Hasta La Ideas

This writer is a big fan of the music video. If it’s done well, you’ll have something like the best of both worlds between a great short film and a song you really dig in this perfect, compressed package. But what happens when you take a video out of its normal confines of computer monitors or, more rare these days, a television screen? Director Saam Farahmand was tasked with making a music video for the up and coming band The xx. But instead of shooting, editing, and releasing, he and the band decided to make something of an event out of it by creating an interactive exhibition now running in London’s Vinyl Factory space. You wander around a big room with three cubes, on which footage of the musicians appear as projections, accompanied by connected, ever-changing lighting. It sounds great as a one-off, interesting project, but Farahmand seems to think this is the future of the medium:

“It is in essence a physical music video, a looping shrine to the album that you cannot compress, send or turn off. We have to understand that these pop-up ‘rooms’ and ‘spaces’ should and will become as commonplace as music videos, bridging the gap until we have the technology to ‘stream’ a 3D experience through our home computer as if it was a YouTube clip. The xx are the perfect ambassadors for the medium. Their music is mesmerizing, and deeply physically affecting.”

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