David C. Johannet - Andrew Sharpley

In their very dense collages of video and sound, the musician Andrew Sharpley (Stock, Hausen & Walkman) and the video artist David C. Johannet use and probe the language of contemporary media culture. Adverts for Nothing is their second joint project and works through the musical appropriation of the codes and functions of TV advertising. Using images from commercials as their raw materials and sampling as their mode of composition, they juxtapose tiny samples of images and sounds at a frantic rhythm in order to create short “pieces” that are halfway between musical scores and mini-films. By erasing all the identifiers of products and brands, they sever this commercial language from its original context, using its own effectiveness to subvert it. Complex and ferociously humorous, these non-narrative pieces are all different, their order always unpredictable. One sequence may consist in a series of puns, for example, while another is a formal exercise in colour and montage, or yet another the metamorphosis of a dog food ad into digital rock’n’roll.