Book Series by Lisa Perrott
New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media Book Series (Bloomsbury)
Carol Vernallis, Lisa Perrott and I are excited to announce our series with Bloomsbury - New Appr... more Carol Vernallis, Lisa Perrott and I are excited to announce our series with Bloomsbury - New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media. We're delighted to consider submissions for collected volumes and/or manuscripts. Here's our call:
Bloomsbury’s New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media is a series of research monographs dedicated to changing our understandings of sound, image, and their relations across media. Today’s media are shaped by digital technologies, new modes of production and consumption, varied platforms, genre blendings, and globalized economic networks. These media demand new theoretical and aesthetic responses. This series seeks surprising, interdisciplinary work that explores the intersections between popular, mainstream, avant-garde, classical and post-classical forms of audiovisual media. Approaches from the disciplines of dance, neuroscience, and philosophy, to name but a few, are welcome. Underexamined historical topics and non-western socioeconomic and technological contexts may help us understand our present moment, and we encourage these proposals as well.
Possible topics include approaches to practice (authorial and collaborative innovations, intermedia, transmedia and remediation); interdisciplinary explorations of new forms, genres and aesthetics; and historical and contextual studies of artists, composers, and performers. Fast-breaking topics, like music and big data, augmented reality, the cyborg, and AI are also encouraged. We hope our commitments to innovative historical, contemporary, and future-oriented work will encourage greater responsiveness to our present moment.
Transmedia
Digital media and the music industry
Convergence culture and the new audiovisual turn
Expanded music video and participatory culture
YouTube and online music platforms
Live performance and new-media culture
Virtual and augmented realities
Intermedia
Advertising
Post-classical theatre and dance
Laptop art
Postclassical film
Gaming
Fans as creators
Cultural re-working, appropriation and transformative creative works
New indigenous approaches to Sound, Music and Media
Pre-cinematic audiovisual technologies
Audiovisual activism
Sound, music and media as agents of cultural and political change
Please send proposals to [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected].
Books by Lisa Perrott
David Bowie and the Art of Music Video, 2023
The first in-depth study of David Bowie's music videos across a sustained period takes on interwe... more The first in-depth study of David Bowie's music videos across a sustained period takes on interweaving storyworlds of an iconic career. Remarkable for their capacity to conjure elaborate imagery, Bowie's videos provide fascinating exemplars of the artistry and remediation of music video. When their construction is examined across several years, they appear as time-travelling vessels, transporting kooky characters and strange story-world components across time and space.
By charting Bowie's creative and collaborative process across five distinct phases, David Bowie and the Art of Music Video shows how he played a vital role in establishing music video as an artform. Filling a gap in the existing literature, this book shines a light on the significant contributions of directors such as Mick Rock, Stanley Dorfman and David Mallet, each of whom taught Bowie much about how to use the form. By examining Bowie's collaborative process, his use of surrealist strategies and his integration of avant-garde art with popular music and media, the book provides a history of music video in relation to the broader fields of audiovisual media, visual music and art.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/david-bowie-and-the-art-of-music-video-9781501335150/
David Bowie and Transmedia Stardom, 2019
Addressing the interart, intertextual, and intermedial dimensions of David Bowie's sonic and visu... more Addressing the interart, intertextual, and intermedial dimensions of David Bowie's sonic and visual legacy, this book considers more than five decades of a career invested with a star's luminosity that shines well beyond the remit of pop music. The book approaches the idea of the star David Bowie as a medium in transit, undergoing constant movement and change. Within the context of celebrity studies, the concept of stardom provides an appropriate frame for an examination of Bowie's transmedial activity, especially given his ongoing iconic signification within the celestial realm. While Bowie has traversed many mediums, he has also been described as a medium, which is consistent with the way he has described himself. With contributions from a wide range of disciplinary areas and countries, each chapter brings a fresh perspective on the concept of stardom and the conceptual significance of the terms 'mediation' and 'navigation' as they relate to Bowie and his career. Containing a multitude of different approaches to the stardom and mediation of David Bowie, this book will be of interest to those studying celebrity, audio and visual legacy, and the relationships between different forms of media. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Celebrity Studies.
