Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :
1.“BROKEN MOTOR” by Soniconoclasm

BSA Special Feature: “BROKEN MOTOR” by Soniconoclasm

Today just one video that isn’t Street Art. But it is the street. And it is art.

For graffiti writers and Street Artists who traverse the streets and blocks and empty lots and tunnels at night, you see a side of the city that is hidden, imperfect, and often rather rough.

Whether its catching a quick tag or spraying out a 3-day installation on the Houston Street wall, you keep running into people. In the case of Houston street it is an endless stream, sometimes a river, of thousands of people during the course of the day and night.

Soniconoclasm by Sebastian Purfürst / Lem Studios. Photo stills from the video.

We’ve even stayed up with artists painting through the night on Houston and seen the sun coming up again on the pavement, long stretches of roaring trucks and cars and thumping stereos and screeching brakes and police sirens accompanying giggling bridle showers, pumped up loudmouthed bros, sarcastic leathered rockers, preppie helicopter moms, khakied dads, tired sanitation workers, drugged dreamers, earnest art-school students, lonely ladies in short skirts, head-down dishwashers, bored suburban teens looking for any kind of adventure, greasy mechanics, bug-eyed investment bankers, smile-gleaming media wiseguys, power-ponytailed sports joggers, washed out addicts, bearded ladies, muscled jocks, winsome winners, losing lotharios. Everyone owns the city and everyone is owned by it.

In Berlin recently we met a photographer/media artist/musician who showed us a music video he just made of regular people whom you might meet on the city streets at night. This spring he asked more than 25 of them to recite phrases and “cut-up of army radio slang phrases” and by splicing them together with his band mate’s recitation of the lyrics synched to their lips, the rawness and rage and disconnected connectedness of people whom you can meet on the street rang true. “

Soniconoclasm by Sebastian Purfürst / Lem Studios. Photo still from the video.

This unvarnished quality bypasses the styled self-awareness of a lot of commercial media, and the anger actually comes across as fear. Perhaps you’ll think its too dark in demeanor – but then suddenly the melding together of the faces into one common entity makes it magic, even transcendent – revealing a simple sameness of everyone.

“This suspenseful individuality of the people is almost completely dissolved in the chorus,” says Sebastian Purfürst of his video with bandmate Markus F.C.Buhl.

Together they are called SONICONOCLASM.