Monday, September 10, 2007

Christian Marclay

Christian Marclay (born 1955) is a visual artist and composer based in New York. Marclay is a former lecturer of video collage and sound at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland where he conducted a summer workshop.

Marclay's work explores connections between sound, photography, video, and film. A pioneer of using gramaphone records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collage, critic Thom Jurek describes Marclay as perhaps the "unwitting inventor of turntablism."[1] His own use of turntables and records, beginning in the mid-1970s, was developed independently of hip hop's use of the instrument, and though not well-known to mainstream audiences, Marclay has nonetheless been described as "the most influential [turntable] figure outside hip hop." [2]