Music : Kraftwerk.
Animation : Rebecca Allen (New-York Institute Of Technology / Computer Graphics Laboratory).

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Rebecca Allen is at the forefront of information technology. It took her two years of work to produce binary icons in 1986, digital avatars of the Kraftwerk members. The artist's science feeds the project with musicians' complete works: after having been represented by robots/mannequins, they are now embodied by intangible synthetic doubles.

To the vocoders, rhythm boxes and synthesizers of Kraftwerk, Rebecca Allen answers with 3D creation, facial animation and modeling. Could we be in a double fascination? That of Kraftwerk for technology and sciences; that of Rebecca Allen for movement, the synthesis of life. The strategy consists in combining Man and machine, to unite them in a unique and liberating flow [1]. Creators and tools seem to have the same status, their aesthetic being constructed on their equality. Music plays itself, musicians exit the image to leave agency to the machine, to technological prowess.

The synthesized alter egos represent their work in common: Rebecca Allen creates the avatars of Kraftwerk, Kraftwerk inserts Rebecca Allen's coded voice in its composition – the only occurrence to our knowledge of a female voice in the work of the group. Rebecca Allen finds herself digitalized and symbolically passes into an audible post-humanity. 

This video was awarded numerous prizes: 1986, Best Musical Video – RFA. 1987: Artistic and Technical Excellence Award – Nicograph Tokyo. It was nominated the same year in the category Best Special Effects, National Academy of Video Arts and Sciences, 5^th Annual American Video Awards. In 1988 it was awarded second prize in the category Musical Video/Images of Future Art and New Technologies – Montreal.

[1] Expression used by Pascal Bussy in Le mystère des hommes machines, Camion Blanc, Paris 1996.

Manon Schwich

Translated by Mia Stern, 2021