Sigur Ros Video Jams a 24 Hour Drive Around Iceland into Five Minutes
Once upon a time, Global-TV Toronto wasn’t a true 24-hour channel. After all the late-night shows were over, the channel flipped to a video taken from the vantage point of a Toronto streetcar making its rounds through the night accompanied by a musical soundtrack. Today we’d call something like this “slow TV.”
On the longest day of the year, the sun never really goes down in Iceland. It flirts with the horizon and then begins to rise once more.
Sigur Ros incorporated the summer solstice into their new art piece, a project called “Route One.” On the first day of summer, they took a 24-hour drive on the road that rings the country’s coast. Moving at a constant 60kph, they captured everything on video and then set it to their new song, “Óveður.” Two weeks ago, more than 500,000 people (interesting, given that the population of Iceland is 330,000) watched the whole thing unfold in real time on RUV, the national Icelandic TV network.
It was lovely, but who has that kind of time? That’s why it’s been then condensed into this five-minute video.
