Read/Keep/Heed/Follow These Instructions

Review of the video “Read Keep Heed Follow” by Julian H. Scaff and Felix Kubin
by Dr. Frab Timov

If one examines the video “Read Keep Heed Follow” (by video artist Julian H. Scaff and electro-futurist musician Felix Kubin) within the context of subcultural theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject modernism or conclude that culture may be used to marginalize the Other. Thus, several narratives concerning a mythopoetical reality may be discovered. The subject is contextualised into a manufactured concept that includes art as a whole.

While Kubin’s music suggests the use of modernism to challenge the status quo, Scaff’s video images employ a dialectic rationalism to denote the bridge between post-futurist identity and class. However, the ground/figure distinction intrinsic to Scaff’s oeuvre emerges again in “The Cosmodrome Futurists” as a counter-reaction to Kubin’s “Hit Me, Provider”. Yet Kubin’s GameBoy-inspired rhythms and electro-excavated beeps and buzzers seem to suggest that we have to choose between subcultural theory and Da-daist absurdity.

In a sense, Scaff’s critique of neo-retroism suggests that truth is incapable of significance, if indeed the premise of subcultural theory is invalid, while Kubin uses artifacts of our electronic past to denote the role of the musician as cosmological archeologist. Together Kubin and Scaff are more like electricians of thinking, composing circuit diagrams of the imponderable desires of the mind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM9ZkSemmBo