Utopia or Dystopia?
Posted by ben on 23 Feb 2007 at 02:09 pm | Tagged as: music, video/film
I’m honestly not sure if this Kraftwerk video presents a chilling vision of the future, or a glorious dream that one day all men will wear blinking ties. Maybe that’s what makes it so brilliant, a perfect Friday afternoon treat.
damn me for being deaf on the internet.
[...] Posted by ben on 01 Mar 2007 at 11:01 am | Tagged as: music, essays Following up on the Kraftwerk video I posted last week, I thought y’all might like a little background on what these guys were trying to accomplish. I find it interesting that critical writing about music most often emphasizes the formal and emotional aspects of the work, and generally disregards the philosophical implications. Visual art criticism, on the other hand, often focuses on the conceptual aspects of the work to the point that the discussion revolves around ideas that are tangential to the actual pieces. In any case, here’s an excerpt from a Lester Bangs interview with Kraftwerk from 1975 which gets to the heart of the Kraftwerk philosophy (read the whole thing on the Creem site): They referred to their studio as their “laboratory,” and I wondered aloud if they didn’t encounter certain dangers in their experiments. What’s to stop the machines, I asked, from eventually taking over, or at least putting them out of work? “It’s like a car,” explained Florian. “You have the control, but it’s your decision how much you want to control it. If you let the wheel go, the car will drive somewhere, maybe off the road. We have done electronic accidents. And it is also possible to damage your mind. But this is the risk one takes. We have power. It just depends on what you do with it.” [...]