Bloomsbury, 2019
Transmedia Directors focuses on artist-practitioners who work across media, platforms and discipl... more Transmedia Directors focuses on artist-practitioners who work across media, platforms and disciplines, including film, television, music video, commercials and the internet. Working in the age of media convergence, today's em/impresarios project a distinctive style that points toward a new contemporary aesthetics. The media they engage with enrich their practices – through film and television (with its potential for world-building and sense of the past and future), music video (with its audiovisual aesthetics and rhythm), commercials (with their ability to project a message quickly) and the internet (with its refreshed concepts of audience and participation), to larger forms like restaurants and amusement parks (with their materiality alongside today's digital aesthetics). These directors encourage us to reassess concepts of authorship, assemblage, transmedia, audiovisual aesthetics and world-building.
Providing a vital resource for scholars and practitioners, this collection weaves together insights about artist-practitioners' collaborative processes as well as strategies for composition, representation, subversion and resistance.
Book Chapters by Lisa Perrott
Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry, and New Audiovisual Aesthetics, edited by Holly Rogers, Lisa Perrott and Carol Vernallis, 2019
Within the broad historical context in which transmedia has been practiced and studied, David Bow... more Within the broad historical context in which transmedia has been practiced and studied, David Bowie and Floria Sigismondi are instructive for their transformative approaches toward creating art across media, and for their alchemical process. As a collaborative team, their process is driven by an engagement with surrealist strategies of estrangement and analogical composition and a propensity for play. Their distinctive signature styles traverse mediums, space and time; in ways that move through and beyond narrative. Through an analysis of selected music videos, this chapter examines the transmediality of Bowie and Sigismondi’s oeuvres. By firstly exploring Bowie’s conception of himself as a medium, along with his persistent threads of ‘loose continuity’ across media and time, the author then examines the intersection of Bowie’s transmedial process with Sigismondi’s treatment of time as a medium. Drawing on the tenets of surrealism, along with the concepts of dialogic world-building, hauntology and ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, the author proposes that for artists such as Bowie and Sigismondi, ‘transmedia surrealism’ may provide a more appropriate conceptual lens than the currently popular lens of transmedia storytelling.
The Animated Music Videos of Radiohead, Chris Hopewell, and Gastón Viñas: Fan Participation, Collaborative Authorship, and Dialogic Worldbuilding. Chapter 3 of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis, edited by Lori Burns and Stan Hawkins., 2019
The animated music videos of Radiohead, Chris Hopewell and Gastón Viñas are entwined by intertext... more The animated music videos of Radiohead, Chris Hopewell and Gastón Viñas are entwined by intertextual threads that refer to each other in a reciprocal and generative way. As a graphic artist and applied fan of the band Radiohead, Viñas has borrowed extensively from Radiohead's music videos and associated world components in order to build new storyworlds in which his own music videos and artwork live in constant dialogue with their intertextual counterparts. Through an analysis of music videos created by Viñas, Radiohead and Hopewell, this chapter draws on the concepts of intertextuality and dialogism to argue that fan-made music video can play a significant role within a broader process of what is termed 'dialogic world-building'. This 'world-building' process gradually becomes apparent across the chapter, as a complex web of woven threads emerges from interconnected analyses of music videos, thereby demonstrating that a transmedial and transauthorial approach can enable a holistic impression of the establishment, appropriation and regeneration of 'storyworlds'. This chapter appears in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis, edited by Lori Burns and Stan Hawkins (2019).
Zig Zag: Reanimating Len Lye as Improvised Theatrical Performance and Immersive Visual Music, 2013
This chapter appears in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics edited by John Richards... more This chapter appears in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (2013).
Animators and visual music artists have long experimented with technological devices to explore the image–sound relationship, often innovating new ways of composing motion in time and space. For Len Lye this involved pioneering methods of animation and exploring the material qualities of organic materials such as film and metal, creating a substantial body of handmade animations that continue to affect audiences and inspire contemporary practitioners. Lye’s work provided the inspiration and raw materials for the development of Zig Zag, an homage to Lye, which integrated traditional musical instruments with digital media, remixed and projected visual imagery, and improvised theatrical performance. This complex process of remediation is discussed in relation to the extracinematic animation of both Lye’s sculptures and the theatrical performances. Extending the term “animation” is fundamental to understanding the way Zig Zag is a reanimation of the latent material life force embodied in Lye’s resting sculptures.
