2005

single channel SD video with sound

dimensions variable

total run time 19 minutes, 50 seconds

 

Bassline Baseline is a video essay that investigates the invention, failure and subsequent resurrection of the mythic Roland TB-303 Bass Line music synthesizer in the last two decades of the 20th century. The narrative reflects on notions of trial and error and "unintended uses" when product innovation meets creative expression. The essay further explores how and why creative tools fail, and how increasingly more options, parameters, or intermediaries devised during development don't necessarily lead to increased expressivity or virtuosity during the tool's lifetime of actual use, unless a political economy of creative production is dramatically reconsidered.

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