Logo Rhythm

On a visit to Berlin some years ago, we were driving through the city late at night in a friend's car. I was in the back seat feeling totally disorientated. Somehow we ended up in a place called Panasonic. Upon entering, I passed through several empty and almost entirely dark rooms until I reached a bar in a long, narrow space with grubby white tiles. The lounge area was taken up by a retro-futurist group of sofas in dark brown veneered wood and black leather relics of the old VIP lounge of the East-Berlin Schoenefeld airport, I learned later. Sinking back into one of them, I was entranced by the blurred images of urban neon that repeated themselves endlessly on a video screen. One loop consisted entirely of corporate logos: at the centre of a black screen they changed in ultra-rapid succession: MasterCard, Condor, Swissair, AT&T, KLM, ABC, Canal+, Lego, VH-1, TAT, Motorola, United Technologies a frantic outburst of compressed information. Funnily enough, my mind easily absorbed this mass of visual data. I realised I was in the perfect mood for it a Major-Tom-mood: 'planet Earth is blue and there is nothing I can do' ­ drunk, tired and happily melancholic. I learned later that my state of mind was triggered off in the back rooms of a former butcher's shop.

Context is important to the artist who created the videos and the club in which they appeared. For Daniel Pflumm, production of work and the creation of specific sites in which to show it go together. For some years now he has been involved in organising a number of clubs in Berlin Elektro (1992-1994), Panasonic (1995-1997), the Init bar (since 1998) and the screening of his video-loops has always been an integral part of the overall design. The clubs have also hosted regular performances by the DJs Klaus Kotai and Gabriele 'Mo' Loschelder, in collaboration with whom Pflumm runs the dance-music label Elektro Music Department. He contributes the video clips for the label's releases and designs its record-sleeves and merchandising. Likewise, the music of Kotai+Mo underpins Pflumm's videos when he shows them in a gallery context.

The gallery is just another site to be designed. As Pflumm is represented by Berlin's Galerie Neu, he supplied them with a new logo (the word 'Neu' in a small red light-box placed on the gallery's flat roof) on the occasion of their recent re-opening in a new space. The opening show consisted of a single video, Neu-loop (1999), in which the Neu logo appears on the head of a revolving toothbrush. A female voice coos 'neu' (new) to a minimalist bass-line. What follows is eight minutes of glossy animations Pflumm has sampled from various TV ads. Most of them promote the latest in detergent technology: washing powder in the form of tablets. Futuristic tabs, sparkling water, clean fabrics and the Neu logo again and again could novelty appear more seductive, more appealing? One sequence sees the gallerists Thilo Wermke and Alexander Schröder dancing (in besuited Gilbert & George-style) in the lower left hand corner of the screen, like a small animated logo, while a plane leaves a pure white trail in the bright blue sky overhead. It's so fresh, so exciting; an ironic take on, as well as homage to, the rebirth of a gallery that claimed to be 'neu' in the first place.

Pflumm constantly juxtaposes the speed of the new with the stasis of awe (and consternation over its consequences). If one loop cranks up the speed, another might consist of a single image which remains virtually motionless for up to six minutes. It could be a computer animation repeatedly builds and deconstructs the AT&T logo; or video footage of the urban night-sky: neon signs on the skyline of Alexanderplatz a slowly revolving light cube shot slightly out of focus. All you can see are the blurred colours red, blue, white of a strange cubic shape against the dark sky, or part of a neon sign that reads 'computer' and flashes on and off at regular intervals. The idea is simple, yet the result is compelling. Once a visual element a computer generated logo, an excerpt from a TV ad or a piece of video-footage has been used in a loop, it is stored in Pflumm's database where it becomes part of his intricate system of visual samples which he re-uses in various constellations, at various speeds.

