An Auteur for Our New Millenium

When the digital revolution was just getting started, Chris Cunningham was among the first tyro filmmakers to embrace the ones and zeros of computer manipulation.

In stunning music videos, such as his masterpiece "All is Full of Love", Cunningham creates alluring worlds where the impossible and the real collide, technology and humanity blur. It's fitting, then, that Cunningham's work is all over the first truly digital medium, the web, and that the arrival of Cunningham memorabilia is welcomed and discussed by netizens with excitement and adoration.

Daily Reel destination site Shortsville recently posted two works by Cunningham: footage from the director's video-jockeying handiwork at a concert called Electraglide 2005, and even better, a visually thrilling Playstation PSP ad spot called "A Day in the Life," which follows the misadventures of a PSP logo in the real world, directed by another British digital guru Alex Rutterford, who consulted with Cunningham on the project.

Both filmmakers are worth YouTubing. For starters, check out Cunningham's video for Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker," a strange, subversion of hip hop conventions or his work on Afrika Shox's "AFRIKA BAMBAATAA", which uses digital fx to comment provocatively on the under-class. I'd also highly recommend Rutterford's rendition of Radiohead's "Go to Sleep," which imagines a computerized universe of avatar-business people completely unfazed by the destruction -- and reconstruction surrounding them.

Something about all the videos -- and their trenchant combination of humanity and technology -- seem perfectly suited for our ever-more consuming digital world.