This project works with music videos, and, rather than letting them be appropriated by sociological and media studies discourses, puts them to use for an analysis that regards video clips as audiovisual figures of thought (tropes) and as a form of staged cultural philosophy. It shows the extent to which music videos have now become their own best critics in that they themselves immediately provide the most pointed commentaries on the situation in which they are used.
The "Heavy Rotation. The Cultural Logic of Pop Promos" project by Florian Keller Fink forms part of the lead project on "Art relationships", which explores the relationships between music, visual (and audiovisual) arts, literature and dance:
In 2002 a video director called Hype Williams published a small anthology of his music videos on DVD. In a segment where directors had largely remained in the background as anonymous suppliers of images, this represented a major new development in the market. Just one year later, the filmmakers Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze created the "Directors' Label", on which they initially published collections of their own music videos and then the works of other video producers, on DVD.
Do these publications of their own works merely represent an extension to the aura of stardom to include the filmmakers, or is there something more to this reawakening of the author from the spirit of music TV? If the above directors are claiming authorship rights for their videos, this would at the very least indicate that the music video genre is entering a new phase in its history. The "Heavy Rotation" project starts from this current phase of the music video with its emphasis on film authorship, and in its selection of videos focuses mainly on the work of those directors who have created the authorship discourse for the music video genre.
The spotlight is on the question of the extent to which these recent, retrospectively "authored" videos, in particular, may constitute a clear manifestation of a logic that could be called the cultural logic of late capitalism. After all, it would be difficult to find any other cultural genre in which art and capital are more closely intertwined than in the music video, where a capitalistic cultural industry with totalitarian traits meets the proverbial "artistic freedom" of the video directors. How far can this apparent contradiction be seen as a perfect fit with the economy of an impossible subversion, of which the musical video has always been an integral part?
Part of the focus of this project is to work with music videos, and rather than letting them be appropriated by sociological and media studies discourses, to put them to use for an analysis that regards video clips as audiovisual figures of thought (tropes) and as a form of staged cultural philosophy. It shows the extent to which music videos have now become their own best critics, by themselves immediately providing the most pointed commentaries on the situation in which they are used.