President: "Why?"
“President: ‘Why?’” is a short trip through heady times. The video mixes morphing abstractions with headshop posters and raw dialogue from two leaders — President Richard Nixon, on the Watergate tapes, and Hells Angels boss Sonny Barger, from an interview about the disastrous Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway, in 1969. This 9-and-a-half minute animation is made up of more than 3,500 tabloid-size “degeneration" prints — enlargements of tiny reproductions of counterculture posters advertised in late ’60s comic books, which were themselves originally distorted by cheap printing techniques. The "degeneration" method of copying each image from the previous print — thereby increasing the distortions — pushes these flaws across the border of recognizable imagery and into abstraction, a metaphor for the towering ideals of the ’60s, which have been battered and degraded and yet remain beautiful today.
( As with those psychedelic albums of yore, headphones enhance the experience. Also, note that this is a 720p version of the 1920 x 1080 original; the full-scale version of President: 'Why?'" is designed for a portrait-oriented 43-inch 4K TV, which returns the posters to roughly their original scale of three feet tall.)
( As with those psychedelic albums of yore, headphones enhance the experience. Also, note that this is a 720p version of the 1920 x 1080 original; the full-scale version of President: 'Why?'" is designed for a portrait-oriented 43-inch 4K TV, which returns the posters to roughly their original scale of three feet tall.)