Curtis Miller, still from The Dark Side of Oz, 1989, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
Curtis Miller, still from The Dark Side of Oz, 1989, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
Screening continuously on Renaissance TV throughout the weekend
The Dark Side of Oz, 1989 is a feature-length video that pairs three albums by the English rock band Pink Floyd with Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939). First described by Charles Savage for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette in 1995, for years the fan-generated mash-up The Dark Side of Oz (alternately referred to as The Dark Side of the Rainbow and The Wizard of Floyd) circulated among Pink Floyd fans through word of mouth and the Usenet newsgroup alt.music.pink-floyd. The Dark Side of Oz instructs viewers to begin Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) at the first roar of the lion in the MGM logo at the beginning of the film, creating an unexpected synchronicity between an album and a film produced thirty-four years apart.
For The Dark Side of Oz, 1989, Miller reproduces the mash-up with an unedited version recorded from a television broadcast on the fiftieth anniversary in 1989 of The Wizard of Oz, found at an antique mall while storm chasing in 2018. The work generates additional unexpected overlaps with advertisements of the period, as well as displacing the conventional synch of The Dark Side of Oz. The Dark Side of Oz, 1989 is sometimes manipulated with subtle image alterations and karaoke moments. When The Dark Side of the Moon ends after 43:00 minutes (roughly halfway through the original film), the audio cycles through Pink Floyd’s subsequent releases Wish You Were Here (1975) and Animals (1977).
Curtis Miller is an artist from Chicago, IL. His work has shown internationally at the Centre for Contemporary Arts - Glasgow, EXIS - Seoul, Fracto - Berlin, Montreal Underground Film Festival, and Alchemy Film and Video - Hawick, UK, as well as domestically at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, ICDOCS, the Hyde Park Arts Center - Chicago, Indiana University - Bloomington, Gallery 400 - Chicago, Tiger Strikes Asteroid - Chicago, among others. He is currently in production of a feature-length film.