EDITED SPECIAL JOURNAL ISSUE by Lisa Perrott
Celebrity Studies, 2019
Despite the death of David Jones, David Bowie continues to shine with a distinctive luminosity an... more Despite the death of David Jones, David Bowie continues to shine with a distinctive luminosity and navigational function. He shines in absence and in repetition in various venues, as on a wall in Turnpike Lane. Our approach to this special issue of Celebrity Studies is framed by the idea that a social, cultural, ideological and semiotic understanding of stardom is entirely fitting for an examination of David Bowie and his legacy. Building on previous research on Bowie’s star personae (Stevenson 2006, Cinque
and Redmond 2014, Cinque et al. 2015), this framework can be further inflected by considering the cosmological significance of stars in relation to Bowie. For instance, stars provide constellations of perpetual guiding points which enable enlightened communities to navigate pathways. Stars also have a spectral dimension, since they are luminous, but not always visible. Stars might seem static and omnipresent, but they are constantly transforming, changing appearance, ageing, living and dying. As Bowie has so aptly emphasised in his lyrics and interviews, there are many different types of stars (including his contentious statement that ‘Adolf Hitler was the first pop star’), and it was important that he set the record straight about which type of star he is: ‘… not a film star… not a pop star… not a marvel star… not a gang-star… I’m a star’s star… I’m a black star’.
JOURNAL ARTICLES by Lisa Perrott
'Accented Music Video: Animating Memories of Migration in 'Rocket Man'. In special journal issue of Music, Sound and the Moving Image, edited by Mathias Bonde Korsgaard and Tomáš Jirsa, 13(2), Autumn 2019, 2019
Since its release in 1972, Elton John’s and Bernie Taupin’s ‘Rocket Man’ has been treated to a va... more Since its release in 1972, Elton John’s and Bernie Taupin’s ‘Rocket Man’ has been treated to a variety of re-interpretations, covers, and performances. But an official music video for this song was not released until 2017. Having been selected as the winner of the music video competition The Cut, Majid Adin teamed up with Stephen McNally to direct an animated video that would become a distinctive visual accompaniment to John’s song, while also offering an evocative re-imagining of Adin’s story of migration during the 2015 refugees crisis. Distinctive for its unusual convergence of genres and its integration of analogue and digital media, this music video offers a rich example of dialogic authorship. Through a close analysis of the sonic, lyrical, and visual construction of ‘Rocket Man’, this article offers insights into the possibilities for the transformation of music video, specifically in relation to intermedial and artisanal responses to exile and diaspora, and the potential of animated music video to provoke a therapeutic engagement with memory.
Time is Out of Joint: the Transmedial Hauntology of David Bowie, 2019
ABSTRACT
David Bowie’s transformational engagement with stardom was
complexly entwined with his ... more ABSTRACT
David Bowie’s transformational engagement with stardom was
complexly entwined with his long and creative relationship with
hauntology. While referring us back in time, Bowie’s songs and
videos simultaneously haunt us about a lost future. Bowie
engaged with hauntology initially by mimicking the sonic, visual
and bodily gestures of many star performers. This developed into
synthesised mimicry, which involved fusing the traits of several
stars in order to create a coherent star persona. During the last
decade of his life, Bowie perplexed his audience by calling up his
own ‘ghost stars’, reconfiguring celebrity and expressing
a persistent sense of ‘future nostalgia’. In his last enigmatic gasp
before exiting Earth, Bowie invited his audience to undertake
a celebratory autopsy of his star status. His parting gifts were
prescient hauntings of the future, poignantly stitched together
with nods of tributary reference to artists he had borrowed from.
Drawing on the concept of hauntology, this article examines
a selection of musical and audiovisual outputs across five decades
of Bowie’s career, demonstrating how he stretched the possibilities
of hauntology as a conceptual tool and an artistic strategy,
and prepared the cultural bed for audience members and cultural
participants to engage with hauntological media.
