German animator, motion designer, and artist Robert Seidel is one of my all time faves. For me, he mixes the organic with the technologic in way no one else does. It’s like retro-futurist, his work often feels like a highly-advanced digital society remembering or re-interpreting the biological. His stuff is so far ahead it’s come back again. 

I recently posted about the new compression artifact technique datamoshing. Always a visionary, Seidel was playing around with what we’re know starting to call datamoshing  in his video (and one of my fave videos of all time) for Zero 7′s “Futures”… back in 2006. The vid was rejected at the time for being too futuristic and outside of the box. Clearly, Seidel is way, way ahead of the curve. 

In his latest work, “Vellum”, Seidel has created a large scale video installation for the COMO/Nabi Art Center in Seoul. A huge, multi-LED screen world, the visuals are aching and secretively beautiful. Like a lot of Seidel’s work, he brings to life an alluring but almost unnerving feeling; of things that seem familiar and comfortable – flowers, seeds, bones, feathers, earth – but which are behaving in ways we don’t understand. Again, with his hallmark air of an altered organic; of mutations and evolutions and natural elements that we think should be completely understood by us but which, for some reason, are behaving just outside of our experience. So intimate, but so alien. 

Seidel says of the work “The perceived interpenetration f skeletal architecture and unrolled landscapes reveal textures of the man-made restructuring of nature. Their different granular perspectives create a fibrous volume of possibilities fusing past, present and future. In their flatness the visible sculptural slices are reminiscent to our accelerated life, shifting into technology and transcending the physical body. The perceived transformation is based on the sculpture wandering through the building seen from a fixed point of view. In vellum motion is form and form is motion…”

Via Feed