First there was Bowie, then there was Klaus Nomi, and now there is BONAPARTE, who by his own admission is:
"LIVING IN THE EYE OF THE STORM!
The heart of Bonaparte's neo-modernist spirit of quantum entanglement is Tobias Jundt, a multimedia phenomenon birthed in a reunited Berlin, which has originated both the zeitgeist and the mythology of a 21st century modernism... (Photo of Tobias Jundt by Melissa Jundt).
"Words and images are pretty much the constant I use to make my rhythms as I wander through different styles. Styles are just clothing. Rhythm is the bones. And images are the flesh." -- Tobias Jundt
Bonaparte's newest collaboration with Tim Fite (right), the American rapper/multimedia artist of i Been Hacked fame.
The two artists share a neo-modernist impulse: to create a unified multimedia body of work imbedded with epic narrative encapsulating the zeitgeist. Considering there is no comparable word in English, it seems that America rap needed some German entanglement to ride the crest off the 2014 quantum wave collapse.
Their joint premiere, which they are taking on tour*, is the stylish and hilarious ME SO SELFIE, nails the James Franco Selfie on its narcissistic head ("Look at me; I never want to look away") through an explosive genesis fusing American rap and sheerly cutting Berlin cabaret wit.
A redrawing of the Berlin scene at its cabaret roots has meshed Bonaparte's myriad influences into a captivating force for change that is both rockstar heaven-sent and startlingly down-to-earth in the sincerity of its collaborative vision: the enigmatic equal exchange of wave/particle and subject/object transforming audiences, and even critics, into participants. For example, on the eve of a new European tour, Jundt's response to my e-mail request for an interview:
"I could offer an exclusive photoshoot in my private recording studio in Berlin. It has lots of vintage gear. We could try to find a language to place myself or parts of me within details of the recording equipment or furniture... try to match the rather Bauhausian aestethics of the new show in photos."
This year, 2014, is marked by a new Bonaparte album, simply titled BONAPARTE, and European tour that begins 10 October which aligns with the stars along with Fite's Kickstarter release i Been Hacked. Their quantum leap out of 2.0 reflects our own, as well as the merging of Berlin & Brooklyn, which has become something of a two-way expressway on the music scene.
Yet, Berlin has the history. Bowie and Nomi, who impacted the East Village seventies scene, and before that was the hyperkinetic gender-bending atmosphere of Weimar Culture, as if in response to Einstein's 1905 quantum discovery of what he called "spooky action at a distance," which invented digital culture as we know it today.
Eternal Return with a Difference with hyperkenetic wave stabilizing into particle: "Players gotta play. Lovers gotta love..." ("Two Girls").
...climaxing in a techno mythical rite annointing the Third (Eye) with the wavicle: "...can't get enough of...less is less and more is more..."("Two Girls").
This slipping out of skins has stripped down the rock star persona into a fully realized 21st century icon born anew out of the transformative fire of Nessus semen and blood-stained cloak, the shadow of the corporate-controlled celebrity obsessed media environment--Berlin, which seeks its own mythology of reunification sourced in a gender-bending tradition of blending opposites with hermetic wit...
Holding up his "pajamas" for the camera. September 2014 marks Tobias Jundt's full-scale emergence from an eight-year Berlin incubation--where his enigmatic charm, stunning facial features and the crystaline vision flashing from his clear gaze had been hiding under a series of guises and disguises. ("Zwei Tage Mit Bonaparte")
With David Bowie putting his Heroes brand on transgender by way of the seventies Berlin cabaret, the reunited city has come to define the in-between space of reunification reflected in a new physics of entanglement requiring a rehaul of epic mythological narrative (click on titles to view entire Bonaparte videos below)...
.....born in fighting spirit of playful collaboration ("May the Best Sperm Win").
This is the artistic daring that is Bonaparte, so many moves and all of them right (brain), a full gestalt ontology arising out of the after-postmodern oscillations of opposites into neo-modernist genius in the Jundt soul-baring Web 3.0 identifiable marriage of image/rhythm/style...