'Intersecting David Bowie', special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 2017
Having consistently defied the boundaries of normalized gendered behaviour, David Bowie has becom... more Having consistently defied the boundaries of normalized gendered behaviour, David Bowie has become synonymous with iconoclastic acts of gender transgression. His celebrity status is marked by a restless drive for recreation , often in the form of ambiguously gendered personae. These personae do not simply originate from a need for constant transformation. Their lifespan is connected with a complex process of performativity in which Bowie plays a pivotal role in re-animating the gestural traits of several other performers. Through an analysis of the videos for Boys Keep Swinging (1979) and The Stars (Are Out Tonight) (2013), this article explores Bowie's role within the cycle of performativity. Complementing this analysis, the author's interviews with New Zealand Bowie-inspired performers provide further insights about their own performativity in relation to identity.
Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal, SAGE Publications., Jul 22, 2015
Auteur music video director Floria Sigismondi has a reputation for creating beautifully macabre i... more Auteur music video director Floria Sigismondi has a reputation for creating beautifully macabre imagery that has been described as surreal and uncanny. Less obvious is the way in which she uses animation and gesture to estrange the movement of performing bodies. While pixilation and stop motion animation are used together to invert the agency of humans and objects, Sigismondi’s use of gesture extends this manipulation of agency beyond technical processes. This dialectic of cinematic agency is discussed through an examination of three music videos directed by Sigismondi: End of the World(2004) for The Cure, Montauk Fling (2013) for Lawrence Rothman and The Stars (Are Out Tonight) (2013) for David Bowie. Considering these videos in relation to puppet animation, live-action film and the cultural and historical migration of gesture, the author argues that Sigismondi puppetises humans and animates gesture as a means of transgression.
The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal; 10(2), July 2015, by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. Copyright Lisa Perrott
Pages 119-140. doi:10.1177/1746847715593697
Beyoncé calls Lemonade a “visual album.” But while there’s been buzz about Beyoncé smashing up ca... more Beyoncé calls Lemonade a “visual album.” But while there’s been buzz about Beyoncé smashing up cars, and a lot of talk about the autobiographical themes of the lyrics, this 60-minute film’s music, words, and sound design haven’t been talked about in relation to its images. Lemonade’s unusual form—a long-play music video—gives it the capacity to draw connections between the personal pain of infidelity and America’s terrible history of racism. Twelve video clips are linked by brief passages comprised of spoken-word poetry, visual tableaux and sound collage. These interludes lean toward avant-garde aesthetics. One thing avant-garde aesthetics and music video share is the ideal of holding several vantage points in suspension. Critics like bell hooks and Adam Szetela have called the film "fantasy feminism" and “boutique activism of the left.” Careful attention to sound, image and lyrics helps us see them lemonade is anything but.
"Beyoncé’s Lemonade: She Dreams in Both Worlds"
Beyoncé calls Lemonade a “visual album.” But while there’s been buzz about Beyoncé smashing up ca... more Beyoncé calls Lemonade a “visual album.” But while there’s been buzz about Beyoncé smashing up cars, and a lot of talk about the autobiographical themes of the lyrics, this 60-minute film’s music, words, and sound design haven’t been talked about in relation to its images. Lemonade’s unusual form—a long-play music video—gives it the capacity to draw connections between the personal pain of infidelity and America’s terrible history of racism. Twelve video clips are linked by brief passages comprised of spoken-word poetry, visual tableaux and sound collage. These interludes lean toward avant-garde aesthetics. One thing avant-garde aesthetics and music video share is the ideal of holding several vantage points in suspension. Critics like bell hooks and Adam Szetela have called the film "fantasy feminism" and “boutique activism of the left.” Careful attention to sound, image and lyrics helps us see them lemonade is anything but.
Metro, Jan 1, 2010
... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10289/5289. Ci... more ... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10289/5289. Citation: Perrott, Lisa (2010). 'Call and Response: Taika Waititi's Boy', Metro, issue.166, pp. 48-53.
Rethinking the Documentary Audience: Reimagining the New Zealand Wars
Media International Australia, Incorporating …, Jan 1, 2002
Abstract: Narratives of war and history are central to the development of nationhood. Within the ... more Abstract: Narratives of war and history are central to the development of nationhood. Within the distinctive context of New Zealand decolonisation, The New Zealand Wars documentary series offers a revised version of a formative moment in New Zealand history. This paper draws ...
