Title Safe 3
by Walter Verdin (BE)

The Belgian pioneer of AV-performances teaming up with the pioneer of the Belgian Blues and Beat-scene: it’s a crying shame it took us four years to get them at the Belgian AV-festival.

For TITLE SAFE, video artist Walter Verdin asked a number of his colleagues to make a short video each according to a few simple rhythmical and technical editing rules. The resulting videos will be mounted in succession as phrases of a longer musical composition, alternated with a musical theme (refrain) composed and executed by Verdin and various live musicians. The beat is fixed and provides the only framework: 125 BPM, i.e. twelve frames per beat.

For more than 25 years Walter Verdin has been steadily building up an extensive and quite diverse oeuvre as a video artist, composer and performer which touches the boundaries of video, music, performance and theatre, not necessarily in that order and not necessarily separate from each other. As a pioneer of Flemish video art, Verdin is known for his highly idiosyncratic approach, and is always prepared to give the latest technological evolutions a place within his oeuvre.

His work at the audiovisual departement of the Catholic University of Leuven as a freelance producer of didactic, company and promotional videos was to be his first contact with electronic and electro-acoustic music. Later on, the coming of a computerised editing tool at these facilities learned him the possibilities of video. The everyday work with this tech-ware caused him to, as he states himself, develop his first video/concert Videorhytmics (1984).Image and sound and their rhythmical, repetitive, monotonous and hypnotising interaction keeps on being a keystone in the oeuvre of Verdin. In the ‘image and sound language’ which Verdin develops, the medium ratifies its own existence in the sense that image and sound make the characteristic element readable.

As a video-maker, Verdin is especially known for his award-winning registrations of the dance-productions by choreographers such as Anne-Theresa De Keersmaeker and Wim Vandekeybus. These videos were not pure registrations: The experience he built up with giving metre to image and sound through Videorhytmics is used in capturing the rhythms of dance in the editing.

In 1993 he focussed back on his own work with the video-installation 'Videolepsia' as a first result. In 1994 Walter Verdin started cooperating with theatre director Guy Cassiers and in the meantime he worked, with the help of Frank Michiels, on another one of his own projects: a new videoconcert, X‹Afrika, based on West African drum rhythms. In 1999 Walter Verdin started his stormtrilogy, where different disciplines interact. In Storm it was video and dance, in DA PRJCT video and music and in DA SSTM video and music performance. Since 2001 Verdins 'Corban vzw' receives structural funding of the Flemish community as a music theatre. Title Safe 1 was its first creation. During the Cimatics\06AV\Festival Title Safe 3 is presented.

• – Title Safe website
• – Walter Verdin