi, performance-based and with visuals that disintegrate as the video plays out. All achieved in-camera, utilising progressively lower quality equipment, shooting and re-shooting from screens as the signal was increasingly interrupted."
He lists Bill Viola, Bruce Nauman and William Basinski as reference points, and the Basinski one is the tell: The Disintegration Loops is a record about tape physically shedding itself as it plays. This is the same idea pointed at a picture.
Why we care
Because the difference between a filter and a process is the whole argument. A filter is a decision you can undo. A process is a thing that happened, in a room, to actual equipment, and it has a direction: forward, and worse. You can feel which one you are watching even when you cannot say why.
Got something wrong? Tell us and we will fix it.
