Chris Cairns: The Technocrat

Partizan’s Chris Cairns is your go-to man for reaching that creative nexus where cutting-edge technology meets inspired artistry. Stepping into a world of disembodied rappers and orchestras of computer junk, Tim Cumming meets a maker intent on total audience immersion

Bring Chris Cairns in on a job and the odds are you’ll have a team of brilliant computer scientists and mathematicians helping sort out your solutions in a truly creative way, delivering intravenous communication and eye-boggling visuals with some subterranean coding and a vivid, visual imagination to make the unbelievable totally real.

Take his work for Neurosonics Audiomedical Lab featuring Scratch Perverts, Foreign Beggars and Shlomo. Made through Partizan’s Darkroom division, with post by The Mill, Cairns’ short film has rappers’ heads fixed into the decks and drum kits before being beaten and twisted to hell; it’s funny, freaky, and sticks in the mind like superglue.

Beardyman and broken eggs

More recently, he delivered an audacious spot for Brother featuring a midi orchestra of obsolete computer tech playing Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changing. There’s a joyfully bonkers set of animations for Cadbury Cream Eggs in an orgy of yoke-breaking, screen-smearing auto-destruction, funny-surreal idents for BBC Radio and Channel 5, and then there’s Beardyman’s Big Man, which is as hilarious as it’s sinister and is one of the most disturbing videos since Aphex Twin’s Come To Daddy.

Music video was a kick-starter for this young British director’s career. An abiding love of classic hip-hop and a circle of college friends (he studied languages for two years at Oxford University before a creative about-turn redirected him back home to Manchester and Salford University for a foundation art course, then St Martin’s to study graphic design) as obsessed as he was with music meant that he was making zero-budget music films for and with his friends from the get-go.

“I was interested in the combination of the creative and the technical and that’s still what gets me incredibly excited,” he says, sitting in a small Soho café near his production company Partizan, on a break from the long hours he puts in at his shared studio space in East London. “I really like ideas and I also enjoy the execution of stuff. To me, it’s inherently linked – an interesting idea that’s been executed in a really elegant way. I played with stop-motion, computer graphics, motion graphics, and that’s what excites me about creative stuff; you never do the same thing.”

One of his mates at college was Tom Vek, a graphic designer and musician who put out his first record on the indie Tummy Touch label before a major-label bidding war brought blacked-out Range Rovers purring up to their student digs. Cairns made several videos for Vek, which led him to production collective Oil Factory, where he worked in the dubbing department, fixing the computers, making tea and making his own stuff on the side. “They were doing awesome work and the spirit of the company was great. People talk about them today in hushed tones – they had more of a family vibe than a business thing. In a world where people can be precious and competitive, I was this young upstart and these guys I really respected were all freely sharing their knowledge and experience – which is the way it should be and often isn’t.”

This was in the mid-noughties. The music video as a commercial form was on the way out. John Stewart, the owner of Oil Factory, was preparing to close up shop when Cairns was approached by Sasha Nixon at Partizan. “I was a huge fan of Michel Gondry and the Chris Cunninghams and Jonathan Glazers of this world,” remembers Cairns, “so the idea of Gondry’s production company calling me up asking to see me was amazing.”

His first job at Partizan was for Lady Sovereign, then on the cusp of going large as a grime star, though she’s since slipped off the radar to the point of checking into the Celebrity Big Brother House – the charnel house of all public reputations. “They had a very small budget,” says Cairns, “but that was still more money than I’d ever seen.”

Partying with Partizan

It was his first experience of working with a label artist, too, which brought its own challenges. “She wasn’t the easiest person to work with,” he reflects. “Her ‘way of being’ seemed to be that people would try to screw her over in some kind of way.” He won her trust by letting Sovereign and her mates deface posters of Jentina, another late-teens English rapper of the period with whom she had a ‘beef’. Soon after that, he was off to New York on the biggest budget he’d ever worked with to film James Murphy’s LCD Soundsystem – a group he idolised.

“We headed out with Grace Body from Partizan as the producer and she took our excitement, enthusiasm and ambition and made it into something that could be done in a professional way. Murphy was really welcoming, too; at the end of the shoot we still wanted to film stuff on the streets of New York and he’d drive us around at 3am in the morning. I think he liked the idea of working with someone who was young and not part of the machine – not tarnished by the art/commerce thing.”

An upcycled orchestra

Much of Cairns’ more recent work comes as a result of his partnering with three tech-minded super-brains at his East London studio. With old college friend Neil Mendoza, and Royal College of Art graduates Marek Bereza and Matt Holloway, he has set up Is This Good? to make tech-inspired work, including Neurosonics Audiomedical Lab and the latest Brother commercial. “We like stuff we can participate in as much as stuff that we can watch,” says Cairns. “I’m really excited by that area of tech development.”

Cairns got the Brother job via Gray through Partizan, and went about constructing a real ‘orchestra’ of outmoded tech, reverse engineered by the Is This Good? team to become a living, if not actually breathing, midi orchestra. “We had this fun adventure of going to computer graveyards,” says Cairns. “Huge warehouses full of obsolete stuff run by wheeler-dealers flogging it to Africa and the Far East. We’d go round and pull things out and cast them like actors, listening to the sounds they made.”

For the shoot, he brought in composer and sound designer Will Cohen to program the music. “The paradigm I had in mind was of a traditional chamber orchestra, so instead of first violins we had first scanners and printers, the percussion area being photocopiers and digital sender devices. For the dot-matrix printer we exploited the movement of the printer head, of the matrix of pins, the form feed that pushes the paper through and the native sounds of the device – the bleeps on the LEDs at the front.”

It’s a brilliant realisation of a concept that has been explored and exploited by artists before now, and has since given rise to the complaint of advertising stealing the ideas of others. “I wouldn’t for a second suggest that people haven’t made music with computer junk before,” says Cairns. “Tristram Cary did the Olivetti orchestra in the 1970s, and James Houston’s Radiohead piece [which some have accused Brother of ‘ripping off’] is an incredible piece of work. But we did something that has other stuff going on and is done with more scale and in a different way.”

He also has plans to make the Brother orchestra a real-life, immersive experience. “I really hope we can do an installation,” he says. “It’s so much more fun to play with it.” One plan is to construct a simulacrum of a bland 80s insurance office “and, as you walk through it, your presence triggers different instruments. So, as you walk past the water cooler a bass line starts going, a filing cabinet starts kick drumming. It’s an interactive experience where your input is invisible to you. And if there is a way people can control the orchestra, rather than watching it, that would be very exciting.”

For the present, his daylight hours have been spent on a cycling film for Muddy Hell – a night-time bike race at Herne Hill velodrome on Halloween night. Cairns got the cycling bug after taking part in Fireflies, an endurance ride over the Alps involving advertising and film world creatives which was started by people at RSA Films to raise money for leukaemia research. “I couldn’t do it this year but I wanted to contribute, so we made a film and the guy who organises Muddy Hell brought his static-roller racing bikes in. And did it all for free.” The short film features industry creatives sweating, pumping and snotting it out as they immerse themselves in the burn under the slogan ‘For those who suffer, we ride’.

Getting inside the story

Immersion, too, is his main goal for future work – the promise of total involvement through creative technology. “There’s something magical in feeling that you’re at the centre of the story. There are lots of possibilities that haven’t been exploited yet, and Is This Good? is well positioned to find out what those possibilities might be. There is no longer a captive audience for one-way communication, and I’m not talking just about advertising, but in life. There is choice, and where there is choice you need to do things that really interest people. Technology is only one way of doing that, but that’s what I’m interested in.”