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Alexander Pettai
Prelude of The Instant World
shots from the silent film “Metropolis” and generative sound (2017) – 1’54”

This work is an experiment, and the experiment comes from all sides. We will try to explain the way our perception of art works. When we watch a movie, we try to understand what did the author mean by making those shoots. When we listen to a piece of music, something from the past may come to our mind because of associations. But what the work of art consists of as itself, that is created by the author, and what is it made of – all of that will always be a great mystery of creation and inspiration.

This work is technically neither a result of a film director or videographer’s work, nor a musical composition, but is still totally new self- contained work. How has it been created? The picture you see contains the shots from the silent movie “Metropolis” made 90 years ago and the shots are all blended and mixed. The color correction is made on the shots so they might not be recognized, but the author underlines how important is the presence of those shots. This is because every piece of art bears the inherited memory of what has been made 90, 200, 1000 years ago. Also the music track has not been generated by the author but with help of a special program, which may actually translate the image of every shot into a piece of sound. All of that may seem like throwing stones into water or something like that but you may feel that this is a real piece of art both from the side of music and video art. It is worth mentioning that the name reminds us that everything in this world is connected with thin threads but people rarely speak about it.

Alexander Pettai was born in Estonia (1959) and lives in Moscow since 1977. He studied at the Moscow Art School (1982-86) and at SCAN (Interdisciplinary Expertise Centre for Computer Graphics, Computer Animation and Multimedia), Groningen, The Netherlands (1993-94). His works consist on paintings, drawings, computer graphics, and media art; they are in private collections in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Germany, Italy, Denmark, The Netherlands, and the U.S.