Making Friends (With Hell) (2022)
The video for André Baum’s song Making Friends (With Hell) was conceptualized and directed by André Baum and shot by Lightwriter. The video follows a humorous yet critical process of making friends with one’s own shadow, inner turmoil, depicting a literal meeting of two sides of one person. These two parts, while initially separate, then meet, debate, and dance with each other in an inner space represented by a raw blank green-screen. Ultimately, they merge into the shadow and remain playful in darkness.
Hungry Ghost (2020)
A short film accompanying André Baum’s song Hungry Ghost, directed by Baum and Jasia Kaulbach. Hungry Ghost finds the artist playing The Man in Blue, a character who wakes up in the ocean, a mere speck on the surface, perhaps sinking, perhaps swimming. The Man in Blue gradually walks out of the ocean completely dry, turns, sits, and appears to be meditating, shoulders now level with the horizon, looking back calmly at where he once was.
Ira Cohen: An Homage (2011)
A short film made in memory of Baum’s family friend and artistic inspiration. Ira Cohen: An Homage centers around reversed footage from Cohen’s The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda and reveals Ira Cohen slowly burying himself in dirt rather than emerging as he does in the original. Baum reads Cohen’s poem, “Song to Nothing”: a meditation on life, death, and dreaming, which is accompanied by Baum’s soundtrack composed with voice and bells recorded on a decomposing cassette tape.
Good Morning, America! (2011)
A culture-jam video edit of found footage from a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone, modern American news segments, drug advertisements, and leaked war crime footage. The borrowed time-traveling protagonist from The Twilight Zone stumbles into the future and watches in horror as an anti-depressant advertisement appears on TV, after which he is advised to “get some sleep.” In this context, the line reads as advice to American viewers to enjoy blissful ignorance.
Prove To Me You Are Human (2011)
A video of homemade and found footage woven together to present a cautionary tale on technological evolution. Clips are taken from Koyaanisqatsi, Metropolis, Daft Punk’s Technologic, and future consumer technology commercials. The juxtoposition of high-production with homemade low-resolution videos and audio made using mobile phones create a dissonance in the concept of “future,” especially as the age of the footage shows over the passing years. The appearance of a snail traversing the screen throughout the video punctuates the increasing speed of the film, revealing what arises – and what is lost – in the meeting of two opposing paces of life.