Following from previous animation work, with reference to Gerard Byrne's "1984 And Beyond" video work at the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and in a similar vein to Candice Breitz's Re-animations, I began reconstructing a narrative based around A-ha's 1986 music video Take On Me, in which the fictional realm of the iconic music video is conflated with quotes that the band members themselves have said in interviews, Morten's own philosophy, and references to Baudrillard and Philip K Dick.
Recent images of the band are being redrawn in the same style of drawing as Michael Patterson's animation, although they are not rotoscoped in the same way. Rotoscoped animation is a technique of drawing over live film footage, considered by many - including the artist Luca Buvoli who used the technique in his video "Velocity Zero - Aphasia" - as cheating, despite being used to spectacular effect in the examples I have referred to. So the drawings, these re-animations exist now, in 2007, therefore changing the temporal dynamic of what is perceived by many as an iconic 1980s music video. This is also in context with band member Morten Harket's own existential philosophy: "There is no Birth, Life, Death - Existence, it's all the same thing. There is only Now"
scene in Waking Life in which Richard Linklater appears and describes Philip K. Dick's theory
Jeff Ayeroff, Steve Barron, and Michael Patterson showing how the Take On Me video was created.
Bunty dumped Morten shortly afterwards for Billy Idol (A-ha.com) This kind of information will be added retrospectively to images from the video.
Live images of A-ha appeared as a new version of the Take On Me video during their most recent gig in Kiel, Germany, September 2007
Merely by drawing an image from the Take On Me video now, in my studio, this alters the whole context of the images.
The quote is from a recent interview with Morten Harket in Jan Omdahl's The Swing Of Things: Twenty Years With A-ha, 2004
Excerpts from Waking Life
Blackbird's illustration work: http://blackbirds-birdhouse.blogspot.com/
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