Nosaj Thing – Eclipse/Blue
2012 · Directed by Daito Manabe
48K Likes
Best comments
1.“In the future, the most powerful computers will be controlled through interpretive dance.”
More comments
- 2.“There's a projector behind the screen for the moving backgrounds, another projector in front of the dancers, plus Xbox Kinect sensors to scan the dancer's body and project images on them.”
- 3.“In 2014 I was high as fuck on the way back to my parents' house. It started raining, and I decided to lie on the ground in the middle of a field listening to this track. Probably the best experience of my life.”
The story
Nosaj Thing is Jason Chung, a Los Angeles producer. Eclipse/Blue features Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead and was the first single from his second album, Home, released in January 2013. For the video he went to Tokyo audiovisual artist Daito Manabe, working with takcom, Satoru Higa and choreographer MIKIKO (the brain behind Perfume's dance moves), backed by The Creators Project, the Intel and VICE art outfit.
Here's the trick: none of it is post-production. Manabe said it's all a live dance performance. A high-speed camera tracks the dancer and the graphics get projected right onto her body, so shapes and particles bloom and scatter off every move. The setup is built like an eclipse: one dancer in front of a screen plays the sun, another behind it plays the moon. Manabe openly credited Klaus Obermaier and Ars Electronica Futurelab's piece Apparition as the model.
Chung and Manabe kept going. In 2016 they toured a show with real-time augmented reality visuals, and Pitchfork called its Coachella debut the winner for best visual production. This video is where that started.
