Originally published at: This 1990s computer animation will melt your brain | Boing Boing
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Popkin must be going down some sort of obscure media rabbithole. This is the 4th “check out this weird [past decade] video” post in a row,.in a span of about 2 hours.
(This is not disapproval, just an observation!)
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Oh sure. Like we don’t ALL have that dream.
No? Just me?
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I’m afraid I’m gonna have that dream tonight.
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It’s just as well that he didn’t have access to modern computer graphics tools, because what was charmingly crude could easily end up being really unpleasant…
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You see, things took a dark turn when the professor decided to snort a line of coke off his desk.
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That’s a doozy. My phone wouldn’t play audio for some reason. It’d make a great temp sound effects practice
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I thought that the floating/dancing god poo was a high point.
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That had everything: a Christ figure speaking in tongues, two church-crushing poops, and an overlord penis.
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No argument there. Another observation:
“…the strange trip, mysterious characters, and other-worldly art.”
Given the more than convincingly entertaining state of CGI in the 90s (ex: Toy Story), I wonder why Speer’s effort comes off as a university computer lab research project from the very early 1980s; stuck there, at least two of the three boxes above are bound to be checked off – artist or not – and especially if the creator actually has no story to tell. The medium alone seems to be the means to the end, whatever that is.
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The christ figure was actually Odin, who was hung on the world tree Yggrasil for 9 days. You can see his ravens, Huginn and Muninn and his wolves, Geri and Freki in that bit too. And the floating symbols were runes. Not sure of the language he was singing in though.
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The only thing I know about pronouncing Welsh is that the initial “Ll” is pronounced “Chl”, but you can get by with “Cl”, like “Click”
Another observation here:
For me, on the first viewing this piece is stating it’s position in the realm of “art” - the ‘book of life and death’ and all the iconography around that. The sacred and the profane - hallelujah chorus and excrement.
The scratchy vinyl low fi sound that chops and changes. Hearing and seeing the means of production in low rent techniques is a well worn trope in video/film art going back decades.
Like much contemporary art this was posing a question to me which is “what the fuck is this all about??”
Not saying I liked it, but I guess that is the point of modern art, it generally confronts you with a question as opposed to sitting there saying look at the skill and beauty that went into creating me and judge me by my peers.
Yep, watched it another time and will do again and if it doesn’t make sense then I’ll have a bit of a think about why that is… not discounting the very rudimentary CGI and the sound design.
…and that’s 4:18 that I’ll never get back again…
why is carl jung dreaming about metatron pooping on a church
I find this video oddly lacking in potato knishes and little black squash balls.
Matthew Barney should adapt this into a full-length live-action movie series.
Wait, I think maybe he already did.
It’s not Welsh. It sounds like a recording of an old Icelandic man chanting in Old Norse. Specifically he is chanting stanzas 3 to 5 of Sigrdrifumál, a minor and strange part of the heroic half of the poetic Edda. The stanzas are invocations of the Norse gods and something that can maybe understood as a rune spell.
The runes appearing around his head are a simple futhark sequence in the younger futhark (i.e. the runic equivalent of writing abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, however with a little more significance than that would have for us)
It’s seldom that a degree in Old Norse studies actually comes in handy, so thanks for the opportunity.
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Sorry not everything weird and demented is actually art. Sometimes it’s actually crap.
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