Analog_Memorial / Karsten Pflum - Borg_Acid160bpm
2015 · 6m · UK
Directed by bob jaroc
Genres: documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
Brighton-based video artist Bob Jaroc compressed 580 hours of his personally recorded VHS tapes into five minutes, displaying twelve recordings simultaneously in a hypnotic grid set to Karsten Pflum's acid techno track — a self-portrait made entirely of accumulated television.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Twenty years of obsessively taping everything on television, now compressed into five minutes playing twelve channels at once. Jaroc calls it a self-portrait. He's right. This is what a human's media consumption looks like when you liquefy it and pour it back out.
580 hours of personal VHS compressed into five — Jaroc turns Bill Morrison's decay-poetics inside out and makes the quantitative gesture itself the self-portrait. The premise is the artwork, and it works.
Twelve channels of personal VHS compressed into five minutes set to acid techno — the math alone (580 hours in 300 seconds) is the artwork. A self-portrait of a person who recorded everything, now legible only as a hypnotic grid.