Jem Finer - offworld

"Offworld is the fifth track on Jem Finer's 2003 album, gtr, a collection of improvised recordings made with a guitar and a laptop running bespoke algorithmic systems, coded in SuperCollider. The video was made in 2005, again using algorithmic and aleatoric processes, which ingested and then reconfigured short movies relating to space exploration and the cosmos. And now here it is again, in a completely different universe . . . "

https://superrare.com/artwork/eth/0xe...

The experimentation engaged in by those traditional contemporary artists who explored the new media and new audience of crypto art bears parallels with the work of those early pioneers of contemporary music who were searching for new tools and new sounds at the birth of the three-minute pop song. Often not being digital natives, the limitations and possibilities of crypto art have been fascinating - and adding a musical element has only seemed to accentuate this.

Burt Bacharach used to call his three-minute compositions ‘miniature movies’ and with this inspiration, in late 2022 Blackbird Rook asked artists who also make music alongside their visual art practice, to produce one track for a compilation album of crypto art music videos - an album of contemporary artists and musicians negotiating the crypto art world - each artist as a blackbird, singing in the dead of night, throwing their creativity out into the digital void.

‘Singing in the Dead of Night’: Ian Parkin with Minor Works Depot; Geraldine Swayne with Faust; Emma Richardson; Jem Finer; Grant Foster with in a skull; Karl Bielik and Lark; James Scott Brooks interpreting the archive of Giacomo S Ruscelli; and Duncan McAfee.