In 1998, while living in Tokyo, Tapio Snellman and Christian Grou produced the film called ‘seek.01’. The film is a search. It describes different atmospheres, velocities and scales in which a traveller, intermittently encouraged and desperate, is looking for a place he can rest and identify with. Sometimes frustrating one wishes to stop the search; but suddenly this exciting city can be enjoyable, or it seems as if one has already arrived... The city is endless, full, anonymous and perpetually repetitive. Faces are distant and impalpable in their seclusion. The only places in the city are those where streams of different movements come together just to be divided again and thus attracting, like magnets, people lights and sounds. The film is 23 minutes long.
seek.02
The contemporary city, seen as a global entity, is dissected in time and motion to abstractly reveal a universal experience. Footage filmed in two very different cities, London and Bombay is combined and juxtaposed, often ignoring or delibaretely obscuring the geographical source and concentrating on the spatial, temporal, as well as atmospheric quality, creating a new city of imagination.
The film explores subjective perceptions of global urbanity. It plays with the imagination and the preconceived expectations of the spectator. The exotic is confused with the familiar, the sound of the 'everyday' is combined with image of the 'unfamiliar' and the music of 'elsewhere' is cut to the visuals of 'nowhere specific'.
Footage of urban flows combine into an elaborate choreography of movement and sound. neutral paints complex disjunctive atmospheres using music as the carrying force. Spontaneous slowdowns of flows trigger heightened attention and selective perception of urban elements.
Correlations between the different cities are in part coincidental; common denominators of urban environments are being visually explored, contradicted and underlined.
The film approximately 30 minutes long.
Boards of Canada
DJ Cam
EPH
Khan
Lamb
LSO/abbado
Plaid
To Rococo Rot + D
Autopoieses
Asian Dub Foundation
Manitoba
Shambhu Mehta
Lagowski
seek.01
seek01
seek 01
seek.02
seek02
seek 02
SuperDeluxe
neutral
neutral.gs
www.neutral.gs
London
Bombay
Tokyo
Tapio Snellman
Christian Grou