This small gallery on Hackney Road, formerly an artist's studio, has the feel of an amateur, after-hours enterprise and this decidedly DIY offering reflects a wider culture of artists doing things for themselves, without big budgets or pretensions.
Two projectors beam in short films influenced by the music video, an art form that had its own avant-garde beginnings only to be followed by commodification and stultification thanks to the aforementioned arrival of big bucks business. The best thing about the format, as we all know, is that the average music video tends to be only three minutes long, so if you don't like one, the next might be better.
This rolling jukebox-style addiction gripped me while watching a showreel including Mark Dean's reimagining of 'Fight For Your Right', by the once-scurrilous Beastie Boys, as a row of crucifixes (the artist is himself a priest). There's more partying, in elegiac, rave-inflected image mash-ups by Hannah Perry and the brilliantly named Christian 'Megazord' Oldham, and quite a lot of bullshit too, to quote the debut song by Biggie Smalls.
What is clear, though, is that these are merely riffs and not deep engagements with the music video format – just as MTV was assumed to be shorthand for 'yoof culcha' these kids are mostly practising 'noo meedya' artists, whatever that means. A couple of older works from the '80s by British Scratch Video artists George Barber and the Duvet Brothers nod to a deeper narrative between the two genres and it could have gone further in suggesting the reciprocal influence of art on musos (as seen, for example, in Erwin Wurm's 2006 video for 'Can't Stop' by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers). It doesn't go there, but that's not to say you shouldn't.