Fighting the binary prison to get to the liberating birth of the tertiary: "I'm...in the binary system...Let me back into the womb..." ("Riot in my Head").
In the Berlin period of experimentation and incubation, Bonaparte's collaborative ethic birthed a unifed art in which word, image, sound and narrative are of a whole piece. Arriving, as Jundt does, from multilingual Switzerland, where 20th century modernism was born as dada in a Zurich cafe, this makes perfect sense.
And the irony of this multilingual force, self-defined as a "one trick pony" with language, a welcome break(through) from the wordless techno that dominates the club scene here.
I am happy I came to Berlin and got to know the people and processes behind Berlin's techno masters like Siriusmo, Modeselektor, Boysnoize or Housemeister -- and how they work. It definitely added something to my overall palette, but at the end of the day i am not from Berlin and always catered more to all styles and all cultures of the world, regardless of style. I just wander through styles like a swiss mountain boy on a hike, but images and words are more universal than styles. Rhythm is the basic of it all but whether it is -- music or images -- there is rhythm. Composing the frame. -- Tobias Jundt
The Bonaparte terrain is somewhere in-between techno, rock, funk, rap and Berlin cabaret with some burlesque thrown in. Spontaneity rules within the magical associations of image, words and narrative all spun together with a cabaret humor as sharp as the Ego Schiele features and aesthetic language of the quantum exchange...
Waves merging into particles and particles merging into waves...creating Bonaparte from an entirely new fabric... ("May 30, 2014")**
Bonaparte's personal quantum leap reflects the collective leap of 2014 with the mythological narrative arising in surprisingly inventive and original videos (click on titles, below, to view)...
"Out of Control"sums up the black mass predicted by Wolfgang Pauli sweeping over corporate-controlled deterministic America in four minutes.
...establishing a breathtaking aesthetic for the conversion into genius...
Where words, image and rhythm capture the Kundalini fire into Ubermensch: "Start the flame. Inspire sound. Go as slow as you can to higher ground. Cosmic law now let me in. Rash of greatness locked inside of skin." ("Riot in my Head")
The bold, intriguing and refreshing aesthetic of the Bonaparte Conversion -- a quantum leap from Web 2.0 'LIKE' of corporate marketing and control that requires genius pointing out the human shadow for a full-scale liberation: "Life's an open market, you have chosen well..." ("Riot in my Head")
Where does this genius point to? An authentic birth of 3.0 collaboration, the very raison d'etre of Bonaparte, a living model of the metaphysician Graham Harman's proclaimation of the artist as the Third Table of the Real and media theorist Geert Lovin's declartion of Web 3.0 as the birth of something utterly new:
"We cannot just say that the Third is a retroactive movement going back. Absolutely not. If there is an in-between space, that for me implies the New. It is a birth ground for something that is becoming. It is not a compromise. It is not a synthesis in the easy way we have two opposites and let's just do a dialectical trick and create a third option. It has to be a birthing option."--Geert Lovink, media theorist
Never has Time's Arrow both aimed from and pointed to a more crystal clear (erotic) consciousness for a quantum shift transmitted into an enigmatic aesthetic of the tasty...
"I should be your muse, I should a muse..." ("Wash Your Thighs")
*ME SO SELFIE will be performed by Tim Fite and Tobias Jundt for the first time in public on the BONAPARTE European tour, beginning October 10 in Hamburg.
**May 29, 2014 was marked by the publication of a historic New York Times article about a teleport breakthrough overriding Einstein's objections to quantum mechanics "spooky action at a distance".
Lisa Paul Streitfeld is a philosopher and theorist based in Berlin who has just published Hermeneutics of New Modernism, about a new continental philosophy coming out of Switzerland.
Words of Tobias Jundt's songs are sampled in quotes within the photo captions. Photos and videos copyright Bonaparte and used with permission from Tobias Jundt.