I don’t toss around the word “brilliant” too often. I recently rediscovered visual and sound collage demon People Like Us, and it’s absolutely brilliant. I find old film reels, archaic educational videos, public domain images, technology that was supposed to change our lives but didn’t, and general oddities of American industry terrifically intriguing. People Like Us, the A/V project of Viki Bennett, combines all these images with a Raymond Scott-esque audio pastiche.
People Like Us do tour and perform installations occasionally, and I had the pleasure of seeing them back in, I think, 2004 when they came to my school. Their live show is, in essence, a live VJing of these images and sounds. I saw it sober, but I wish I was stoned. And of course, People Like Us is associated with the mighty, avant-retard WFMU. Unfortunately, Viki’s show Do or DIY is not on the current schedule (though she fills in every now and again).
Below are some of my favorite videos. The first is 2003’s The Remote Controller, which features “found footage sourced from educational films to explore the way human body and machine interface in the 20th century.” The second film, “Resemblage,” features a lot of the images I saw at the live show. The last is 2005’s Story Without End, extracted from “a public domain film of the same name made in 1950 about the development of microwave radio transmission and the transistor.”
UbuWeb hosts these videos, and I encourage you to visit them. The site compiles a variety of audio and video from “outsider” artists, and it’s incredibly awesome.
