Videos
Below is a selection of my video works from Vimeo and YouTube.
Ghost Town (Berlin)
This is a video which I shot and put together over a few days in the fall. The idea was to capture the ghostlike, somewhat unreal atmosphere of the city as the weather turns bad, or in the fully lit but empty streets at night. It's meant to be an upbeat video, 'though, taking its cue from the rhythm of the lights during a drive by night.
I made the music for the soundtrack for this video myself.
Liquid Light
Filmed in Umbria on 18 September, 2006, somewhere between the towns of Spoleto and Assisi. In the late afternoon sunlight, the towns, laid like a sparkling gold chain over the mountain range, glisten like they've done for centuries in uncountable Renaissance paintings. Liquid Light is about movement and time - time spent forward and backwards.
The video features a poem written specifically for it by Giuliano Fasoli.
The vocal track is by Ami Yamasaki and is used here under the Creative Commons license. It stems from the stop-rokkasho project initiated by Ryuichi Sakamoto to stop the nuclear reprocessing plant in Rokkasho, Japan.
Open the Gates
Featuring an unsuspecting Japanese tourist encountered in the dome in the town of Spoleto in Italy, this video incorporates a series of sequences shot on the island of Elba, in the region of Umbria and in Florence. It can be seen as something of a corollary piece to the previous video, Liquid Light, in that it is also about movement - but here, it is a less peaceful movement.
The music is the track Coro by Ryuichi Sakamoto, from his album Chasm.
The words are taken from the Doors' song Not to Touch the Earth, which is an excerpt from The Celebration Of The Lizard, a poem by Jim Morrison.
Station to Station (By Train Through Odisha)
I shot this video on the iPhone while taking a train ride from Puri, in the Indian state of Odisha, to Kolkata in West Bengal. I left Puri a day before the cyclone Hudhud struck the area, on one of the last trains out of there.
In Kolkata, I edited the movie in iMovie on the iPhone, often while stuck in a car in traffic. As soundtrack I used the track 'Longing' by the Indian band Indian Ocean.
Seven Harmonies (New York)
I shot this movie over a few very rainy Octobre days in New York. The lethargy that afflicted people in that miserable weather provided me with ample opportunities to observe and to film.
I used extracts of John Cage's 13 Harmonies as soundtrack, and the music heavily influenced the way I edited the video.
Walking Vienna
This video is a bit of a different walk through Vienna. Torsten did the camera work and I did the editing. The music is, appropriately, by the Austrian electronic duo Dzihan & Kamien.
The Wife of the Autumn Wind
This video is art of a series of short works which I called 'Palm of the Hand Pieces'. The intention was to create short (1-2 minutes long), self-contained, lyrical works.
For this video, I added animation using painting software called 'Painter', which can be used to digitally paint over the individual frames of a video.
The Roosters and the Dancing Girls
Despite appearances, this video was filmed in Berlin and not in Bangkok. I shot this footage when I came across a bizarre kind of photo shoot with Thai models and Thai business men on the steps of the Old Museum.
Part of the 'Palm of the Hand Pieces' collection.
In Shadows Play / Pilgrims
Two very short videos, both of them filmed in the Modern Art Museum in Munich.
Kool Kasai & Friends
A video I made of my friends Chris a.k.a Kool Kasai and Oliver a.k.a. QuasiMono. They are both street musicians: Chris does free style rapping in Berlin's subways, and Oliver plays the didgeridoo and drum around various subway stations. Here they have teamed up with Eleonora who sings and plays the quarto.