Doug Bielmeier Music Videos
“Corporate Responsibility Pledge” with Boston-based electronic musician Doug Bielmeier
Unheard-of//Ensemble (Honorable Mention)
"Corporate Responsibility Pledge” (2020)
Doug Bielmeier (music)
Allison Tanenhaus (video)
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is the movement in business to take responsibility for the role of corporations in the quality of life of the communities they serve and operate in. The piece asserts that as either a marketing tool or as an altruistic effort, CSR has both a positive and negative effect on the lives of people and their communities.
Musically, the work explores a combination of a fixed macro-musical structure with that of performer-determined micro-musical structure. The piece evolves over 6 minutes by predetermined decisions by the composer and the performers, who determine the repetition and ordering of small musical phrases within the middle of the piece. The fixed computer and video part serves as an anchor for timing and dynamic/rhythmic growth. The aim is to allow the performers to become co-authors of the work, making each performance unique, yet having a similar over-arching shape.
The video is an assemblage of public domain footage from the mid-twentieth century—industrial shorts, advertisements, PSAs, environmental films, and home movies—that has been ripped, glitched, and restitched. The resulting narrative originates with the golden potential of capitalism for the American nuclear family, and quickly deteriorates into a neon-tinged, retrofuturistic miasma of big business’s shortcomings. With an eye on economy and ecology in equal measure, the video both celebrates and laments the premise and promise of commercial progress.
• Created in partnership with the musicians of the Unheard-of//Ensemble.
• Featured in the Anharmonic Online Film Festival, August 2020, along with a video interview! (Screenshots below); Union Square Video Projection Series, December 2020 and January 2021; Ojo de Agua, December 2020; 4th Photometria in Motion, Ioannina, Greece, 2021; Earth Day Art Model, Telematic Festival, April 22, 2021; TURN UP Multimedia Festival, May 1, 2021
SOMERVILLE WIRE: March 9, 2021 WEEKLY ROUNDUP
Artists discuss work from Union Square Video Projection Series
The Somerville Arts Council and Somerville Media Center hosted a panel discussion with artists behind the Union Square Video Projection Series on March 3. Speakers included choreographer Margaret Wiss, storytelling and animation artist Angie Lin Boyer, and abstract artist Allison Tanenhaus. The public art initiative was part of a three part series where video art was projected onto a building façade in Union Square and was broken into three themes. During the discussion, the featured panelists discussed their inspirations, their interests in collaboration, and the overlap between different disciplines they are involved in.
Tanenhaus’ piece drew from the idea of corporate responsibility, the “tension between big business having these outreach efforts to help their communities, but also how much of that is really compensating for potential harm they’ve done.” The video also addressed the concept of how everyday people are complicit in this complex. She used public domain footage and applied “a bunch of glitchy effects” to convey what she described as a colorful but sinister quality.
