An Intermittent History

Dejan Grba, Kraftwerk P-b-M, digital video, 1998.

With the emergence of digital editing and more widespread use of computer technology in creating video works, new possibilities have come into existence, which have been used, among others, by the Belgrade artist Dejan Grba. Although at first sight different in terms of form and content, Dejan Grba’s videos are focused on the issue of the seamless fusion of art and technology, deconstructing the traditionally opposed myths of the subjective individualism of art and the neutral objectivity of science or technology. In his piece Kraftwerk P-b-M, the tradition of the ‘experimental’ video is continued in a certain way, but it is deconstructed in the form of a digital video animation, or ‘digital synæsthesia’, by transforming sound into picture and picture into sound, as well as transforming this process into ‘discrete values of numbers’, in the same way as the history of techno culture is deconstructed in relation to the music of the group Kraftwerk. In the piece Dog Life Days (1996), he technically deals with a bodily motif, which in its conventional meaning spectre is extremely repulsive, i.e., it involves a lively computer animation of excrement. In this way, this video links two influential characteristics in the art of the nineties: new technologies and a ‘return’ of the psychically ‘repellent’ object.