The multi-media artist Timo Novotny describes his project as an experimental musical documentary. His film is a remix of the film Megacities, a visually opulent essay about life in several big cities around the world, which was filmed in 1997 by the Austrian director Michael Glawogger. In the documentary, Novotny works with the kind of technology often used by DJs in dance clubs - the remixing of an original work and the use of loops to create new compositions. An audiovisual journey to Mexico City, New York, Moscow and Mumbai occurs against the backdrop of the original film, just under one-third of which the director used in the film re-mix. The visual material in the new work includes unused footage, and sequences that were subsequently shot in Tokyo by the film's cameraman. The soundtrack, which plays a role in shaping the film, is the work of the electronic group Sofa Surfers. Like the original film, RMX shows life on the flipside of the global economy: the cities are like black holes, which pull more and more people into their space; more than ten million people live in each of them. The big city symphony resounds in dark tones, as poverty is the source of its clamour. The film grows out of the composition of the previous film, and the same images are offered in different ways. It puts forward new harmonies and alters the syntax to show that an image can be presented as many times as the memory or the imagination is capable of conjuring it.
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