A + B = what?
Have you ever been walking somewhere, listening to music, and the music totally fit with your mood and the surroundings? Or perhaps the music didn’t fit the situation at all, but the result was unique anyways. Try it sometime: listen to something you don’t normally listen to and go for a walk. Try to imagine your experience as a movie, and the music is the soundtrack. Sometimes the results are quite interesting, and sometimes they’re quite a bit more than a mere sum of the parts.
This is something the surrealists must have understood well. The juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated objects or ideas creates a rather unique experience. Object A evokes one set of associations and feelings. Object B evokes another set of associations and feelings. When they are combined in a dramatic fashion, the overall feeling one gets can be quite disorienting, taking us places we may not have been able to guess from looking at each object individually.
So where am I going with this? Well, these sorts of interactions between disparate objects, media, etc are happening around us all the time. Its in our advertising, it’s in all of our art, its in the design of consumer items, it’s everywhere! And it’s all calculated to varying degrees to elicit a certain response from people. It’s rather fascinating once you start to really notice it, and once you do, the creative possibilities are nearly endless. Check out the video below and see what you think. The user who posted this writes:
“This channel also includes a developing series of mi[X]Videos: works
that occur by chance through the juxtaposition of found video and
random selections of avant-garde and traditional music repertoire from
my collection. There is no intentionality behind these videos, other
than to abstract and relieve the found images of their inherent
associations and meaning. Cinema convention applies music for the
manipulation of mood. These are anti-soundtracks; mood results solely
from simultaneity.”