Needless to say, the repeated images correspond perfectly to the sound of repetitive beats. Pflumm and Kotai+Mo have used the Elektro, Panasonic and Init bar as sites for experimentation: the clubs allowed them to develop audio and video loops in correspondence with each other. The clubs became both sites of leisure and sites of production. The music of Kotai+Mo is electronic with a no-nonsense attitude: no esoteric synthesiser soundscapes, just cool, dark, monotonously pulsating bass-lines. Beats are sparsely added. There might be a four-to-the-floor bass drum but no cymbals, just a minimal mid-range knock-knock-knock to indicate a potential rhythm. In its stripped down monotony the music perhaps owes more to the grim, gloomy lust of DAF (Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft) than to the sublime elegance of Kraftwerk. This is clearly a Berlin sound, the opposite of Cologne's bright, uplifting techno.

In his video-clips for Kotai+Mo's tracks, Pflumm continues to develop an aesthetic of repetition with minimal means. For the track 'Ice Train' (1998), for example, he filmed trains speeding past a static camera. The front and back of the trains are never visible. All the loop depicts are carriages in motion a steady flow of blurred colours and the rectangular shapes of windows in ceaseless repetition. Periodically the effect is heightened as the format of the images changes: from filling the whole screen the train is condensed to a vertical strip that runs through the middle of the frame like an animated frieze. For CNN Questions & Answers (1996) Pflumm appropriated footage from a CNN newscast in which a split screen shows the presenter in one frame and the correspondent in the other. The subtitle reads 'Call from Switzerland'. However, no other information is communicated as both journalists do nothing but blink. Pflumm captured the one split second in which the stream of data ran dry a blank space between words and turned it into an infinite loop. Without any data to animate them the two newscasters become lifeless ghosts forever condemned to flash their empty knowing smiles at each other.

In the end, the difference between a club and a gallery simply amounts to a difference in the attention span of the viewer. The sober viewer of an exhibition demands condensed information, a visual statement they can identify and analyse. The altered state of a clubber's mind makes them open to any kind of visual information, just as long as it purports to offer a certain pleasurable quality of indifference. In a way, Pflumm's work is about exploring the dynamics of attention span. While the context of a lounge situation allows for experiments with roughly cut video material and extended loops, the art context (as well as music TV) requires focused stimuli. Then again, the attentiveness of a person dancing might be entirely different from that of a person relaxing or watching TV. When he was asked to produce visuals for the WMF club in Berlin, Pflumm installed eight monitors in pairs around the dance floor. At short intervals logos would flash up for a split second on different monitors at different times diffused stimulants for the brain of a dancer.

Pflumm's strategy of expropriating corporate logos is a technique of rigid denomination: if you can call a cat Socrates, why can't you call a record CNN? Corporate logos look smart and they're up for grabs so why not use them for your own purposes? Of course, this strategy of affirming the spectacle of corporate culture raises the question of politics. Can affirmation be a form of opposition? When Pflumm received the Ars-Viva prize from the BDI (German Industries) in 1997, a show of political discontent was inevitable. His first step was to erase all of the inscriptions in the logos he used in the video for the initial BDI exhibition in Stuttgart. As the exhibition travelled he had three-dimensional light boxes built from these 'censored logos' (as he called them). Coloured rectangular, concave or convex Logo shapes framed the empty but well-lit space where the company's name would have been. Apart from his own label, Elektro, the 'censored' logos exclusively comprised those of German Industry: Oetker (pudding), Kraft (mustard), Abtei (vitamin pills), Raiffeisen (bank), Knorr (instant food), Hamburg Mannheimer (insurance). Consequently Pflumm turned affirmation into its dialectical sibling zero-affirmation by emptying out the emblems of the German Industry and offering the vacuous signifiers of their corporate identity back to them.

Jean Baudrillard once described the society of the spectacle as being based on the fact that it swamps the consumer with products and sensations without allowing them to react and return these 'gifts'. In his portentous style he stated that 'Power [...] resides in the act of giving without being given. [...] The only effective reply to power is to give it back what it gives you'. 1 Jon Savage made the same point when he claimed that the intention of Punk's provocative use of the media was 'to play the media's accelerated jumble of signals back at them'. 2 When it comes to subversion, the slogan is no longer 'Smash your TV!' but 'Give TV back what TV gives you!' Does Pflumm produce insubordinate counter-gifts? To loop the logo means, at least potentially, to turn the tables on the culture of corporate spectacle.