The experience of repetition as death | videos for Clarice Jensen | 2020

We are humbled and honored to work with extraordinary cellist and artistic director of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME), Clarice Jensen.⁣⁣ Her album, ‘The experience of repetition as death’ was released on FatCat’s pioneering 130701 imprint on April 3rd 2020. ⁣

The video concept for Clarice Jensen’s album The experience of repetition as death is an aesthetic extension of Testu Collective’s previous work Acetone Oceans (2019). This work is rooted in the exploration of special effects techniques used in 60s/70s sci-fi films such as Andrei Tarkovsky’s sentient ocean in Solaris, created by zooming into unfolding chemical reactions. 

We allow the chemical transformations to guide us into finding organic patterns. Although we are using identical chemical building blocks, there is never a similar structure reproduced. New formations emerge from the repetition of mixing the same solvents, pigments, and catalysts. 

Just as Clarice’s album asks us to take a deep listen into the glacial movement of her layers of cello, we are asking the viewer to take a pause in this visual emergence.