Holger Lund
Make It Real and Get Dirty!
On the Development of
Post-digital Aesthetics in
Music Video
Holger Lund
Make It Real and Get Dirty!
On the Development of
Post-digital Aesthetics in
Music Video
2017/2015
Quote as
Holger Lund (2017). “Make It Real and Get Dirty! On the Development of Post-digital Aesthetics in Music Video,” in: Daniel Kulle, Cornelia Lund, Oliver Schmidt David Ziegenhagen (eds.): Post-digital Culture, www.post-digital-culture.org/hlund-eng
Abstract
Under the imperativist title “Make It Real and Get Dirty!” the analysis considers the development of several strategies of post-digital aesthetics in music video. A first look will be taken at examples for an interrelation between post-digitality and realness—the latter term here used to describe a material, tangible reality.
Then an attempt will be made to more closely define the semantic range of the post-digital, before finally the development of post-digital aesthetics in music video is followed from a historical viewpoint based on a choice of various characteristic videos.
Digitality forces entities to disassemble, since they have to be fed into binary digital code. The integrity of any entity is necessarily shattered to allow for digital processing and representation. How to respond to this process? Several aesthetic strategies have been developed within the post-digital like a) a return to analog synthesizers and a bric-a-brac aesthetic in both music and video, b) the simulation of analogicity by digital means, for example by digital simulations of analog synthesizers or bric-a-brac aesthetics, c) the creation of “handmade-digital” hybrids, and d) a phenomenon that could be labeled hyper-digitality. Here, digitality is exposed very openly and points to the inadequacies attached to the digital.
What is the result of these strategies? Often enough a paradox attempt to achieve an unfragmented, true and real analogicity through the means of digitality, which, of course, fragments truth and realness by default.
