A similar evolution has already occurred in music. The first electronic keyboards
sought to re-create a piano’s acoustic properties by amassing sets of rules about the
physics of keys, hammers, and strings. The end result sounded like a synthesizer.
Now DJs and musicians sample and morph the recorded sounds of actual instru-
ments.
Instead of synthesizing the world, Gaeta cloned it.Manovich makes a similar point about the shift from simulation to sampling-
based technologies, drawing heavily on the visual effects designer ofThe Ma-
trixtrilogy, John Gaeta, who is also discussed in Silberman’s article (above).
Later cases likeThe Curious Case of Benjamin Button(David Fincher,)
andAvatar(James Cameron), as well as ongoing aspirations towards
photographic realism in computer games by means of capture and synthesizing
technologies, only reinforce this development.Silberman’s parallel to music
production, where“DJs and musicians sample and morph the recorded sounds
of actual instruments,”also captures well the generalized post-production
mode that permeates cultural production at present, where the interest in muta-
ble temporalities is merely one element.
Valery was right in expecting innovations to transform the techniques of the
arts, and thereby affect artistic invention even to the brink of changing our very
notion of art. These changes are still being discussed, perhaps now most inten-
sely in relation to the new status of photography in the art world and the term
post-medium condition.Likewise, it seems increasingly necessary to reflect on
the ways in which current technological changes affect cultural production and
perhaps also come to alter our notion of art. Today’s technological changes are
related to the computer with its procedural receipts offered by ever more finely
tuned algorithms, along with increasingly developed storage, mixing and mod-
ification technologies. Thus, efforts to conceptualize current changes to cultural
production often revolve around notions like archive, algorithm and post-pro-
duction.
This chapter has explored a particular aspect of the aesthetics of post-produc-
tion, the mutable temporality, which seems to become increasingly prevalent in
contemporary music video, but is in no way limited to this format. When the
music video in particular has been an arena where various forms of mutable
temporality has been probed, it has at least two explanations. Music itself being
our most important temporal art form, is therefore also an arena for the explora-
tions of various forms of emotional temporalities. Such temporal experiences
are not merely articulated in the music itself, but also in the image streams and
pulses accompanying them in music videos. Another explanation may be found
closer to the relationship between technology itself and the audiovisual lan-
guage it supports. Music video has long been a playground for new technolo-
Mutable Temporality In and Beyond the Music Video 179