Oneohtrix Point Never & New Media Art

Daniel Lopatin, aka experimental musician Oneohtrix Point Never (OPN), will be arriving in the UK next month to premiere his original live soundtrack for Koji Morimoto’s Magnetic Rose at Jodrell Bank Observatory.

Forming part of our Watch the Skies! weekend, this new commission will augment the operatic sci-fi visuals of one of Japan’s most accomplished anime directors (Akira, Robot Carnival, Neo-Tokyo) with an electronic artist revered for composing highly conceptual soundscapes.

In-tandem with his music career, OPN has cultivated a number of prodigious projects with new media artists, working in collaboration to produce audio-visual installations, multimedia performances and video accompaniments to his tracks.

These partnerships are not only a lens through which you can understand his compositional ability,  but also his interest in melodic and visual manipulation.

John Michael Boling

Net Artist and Abandon Normal Devices veteran John Michael Boling (Art for George Lucas) collaborated with OPN last year, directing the music video for Boring Angel which appears on the acclaimed 2013 album R Plus Seven.

Utilising the emoji, an evolved variant of the emoticon, Boring Angel narrates a love story which tips swiftly into despair; presenting an audio-visual experience which deftly manipulates a playbook of universal human tragedy, ranging from the mundane agony of waiting for a phone call to the ultimate finality of death.

It’s a tearful watch, and Boling impressively weaves OPN’s transcendent, kaleidoscopic waves of sound into gripping emoji-theatre.

Nate Boyce

Nate Boyce is a sculptor and net artist. Over the past year he has developed live, improvised, visual projections for OPN’s performances and directed the music video for Still Life. Boyce also collaborated with OPN to produce multimedia events R Plus 6/Affect Index and Reliquary House at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).

Billed as a re-imagining of the canon of modernist sculpture, Reliquary House was an audio-visual amalgamation of Boyce’s skill as a manipulator of 3D rendering and OPN’s provocative sound design. The pair pulled historical objects from MOMA’s collections into a new context, re-inventing artworks in impossible computer generated landscapes which defied architectural realities.

Takeshi Murata

Glitch art pioneer Takeshi Murata‘s music video for OPN’s Problem Areas draws hyperrealistic images from his 2012 solo show “Synthesizers” to present an artificial still life which mocks the divide between digital and tangible worlds.

Described as ‘digital pop art’, Murata’s compositions feature stacks of glistening, dust free,VHS tapes arrayed in neon harmony with empty beer cans, scattered dollars and a substantial variety of eerily immaculate fruit.

Like OPN’s computer generated music Murata’s work is gloriously synthetic, and the uncanny perfection of his visuals is infused with an absurdity which only everyday mundanity can provoke.

Oneohtrix Point Never will be premiering his new live soundtrack for Magnetic Rose on Sat 04 Oct. The commission forms part of our Watch the Skies! programme and will be presented alongside an original AV show for the Lovell telescope from Soup Collective and an outdoor screening of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror show Alien.

Tickets are on sale now, more info on the event here.
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