Max Cooper – Resynthesis
2017 · Directed by Kevin McGloughlin
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Best comments
1.“'On this episode of How It's Made, we'll be taking a look at lysergic acid diethylamide.'”
More comments
- 2.“Whatever drugs Kevin McGloughlin's on... give them to me. Now.”
- 3.“Fun fact: in there somewhere is a normal shot of an escalator.”
The story
Max Cooper has a PhD in computational biology and worked as a geneticist before going all in on electronic music in 2010, so naturally his train-window daydream turned into a physics theory. On a run of high-speed train trips he watched the wires outside seem to dance, even though they weren't moving at all. He was. Maybe time fools us the same way, he figured: the past as a solid shape we keep growing out of, with the present as its surface. He made this track on those same trips.
He handed the idea to Irish filmmaker Kevin McGloughlin, one of his favorite visual artists, who shot in Dublin and Sligo and went to town with photography, real-time footage and a pile of 2D and 3D tricks, plenty of them done in camera. Lights smear into long streaks, photos stretch like taffy, and little glimpses of people get caught in the pull, as if you were looking at a moment and its whole past at once. Cooper says there's a deliberate nod to the slit-scan effects in Kubrick's 2001.
It came out in November 2017 on his EP World Passing By. A scientist and an artist trying to show you what time looks like from the outside. Mind-pickling, as Cooper puts it, and he's not wrong.
