Bowie…
I remember the interview Jeremy Paxman did with David Bowie in 1999. I was deep into the web at the moment and was constantly trying to convince people that it was very definitely the start of a revolution and not just ‘the 1990s version of CB radio’…
Partial transcriptions from Gizmodo:
“I really embrace the idea that there’s a new demystification process between the artist and the audience,” Bowie says. He continues on to talk about how the 1980s and 1990s saw a tremendous fragmentation of musical genres, which he sees as positive for establishing interesting communities.
“But what is it specifically about the internet?” Paxman asks. “Anybody can say anything, and it all adds up to what? It seems to me there’s nothing cohesive about it in the way that there was something cohesive about the Youth Revolution in music.”
“Oh, but absolutely,” Bowie says. “And I think it’s because at the time, up until at least the mid-70s, we really felt that we were still living under the guise of a single, absolute, created society—where there were known truths and known lies and there was no kind of duplicity or pluralism about the things that we believed in.”
“That started to break down rapidly in the 70s,” Bowie continues. “And the idea of a duality in the way that we live—there were always two, three, four, five sides to every question. That the singularity disappeared. And that I believe has produced such a medium as the internet, which absolutely establishes and shows us that we are living in total fragmentation.”
[…]
“I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.”
[…]
“Yeah, I’m talking about the actual context and the state of content is going to be so different from anything we can envisage at the moment,” Bowie says. “With the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in sympatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.”
“…it’s happening in visual art. The breakthroughs of the early part of the century with people like Duchamp who were so prescient in what they were doing and putting down the idea that the piece of work is not finished until the audience come to it and add their own interpretation and what the piece of art is about is the gray space in the middle. That gray space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about…”
Playing around with that video… frame by frame reshoot. Just testing different sizes and movements. Seeing what happens when I do different things with the pinhole. No audio.