Remix (1999)

Remix

Remix, another in a series of commercial announcements designed by Pärn, is both joyfully anarchic and formally precise. What look like animated children’s drawings of people and things playfully and fluidly shift shape and, indeed, often prove to be composed of interchangeable shapes. Therefore, a tabletop easily substitutes for a piano, a flower for a bird or a hat, and a colourful hanging mobile for a brand-name beverage. Yet Pärn’s work takes on decidedly fantastic dimensions with his highly original use of language, and his penchant for the word games so beloved of the surrealists. Words and sounds are imbued with a concrete significance. Visual speech bubbles, notes from the solfège, and an entire, and entirely unique, onomatopoeic vocabulary appear as elements of design in the composition of images, even while the sounds themselves are being produced. In this way, words with specific meanings can be combined with other words both visually and aurally to produce new words, and new significations. Thus the “remix” of the title takes on multiple layers of meaning: it refers not only to the product in question, and to Pärn’s film about it, but also to the way in which words and images are constantly “remixed” in creative ways to construct the deep and essential structure of the world around us.
Nicholls, C. (2005). (Very) Short films by Pärn. Remix. Metro Cinema Publications Number Two, March, lk 23.