Chris Cairns Gets Technical

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.

Subscribers to shots.net can read the full interview with Cairns here, or in the new issue of shots magazine, issue 140, out now. To subscribe to shots, click here.