When we think of music videos, most of us do not really think of art. And yet, this format was very fertile for experimental video artists, as it consists in providing a visual complement to music. Over the decades, it became a true art form, before recently losing momentum. Nevertheless, the 1990s and 2000s gifted us with some absolute masterpieces.

Chris Cunningham, a fan of Star Wars and underground electronic music, started out in the arts department of film studios, designing creatures and robots. He was so good that he got to work with Stanley Kubrick on A.I. During his time on that set, he directed his first music video for Autechre, delivering a terrifying and surreal vision alternating pulsating cuts of blurry, dark and apocalyptic environments, with distorted views of menacing robots. From the very start, he taps into the experimental and plays with our fears of technology.

One of his later and most ambitious works was produced in association with the synth maestro Aphex Twin, and is as magnetic as it is disturbing. Rubber Johnny took Cunningham six months to edit, and the result is an absolutely exhilarating video. It demonstrates a masterful sense of rhythm and a deranged creativity beyond bounds. Once again, the artist takes us into a nightmarish world with bizarre creatures and a rapidly changing pace. The sound and the image always go hand in hand, and Twin’s musical oddities are the perfect complement to Cunningham’s strange and distressing aesthetic. It is also extremely impressive how he manages to build a visual narrative that makes more sense to our sight than to our reason. The video seems to be in perfect harmony with the beats, and we truly have a visual enhancement of sound here.

In another very strange video, the artist plays with the format of advertisement when Sony asks him to produce a spot for Playstation. For this project, he creates a puzzling vision of a young woman whose features are digitally edited so that her face looks unreal. The ad actually aired, and created a buzz around the peculiarity of the scene. The girl is talking, and seems to be giving some kind of inspirational speech, striving for “mental wealth”. The true meaning of her words are bound to individual interpretation, but her face is something that is hard to forget…

Watch the Playstation ad here:

Watch the videos and find our more about Chris Cunningham here:

https://inverted-audio.com/visual/chris-cunningham-in-focus/