Delaware is an heartwarmingly twee digital design collective from Tokyo. They’re a band, a video art group, a bunch of 8-bit loving graphic designers— they’re kind of like a Japanese counterpart to Paper Rad, but less ironic and more sentimental. In their own words:

Delaware is a japanese super sonic group, designs music and musics design.
Their works take on multiple forms such as recordings, visual installation, writing, web, mobile phone, poster, cross stitch, and live performance.
They call themselves “Artoonist” (Artoon means art plus cartoon).

I found out about Delaware through Momus, the genius mind behind the blog Click Opera. Momus is pretty prolific. Not only is he a renowned Scottish musician with an wide catalog of records to his name, but he also posts engrossing, polished essays almost every day, ruminating on concepts both obscure and widely discussed in the worlds of art, politics, theory and pop culture.

Recently, Momus delved into the radness that is Delaware’s YouTube Harmony project, an endeavor in understanding and manipulating the massive stockpile of video content floating around on YouTube. By remixing unrelated clips into a four-channel split screen, Delaware creates something original and meaningful, divorcing fragments of creativity from the cold ether of the Internet.
 

One of the most fascinating things about this exercise is how auteurism is never cancelled out by the flavours of the source material. If you know Delaware’s work, you see their guiding hand, their concerns, their style and their sensibility the whole time, even though they’re using found footage.

What’s more, although a lot of the source material is American, the end result is, for me, very Japanese. Delaware have reverse-engineered a final result that has a very similar information density to Japanese television. The screen crowds with details, insets, graphics, and yet somehow a spirit of bland positivity prevents all this clutter being overwhelming or oppressive. As in a Japanese city, a certain good-natured and civic-minded mood prevails, offsetting densities of information and event which could otherwise be murderously high. There’s also, here, a sort of wide-eyed romanticism about world culture which is very Japanese, a transformation of everyday activities into something graceful and beautiful, and of course robot voices and an obsession with cooking.

Read Momus’ entire post on Delaware’s YouTube Harmony (which goes on to discuss the relationship between remixing and globalization, and the meaning of Morissey’s nationalist comments) here, and watch all the YouTube Harmony videos on Delaware’s website.

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