On Objekt‘s 2014 2xLP Flatland, out now on PAN, the artist explores the notion of perspective, imagining the ability to approach a complex scene from the multitude of it’s potential view points. Likewise, the outstanding video treatment for the track “Second Witness” visualizes this panoptic possibility. Directed by a team that includes the musician himself, TJ Hertz, Swiss visual/sound artist Rachel Buehlmann, British photographer Joe Dilworth, as well as the French-Japanese artist/curator Nine Yamamoto-Masson, the team employs a 360-degree pinhole camera as a way of putting the album’s theoretical tact into direct practice. It’s a device which Buehlmann built in 2012, and the camera exposes 180 images on 5 meters of 35mm film, allowing for a single moment in time to be captured in a circle of perspectives. With the images reassembled in editing, our viewpoint animates around a strange, dream-like room where looped strands of camera film, or later ping-pong balls, hang as though suspended in the air. The grainy black and white film, here, provides an intriguing visual analog to Objekt’s punishing sub-bass tones, while also providing an interesting contrast to the track’s squelchy, digitized beats and anti-gravitational synth washes.