Book Reviews by Lisa Perrott
Future Nostalgia: Performing David Bowie by Shelton Waldrep (review in Cinema Journal) , 2018
Future Nostalgia: Performing David Bowie by Shelton Waldrep
(review)
Lisa Perrott
Cinema Journal,... more Future Nostalgia: Performing David Bowie by Shelton Waldrep
(review)
Lisa Perrott
Cinema Journal, Volume 57, Number 3, Spring 2018, pp. 183-187 (Review)
Published by University of Texas Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
Access provided by University of Waikato Library (23 May 2018 01:08 GMT)
https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2018.0043
https://muse.
CONFERENCE PAPERS by Lisa Perrott
Experimental Animation, Avant-gardism and the Subversion of Popular Music Video (paper presented by Lisa Perrott at 'Experimental Animation Symposium', held at AUT, May 4)., 2019
As defined by Paul Taberham (2019, 17-18), “the basic premises of experimental animation hark bac... more As defined by Paul Taberham (2019, 17-18), “the basic premises of experimental animation hark back to the early twentieth century avant-garde”. This form of animation “typically offers formal challenges to the spectator” akin to the aims of independent filmmaking and non-commercial artistry. For those who are unfamiliar with the broadest applications of experimental animation, popular music video may initially seem like an unlikely object for examining this form. However, recent studies into the origins and transformation of music video have cast light on the inspiration that some music video directors glean from the avant-garde as an antecedent to music video (Korsgaard, 2017; Perrott, 2015; Richardson, 2010). Such inspiration is manifest in the employment of avant-garde compositional strategies and experimental practices, and in the production of challenging new forms that traverse media and straddle disparate approaches to art and culture.
After first outlining the historical and cultural context in which animated music video has developed, this presentation focuses on music video’s incorporation of surrealist compositional strategies alongside experimental animation techniques such as pixilation, puppetisation and stop-motion animation. Drawing on analyses of music videos by Chris Hopewell, Michel Gondry, Floria Sigismondi, Stephen Johnson, the Brothers Quay and others, this presentation will show how surrealist strategies such as estrangement, concrete irrationality and analogical composition operate alongside experimental animation techniques, thus serving to subvert the normalcy and commercialism associated with popular music video.
The Transgressive Performativity of David Bowie: From Boys Keep Swinging to The Stars (Are Out Tonight).
David Bowie has become synonymous with iconoclastic acts of gender transgression. His celebrity s... more David Bowie has become synonymous with iconoclastic acts of gender transgression. His celebrity status is marked by a restless drive for re-creation, often in the form of ambiguously gendered personas. But these personas do not simply originate from an autonomous psyche in constant need of transformation. They are formed as part of a complex process of performativity in which Bowie plays a pivotal role in re-animating the gestural traits of several other performers. For Judith Butler, gender performativity involves an act of mimicry that she describes as “drag” – an ongoing process by which gender is performed, imitated and reperformed. For Bowie, the cycle of mimicry continues, with star performers, models and fans now engaging in ‘Bowie-drag’.
Bowie’s gender performativity is transgressive due to his fluid shifts between expressions of masculinity, androgyny and alterity, with the most ‘alien’ of these personas provoking ontological
ambiguity for the audience. This uncertainty about whether Bowie is man, woman, human, animal or alien, is accentuated by the ‘gestural uncanny’, an affective bodily experience provoked
by Bowie, in collaboration with his photographers and music video directors. After first examining how Bowie has established himself as a transgressive performer of gender, I explore these ideas in relation to an examination of the music video for ‘The Stars (Are Out Tonight)’, directed by Floria Sigismondi.
