Best in show

“It’s often difficult not to think of a well-made and striking music video when you hear a hit song on the radio.

Radiohead’s House of Cards, for example, contains some remarkable imagery, which adds so much to what is, to be honest, not a particularly good track.

But I’m still very moved when I see those pictures of people and places swirling, coming apart, floating in and out and disappearing altogether.

Instead of a traditional camera, the video was made with scanning technology, which detects the distance between a sensor and the objects to give a ghostly grid-like effect.

The approach epitomises this exhibition, which focuses on the idea that music video is an artform in its own right.

Not so long ago, photography – now one of the foremost methods of artistic expression – was considered by many people to be simply a genre that reproduced art.

Music video has suffered similar criticism. People say it’s just advertising and only there to promote music.

But every artform – from photography to painting and sculpture and beyond – comprises 99% crap and 1% that is really important and we reflect this by looking at music video’s many forms of expression, tracing its history and influences and recording its place in today’s multimedia world.

We begin with the visualisation of music in the 1920s through the work of Man Ray and Oskar Fischinger and come bang up-to-date with interactive and personalised music videos through, for example, the connection of Google Maps to music video content.

I find it particularly interesting that video is now, more or less, freed from the censorship of television and is rapidly becoming an internet artform. The Pussy Riot video, for example, is forbidden in Russia and when we tried to show it in Ukraine last year, the authorities tried heavily to stifle us.

Blurred Vision, a rock band fronted by two brothers whose family fled Iran in the 1980s, caused a sensation on YouTube with their no-budget reworking of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, which proclaimed: ‘Ayatollah, leave those kids alone.’

And an Egyptian friend of mine told me we could fill an entire exhibition with the amount of new song and video ideas that comment on every step on the revolution in that country.

We’re constantly looking for video material but so much of the old stuff has been lost and you can tell that so many of the ‘extras’ on today’s DVD reissues are copies of copies.

In fact, I am regularly called by bands asking if I can find their old videos in anything approaching decent quality.”

The Art of Pop Video runs until 26 May at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool

Michael P Aust is the co-curator of The Art of Pop Video. He is a film producer and director of the SoundTrack_Cologne festival of music and sound in film and media