Beat after beat, a musician lashes out at New York City.

With his drumsticks, he elicits a beat from asphalt and walls, phone booths and blinds, lampposts and garbage cans, which he improvises solo through Manhattan.

A song sleeps in all things: There is something useless and romantic about what the American video artist John Sanborn staged in front of the camera in 1982 in “Ear to the Ground” with the percussionist and composer David Van Tighem.

At the end of the short film co-produced by Kit Fitzgerald, the sound artist hops down a deserted street into the sunset.

In retrospect, this street art performance appears cheerful and simple in the best sense of the word, a dancing epiphany in the confidence of being able to follow one's own rhythm.

Ursula Scheer

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Digitally restored, the four-and-a-half-minute single-channel video opens a Sanborn retrospective at the Karlsruhe Center for Art and Media (ZKM), which pays tribute to a pioneer with works created between 1978 and 2022 in his largest European solo exhibition to date - and a wanderer between the worlds of art and commerce.

So in tune with the zeitgeist was "Ear to the Ground" when it was made that Sony knocked on Sanborn's door and asked if the video wouldn't make a great template for a spot promoting the Walkman.

Born in Huntington, New York, in 1954, John Sanborn was never averse to crossing borders, commissioned work, or artistic collaborations.

He confesses that he always wanted to be where the audience is.

From experimental video art to MTV videos for Grace Jones,

The spectrum of his work ranges from work for Apple and Adobe to opera or an interactive moving image installation in virtual reality (VR).

This reflects the media upheavals of the past decades: Everything analogue that Bauhaus experimental filmmakers could have understood gave way to digital techniques, linear broadcasts or live transmissions to streaming.

Today everyone is a video artist;

Youtube and Tiktok make it possible.

The medially reinforced redirection of attention to one's own ego, the massively individually cultivated perspectivism, is also understandable in Sanborn.

While early work was dominated by the ambition to push the limits of technology to bring image and sound – often music – into collision, Sanborn is currently concerned with the ubiquitous questions of cultural identity and narratives of the self.

In view of the global crises and one's own aging, the fragility of existence is increasingly coming into focus.

Always there, where the audience is

It all started in 1974.

At that time, Sanborn visited one of the first major video art exhibitions in Paris and discovered his artistic vocation.

Nam June Paik became his teacher, mentor and friend.

A key milestone in Sanborn's career was an opportunity to create break filler for television coverage at the 1980 Montreal Olympic Winter Games.

He was one of the first video artists to go on the air with MTV and developed a video lounge for a nightclub.

He experimented with digital video technology with Dean Winkler: In 1983, “Act III” was created to a musical composition by Philip Glass.

The single-channel video, long a classic, combines the passing skyline of New York with repetitive sounds with multiplying geometric shapes.

Everything seems to spring spontaneously from the reverie of a teenager with a cat (Glass's daughter) who has a pulsing tangle of lines floating over her hand.

Taking you into an imaginary world where emotions are awakened and expressed visually and acoustically: that is the goal of such works.

Also in 1983, Sanborn created a comic opera for television about reincarnation, this time with Robert Ashley.