If the incessantly upbeat drone of the media world has you staring at the clock and thinking about the bar, join us as we slip into the dark and refreshingly bullshit-free world of the musician and visual artist known as Denial of Service.

STASH: Tell us about the creative and technical challenges involved in creating your work.

DoS: “I only ever take projects which interest me utterly, immediately & emotionally. The way situations have progressed as a (technically) unemployed producer (some call this freelancing) I mostly get ‘offered’ to do music promo videos.

“If the sonics click with me, the concept is already there in a split second – I tend not to bother with material which doesn’t spontaneously provoke imagery (the compensation is usually completely unworthy of mention either – I do not take kindly to wasting my time). For some odd reason I do not feel that much creatively challenged. The process is either automatic or the project is altogether discarded beforehand.

“In terms of the technical, I tend to use anything and everything I can, be it soft or hard (I shoot through a €69 kinect v1 and/or a sub-€20 Creative webcam from the 90s – I work on a nine year-old broken Windows machine without a graphics card)

“I have been using After Effects and 3DSMax since the 90s and I’m also producing lots of visual bits & bobs in Processing, Max, vvvv and Python. I am very keen on utilizing artifacts, intermediary process by-product materials and (hex-edited) program crash ‘trash’.

“I also tend to go quite pedantic (if not full-on OCD) with old-school hand-eye editing on every piece as well.
Although my aesthetic has been tagged /labelled already, I opt for a different approach for every new project, as much as I can (although some traits have, by now, been rendered unavoidable).

“This is an utterly draining, physically taxing and life-consuming line of work when one goes it alone and without any agency/management backing.”

 
What about your background and inspirations?

“I have a med-school and special forces background. I am a quintessentially Burroughsian news junky. Always been involved in music production (releasing since the early 80s) and my occupation in the visual field came out of sheer necessity long over a decade ago in order to make ends meet financially at the time.

“Bio-disaster, bio-hacking, media info-fernal paranoia, altered states of vision/perception (I am half-blind due to brain tumor), the spectacle of post 9/11 terrorism, ‘the apocalypse’ and the inescapably machanic essence of ‘organic’ life and emotions are some favorite key concepts as informed by own experience.”

Unless there is an evident psychopathology
in such pieces, all love is lost as far as I’m concerned.
Formalism is death.

 
Where do you see tech-driven art like yours headed in the future?

“For the so-called ‘generative /algorithmic’ techniques, the resulting permutations ought to be as endless as the field of mathematics itself. The more these production processes become routine (or training subjects) the sooner the field will deteriorate (in the same way as IDM did in the mid-naughties).

“Unfortunately, public attention tends to stick to the pure tech, oft times gimmicky, aspects and/or the wow-element of the automated complexity of these works (favorite nick so far: ‘data-punk’), however, what I appreciate and enjoy most are the quasi-organic/visceral aspects of such art – wherever and whenever applicable (see the masterpieces of Chris Cunningham, Dvein, ManVsMachine et al).

“Unless there is an evident psychopathology in such pieces, all love is lost as far as I’m concerned. Formalism is death.”

 
Kero / Gotshell “Perindsor”

 
RAWTEKK “Here’s To Them”

 
Visuals: Denial of Service