The Artist Explains: Vôx Ve - 'Sad Surfing'
Swiss artist Vôx Ve speaks to us about her impressive visuals for powerful single, 'Sad Surfing,’ which is concerned with the themes of millennial health and disconnection and sees her jump into the Hudson River in January to feel something real in this digital world.
Where was the video for 'Sad Surfing' filmed?
The beach scenes were shot on Long Beach, NY—a winter surf spot that decided to go flat on our shoot day. Heh. The morning sky was unbelievable though; a golden-blue gift from the heavens.
The bedroom scenes were shot in a budget-friendly cyclorama studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn I found on peerspace.com.
The city scenes were shot running through Hell’s Kitchen to the Hudson river Pier 81, which is a yacht dock (a good sign that it was probably/hopefully deep enough to jump off of;)
Everything was filmed in January of 2019, making the shooting experience all the more epic for its frostbite risk.
How does the video connect with the song?
The song and the video are one in using my personal story of isolation through vicarious virtual living as a window into a much larger generational experience of digital overload and disconnection from true contact and nature.
I wrote the song at a time when I worked alone from home as a freelance ghostwriter in Hell’s Kitchen and spent a lot of time like the video protagonist does—marooned on a big bed in a tiny apartment net searching for feeling.
During that period, I found myself weirdly obsessed with watching YouTube surf videos, because, I realised as I wrote the song, ocean surfing became the metaphor for everything I wasn’t doing behind the screen: touching, gasping, risking…living.
So the “YouTubular” music video with the three dancers that the protagonist watches takes place on a beach in order to represent that ideal that I had of surfers and other people “out there” really living a real experience in real nature with real contact and closeness to others.
The jump into the river at the end is not part of the song but it definitely represents the feeling I had when I wrote it: desperate to do something drastically real and touch a piece of the experiences I spectated.
Do you have any behind the scenes stories you can share with us?
My experience getting back out of the river after the jump will be a forever memory.
Though the last shot ultimately turned out for the better, it was originally supposed to last much longer. But when I hit the 55 degree water “IRL,” I could only pull off a few seconds of serenity before some very uncinematic gasping and flailing took over.
We had a rope ladder from the pier, which, others probably could have predicted, swung impossibly far under the pier the moment I hung on it…It took a human chain of 2 crew members plus the director to yank me back to safety.
Also, that was the first day of several scouting trips when we’d encountered security guards on the pier. They’d already given us a warning to piss off, so we had to try to do all of this very fast, hiding all the action and gear behind our van. If I was looking for an experience of feeling alive, I certainly got it.
Could you tell us about the ideas/ themes/ imagery used?
I’m a big fan of visual metaphor, so there are lots of subliminal goodies tucked away for the finding, but a few bigger things:
1. The larger than life digital animations:
The story starts in a grey room with a grey person marooned on the island of her grey bed with only a grey laptop. When she opens it, the empty room starts to fill with the vivid, exciting colours and images of her internet search odyssey, depicting how internet content can, in some senses falsely, and in some senses really, fill our lives with inspiration and excitement.
The detrimental side of her scrolling/swiping/surfing emerges as it becomes excessive. The mental immersion that began slowly, depicted by a few trickles of paint down her head, begins to compound into total mental––and paint––saturation, showing the overwhelm that many of us experience in the 2019 reality where constant exposure to internet content has become the air we breathe.
2. The Millennial pink paint:
This pink, dubbed by the internet, “Millennial Pink," is a particular shade of light pink that you would probably recognise because it's been the branding colour for a tidal wave of ads targeted towards Millennials, hitting you from all sides over the past 5+ years.
For me, this colour came to represent the brain-saturating effects of our constant exposure to digital media and its messaging on what lifestyles, appearances, and expectations we Millennials "should" aspire to.
So, as the protagonist goes deeper down the content rabbit hole, the paint sneakily accumulates on her head like the subliminal effects of constant social media comparison, until she’s totally overwhelmed and has to sprint to the nearest piece of nature to wash it off.
3. The melding of the bedroom and beach scenes:
The bedroom scene girl’s increasing immersion into the dancers’ beach music video—first in resembling the principal dancer, then in appearing on the beach in her grey PJs and taking over the main dancer’s spot—depicts how easy it is to feel as though we’re living the content we consume.
The moment when the protagonist slams her computer shut and the room goes grey again is intended to remind us that despite everything we saw, she was really just sitting there with a computer the whole time.
4. The costumes and choreography.
I wanted the dancers’ coats to be blue and tried to make all the choreography very wavy/undulating to make the trio feel almost like an extension of the landscape, representing the imaginary of being one with nature.
Is there a message the video is trying to convey?
I want anyone who has felt anxious, empty, or overwhelmed by the omnipresence of digital in our daily lives to feel recognised, and part of a generational struggle that needs our collective consideration. Constant screen time and social media have been normalised so fast that we haven’t had time to step back and assess how it may be negatively impacting us.
Mental health issues are much more prevalent among Millennials than previous generations and psych studies are showing that social media usage plays a big role. I’m in no way against social media, but I have suffered these effects and have seen far too many of my friends suffer them too, such that I hope ‘Sad Surfing’ can contribute to a conversation around what uses and amounts of technology are healthy for us as complex human animals who also need nature and touch and all those good things to survive.
I swear if we Millennials took more breaks from our phones, we’d feel better and wouldn’t even have to jump in a river;).
Interview feature by Karla Harris