Jip Mus

Role: visuals
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01

music

04:00

Max Cooper - Inanimate to Animate

Max Cooper: With nature’s scene set, we now venture into the strange boundary of living and dead. The dynamism, determinism and energy gradients of the environment harnessed for self-replication in organisms which appear as much inanimate natural process as animate life. But complexity grows, and we are on the trajectory towards sentience in the visual story. The musical starting point of this project was that of boundary conditions, and the musical escapism into a surreal boundary between wakefulness and dreaming. I continued to explore themes of boundary conditions with Jip Mus for the visual interpretation, where Jip delved into the mechanics of life, with self-made growth media, micro-organisms and micro-cinematographic experiments. The vocalist and musician Kotomi, who has a beautifully ethereal voice, brought the project to life perfectly. Not via lyrics and a loud human presence, but with the voice as an instrument, blending her feeling into the wider experience. For the spatial audio mix with Adam Smythe and Niels Orens, we created partially randomised and freely improvisated structures. Using smooth movements and a balance of order and disorder spatially to mirror the ideas of the chapter. The previous collaboration with Max on the ‘Reflect’ film was choreographed by the different shapes water would take when shifting in states of aggregation. This natural growth was one of the starting points for ‘Inanimate to Animate’ as well. Jip Mus: This is a story about the boundary between life and non-life. A film about the continuation of species, where we see different cells and organisms increase in an almost rhythmic and pulsating way. Getting the right amount of abstraction and dream-state in the visual approach was the challenge for this project. The organisms we see are super abstract, we recognise them as being from a natural world but also can’t quite place them within our frame of reference. This is also why working on a microscopic level is interesting to me, we usually can’t experience this complex dimension. Everything you see in the film is ‘living’. It is questioning our definition of intelligence and what we define as a living organism. It’s amazing how much I have learned about biology and our (micro) universe and I am incredibly thankful for the people that helped me during this project. I hope you can enjoy our work, and that it might bring back some fascination for the natural world around us.

02

music

03:51

Max Cooper - Reflect

A story of ice and reflections with the second part of Max Cooper's Earth EP. Max Cooper: The project began as so many others at the start of the lockdown period when everything was brought under inspection for all of us. And as often is the case, my writing process became a sort of balance, against my collapsing world of touring and new uncertainties. There's something about focusing on a simple chord progression and the feeling it contains which often puts things into perspective. What developed was the Earth EP, with a focus on the beauty and processes surrounding us, and our role amongst the system. I started chatting to Jip about the project and he had the great idea of linking the reflections of the music to those of ice and its role in reflecting light from the sun, linking in footage from his visits to Svalbard, research lab imagery of ice crystal formation from Wenting Zhu, and his own ice formation experiments. Big thanks Jip for the beautiful work, I hope you enjoy it too. Jip Mus: The film is choreographed by a natural source; change of temperature. I was amazed by all the different shapes and movements water would make, a continuous dance of shifting into states of aggregation. I got to visit Svalbard last November for a photo series and I was shocked to feel the rise of temperature in the Arctic so vividly. When I first heard the music that Max sent me it gave me a melancholic feeling, the same feeling I felt seeing this island slowly disappear. I hope this film helps us understand the value of these places and that we need to preserve them to slow down the rapid changes of temperature on our planet. I would like to thank Wenting ZHU from Beauty of Science (research institute from China), Cecilia Blomdahl (drone operator from Svalbard) and of course Max Cooper for working together with me on this film.

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