PhD Thesis by Lisa Perrott
The 1998 television broadcast of The New Zealand Wars documentary series was a significant public... more The 1998 television broadcast of The New Zealand Wars documentary series was a significant public event, which had a major impact on a broad range of communities and individuals in Aotearoa New Zealand. This popular television history engaged with issues of historical veracity, race, culture and nationhood and challenged previously dominant discourses associated with these concepts. In doing so, it provoked heated debate, and a re-imagining of 'nation', and also opened up spaces for alternative ways of engaging with historical narrative. Informed by post-colonialism, cultural studies and cultural memory, this thesis explores the discursive and affective role of The New Zealand Wars, as it has operated within the turbulent climate of 1990s New Zealand cultural relations. This catalytic function is described in this thesis as a phenomenon of a television series shaped by, whilst also intervening in, processes of cultural colonisation and decolonisation. While both of these processes involve the transmission of discourse via cultural forms, the act of cultural decolonisation requires, in addition, the convergence of a number of agents (people and communities, discursive and memory resources) and circumstances, within particular contextual conditions. Such a convergence provided the conditions for the discursive synthesis, which shaped the production, construction and reception of this series. The role of audio-visual media (and specifically television documentary) in transmitting cultural memory is significant as it enables the flow of memory through channels or forms (such as visual, oral and aural traditions) that can bring about new perspectives and critical reflections upon colonial discourse and dominant concepts of nation and culture. In addition to these social and intellectual processes of audience engagement, this thesis argues that experiential and affective dimensions of cultural memory can (in these specific circumstances) open up radical spaces, offering the potential for generating awareness and sparking political action. These issues are explored through a tripartite analysis of the production context, construction and reception of The New Zealand Wars series. The integration of these three phases of analysis has generated a number of insights into the potential of audio-visual forms, including their producers and audiences, to participate in the negotiation of, and resistance to, colonial discourse. Such insights serve to challenge taken-for-granted constructions of nation and history, and suggest the increasing relevance of alternative concepts such as community-building and cultural memory. Ultimately, this thesis argues that television documentary can serve as a prime site for the articulation of these concepts. The New Zealand Wars serves as a case study, which demonstrates both the potential of this site, and the significance of the social-historical and cultural context in framing this series.
Uploads
Book Series by Lisa Perrott
Bloomsbury’s New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media is a series of research monographs dedicated to changing our understandings of sound, image, and their relations across media. Today’s media are shaped by digital technologies, new modes of production and consumption, varied platforms, genre blendings, and globalized economic networks. These media demand new theoretical and aesthetic responses. This series seeks surprising, interdisciplinary work that explores the intersections between popular, mainstream, avant-garde, classical and post-classical forms of audiovisual media. Approaches from the disciplines of dance, neuroscience, and philosophy, to name but a few, are welcome. Underexamined historical topics and non-western socioeconomic and technological contexts may help us understand our present moment, and we encourage these proposals as well.
Possible topics include approaches to practice (authorial and collaborative innovations, intermedia, transmedia and remediation); interdisciplinary explorations of new forms, genres and aesthetics; and historical and contextual studies of artists, composers, and performers. Fast-breaking topics, like music and big data, augmented reality, the cyborg, and AI are also encouraged. We hope our commitments to innovative historical, contemporary, and future-oriented work will encourage greater responsiveness to our present moment.
Transmedia
Digital media and the music industry
Convergence culture and the new audiovisual turn
Expanded music video and participatory culture
YouTube and online music platforms
Live performance and new-media culture
Virtual and augmented realities
Intermedia
Advertising
Post-classical theatre and dance
Laptop art
Postclassical film
Gaming
Fans as creators
Cultural re-working, appropriation and transformative creative works
New indigenous approaches to Sound, Music and Media
Pre-cinematic audiovisual technologies
Audiovisual activism
Sound, music and media as agents of cultural and political change
Please send proposals to [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected].
Books by Lisa Perrott
By charting Bowie's creative and collaborative process across five distinct phases, David Bowie and the Art of Music Video shows how he played a vital role in establishing music video as an artform. Filling a gap in the existing literature, this book shines a light on the significant contributions of directors such as Mick Rock, Stanley Dorfman and David Mallet, each of whom taught Bowie much about how to use the form. By examining Bowie's collaborative process, his use of surrealist strategies and his integration of avant-garde art with popular music and media, the book provides a history of music video in relation to the broader fields of audiovisual media, visual music and art.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/david-bowie-and-the-art-of-music-video-9781501335150/
Providing a vital resource for scholars and practitioners, this collection weaves together insights about artist-practitioners' collaborative processes as well as strategies for composition, representation, subversion and resistance.
