The Rift by MK_ultra – a film by Enkidu rankX – Find out more about the music / album here >>

The Rift

„The Rift“ is about the growing gap or rift within the socio-economic realm of our societies. As the riches of the world have been redistributed unevenly, I have the strong feeling there is a a storm coming (to cite a pop movie). But will the wind blow in the right direction; that is the question that I do ask myself. And where does the wind blow…

eavesdropping

In 2006/2007 I did the clip „eavesdropping“. What now is a certainty (in the wake of the NSA scandal and Edward Snowdons leaks) I already had a strong feeling that something smelled fishy, something very wrong in the state of Deutschland (and the world in general). Though never a real secret, I was surprised how right I had been with my intuition. It is interesting in that context, that the film evolves around the area, where later on the NSA spying post was to be discovered.

Seagulls on a beach of litter

This movie is as personal as it gets. A big part of my family comes from a landscape in northern France called La Hague. This region of Normandy / Cotentin is sadly known for its nuclear facilities, that is to say a nuclear power plant, a nuclear retreatment facility and a nuclear submarine facility / construction site – all of this within a 30km radius. I feel closely linked to this beautiful landscape and utterly devastated at the destruction that comes with these facilities. An thus, this very personal clip of mine can be viewed as a metaphor for the global problem of nuclear energy and its waste issues.

Sam Beats

„Sam Beats“ deals with the pixilation and degradation of the female depiction within our main stream and social media. It is based on a Japanese porno that was glitched and therefore pixilated. I used this grid of pixels as a basis for a sound-reactive block of voxels that are later retextured with a collection of important female figures of history, art, science or my personal life.

my real step (an island of life in a sea of death)

This is the documentation of a real time audio-visual installation I did back in 2009 in a Berlin gallery. I used my face, aged it and projected it again on a blank sculpture of a face. By use of projection mapping done in PureData [pd] I then projected the process of ageing myself (to let’s say 80) in a time span of ca. 8 minutes (here speeded up to ca. 4min). As in real life, the process of ageing way beyond the threshold of perception so you could only notice the difference in age by averting your eyes and coming back again later. The music was played over headphones. “Island” is a meditation on the human condition, its impermanence and finally death.

1965 Perversion

This clip is not to be take to seriously. Yet it deals with a very serious issue: that of the idea of cleanness. There is an obsession for hygiene in modernity and post modernity. This, to my mind, has a lot to do with our growing fear and negation of death and sexuality. We fear both, clean and sport and eat healthy us away from the fist one and idolize the second one to an unreachable height we then abandon to reach altogether. This (very protestant) sublimation of both urges (the Freudian death and sex drive or instinct) we have arrived to a very fearful and isolationist world of clean single units.

X

When I first heard the „Message to the Grass Roots“ by Malcolm X (November 10, 1963, in King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan) I had to do something with it. It was so brilliant, so impressive and so up to date; I would still make me rise from my seat today. Though the issues have changed just a bit in our time, the essential argument is a 100% valid: „Freedom is a state of mind“. And as today we are enslaved by big corporations and their abundance of unnecessary goods, we have to ask ourselves again: „Do we need to be enslaved by property and greed…“

Space Dusk

Space Dusk is simply about the beauty of the cosmos. It is also an homage to „The power of ten“ by Charles and Ray Eames. The music consist mostly of samples of space sounds, the pulsation of stars, the radio emissions of Saturn and Jupiter and the film was completely rendered in 3D. I have loved astronomy and space exploration since my childhood days and I am a bit saddened at the loss of public attention for it in the last 20 years or so.

The Rift -reprise-

As for „The Rift“, „-reprise-“ reprises the subject matter of the first song / clip but hints at future crashes i.e. the coming tensions in the Pacific with China, the US and so forth. It is my firm belief that there is much disturbance there to come and I honestly am not very optimistic at the future of our current civilization. But hey, that’s jut me 😉