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Kraftwerk P-b-M is my early experiment in digital media conversion. It explores the abstract formal qualities and emphasizes the synæsthetic effects of the generative process.[1]

The slightly modified samples from Kraftwerk songs (Taschenrechner, Autobahn, Radio Aktivität, The Man-Machine, Computer Welt 2, Die Robotter, Music Non-Stop and Pocket Calculator) were processed in custom made software. It reproduced sound of each sample as a continuous image stream, and reproduced the image streams thus created back into continuous audio samples. Although the software copied raw data from one file container and created the new file type simply by adding the appropriate header/footer attributes, with no psycho-acoustic or psycho-visual transformations, the original structure and dynamics of the source material were preserved.

The final work is presented as an installation comprising a large scale video projection and sound. It premiered at my solo exhibition in Dom omladine Gallery in Belgrade 1998, and after that it was screened internationally at various venues and festivals.

Taking the image streams and audio from this version, I made Kraftwerk P-b-M Remix in 2006, which was presented at Synthetic Cinema exhibition within Share Conference in Belgrade from 7 to 9 April 2011.

Bibliography

Branislav Dimitrijević, An Intermittent History: A Brief Survey of Video Art in Serbia, 1999.

Miodrag Šuvaković, Serbian Art in the 20th Century: Radical Art Practices, 2010.

  1.  Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound, or voice [...] and any medium can be translated into any other. [...] Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay, storage, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping – a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium.

    Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Brinkmann & Bose, Berlin, 1986 / Stanford University Press, 1999, str. 1-2.