Book Chapters by Lisa Perrott
Animators and visual music artists have long experimented with technological devices to explore the image–sound relationship, often innovating new ways of composing motion in time and space. For Len Lye this involved pioneering methods of animation and exploring the material qualities of organic materials such as film and metal, creating a substantial body of handmade animations that continue to affect audiences and inspire contemporary practitioners. Lye’s work provided the inspiration and raw materials for the development of Zig Zag, an homage to Lye, which integrated traditional musical instruments with digital media, remixed and projected visual imagery, and improvised theatrical performance. This complex process of remediation is discussed in relation to the extracinematic animation of both Lye’s sculptures and the theatrical performances. Extending the term “animation” is fundamental to understanding the way Zig Zag is a reanimation of the latent material life force embodied in Lye’s resting sculptures.
EDITED SPECIAL JOURNAL ISSUE by Lisa Perrott
and Redmond 2014, Cinque et al. 2015), this framework can be further inflected by considering the cosmological significance of stars in relation to Bowie. For instance, stars provide constellations of perpetual guiding points which enable enlightened communities to navigate pathways. Stars also have a spectral dimension, since they are luminous, but not always visible. Stars might seem static and omnipresent, but they are constantly transforming, changing appearance, ageing, living and dying. As Bowie has so aptly emphasised in his lyrics and interviews, there are many different types of stars (including his contentious statement that ‘Adolf Hitler was the first pop star’), and it was important that he set the record straight about which type of star he is: ‘… not a film star… not a pop star… not a marvel star… not a gang-star… I’m a star’s star… I’m a black star’.
JOURNAL ARTICLES by Lisa Perrott
David Bowie’s transformational engagement with stardom was
complexly entwined with his long and creative relationship with
hauntology. While referring us back in time, Bowie’s songs and
videos simultaneously haunt us about a lost future. Bowie
engaged with hauntology initially by mimicking the sonic, visual
and bodily gestures of many star performers. This developed into
synthesised mimicry, which involved fusing the traits of several
stars in order to create a coherent star persona. During the last
decade of his life, Bowie perplexed his audience by calling up his
own ‘ghost stars’, reconfiguring celebrity and expressing
a persistent sense of ‘future nostalgia’. In his last enigmatic gasp
before exiting Earth, Bowie invited his audience to undertake
a celebratory autopsy of his star status. His parting gifts were
prescient hauntings of the future, poignantly stitched together
with nods of tributary reference to artists he had borrowed from.
Drawing on the concept of hauntology, this article examines
a selection of musical and audiovisual outputs across five decades
of Bowie’s career, demonstrating how he stretched the possibilities
of hauntology as a conceptual tool and an artistic strategy,
and prepared the cultural bed for audience members and cultural
participants to engage with hauntological media.
The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal; 10(2), July 2015, by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. Copyright Lisa Perrott
Pages 119-140. doi:10.1177/1746847715593697
Book Reviews by Lisa Perrott
(review)
Lisa Perrott
Cinema Journal, Volume 57, Number 3, Spring 2018, pp. 183-187 (Review)
Published by University of Texas Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
Access provided by University of Waikato Library (23 May 2018 01:08 GMT)
https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2018.0043
https://muse.
CONFERENCE PAPERS by Lisa Perrott
After first outlining the historical and cultural context in which animated music video has developed, this presentation focuses on music video’s incorporation of surrealist compositional strategies alongside experimental animation techniques such as pixilation, puppetisation and stop-motion animation. Drawing on analyses of music videos by Chris Hopewell, Michel Gondry, Floria Sigismondi, Stephen Johnson, the Brothers Quay and others, this presentation will show how surrealist strategies such as estrangement, concrete irrationality and analogical composition operate alongside experimental animation techniques, thus serving to subvert the normalcy and commercialism associated with popular music video.
Bowie’s gender performativity is transgressive due to his fluid shifts between expressions of masculinity, androgyny and alterity, with the most ‘alien’ of these personas provoking ontological
ambiguity for the audience. This uncertainty about whether Bowie is man, woman, human, animal or alien, is accentuated by the ‘gestural uncanny’, an affective bodily experience provoked
by Bowie, in collaboration with his photographers and music video directors. After first examining how Bowie has established himself as a transgressive performer of gender, I explore these ideas in relation to an examination of the music video for ‘The Stars (Are Out Tonight)’, directed by Floria Sigismondi.
PhD Thesis by Lisa Perrott