Uncle Jalil's Garage

American cartoons are the starting point for Martin Arnold's new work. Sequences of short films form the basis of a process of fragmentation, deconstruction, dismantling and repetition. Arnold uses fun, family entertainment to create films with open-ended possibilities for association. His pieces, such as Hydra (2013), Charon (2013), Nix (2013) and Self Control (2011), feature characters whose anatomy is no longer recognizable as such, but rather resemble puppets, remotely controlled from the outside. Trembling hands, dancing tongues, blinking eyes and snoring mouths move like ghosts against an abyss-like deep black background, in which bodily elements constantly disappear, only to reappear once more.

American cartoons are the starting point for Martin Arnold's new work. Sequences of short films form the basis of a process of fragmentation, deconstruction, dismantling and repetition. Arnold uses fun, family entertainment to create films with open-ended possibilities for association. His pieces, such as Hydra (2013), Charon (2013), Nix (2013) and Self Control (2011), feature characters whose anatomy is no longer recognizable as such, but rather resemble puppets, remotely controlled from the outside. Trembling hands, dancing tongues, blinking eyes and snoring mouths move like ghosts against an abyss-like deep black background, in which bodily elements constantly disappear, only to reappear once more.

American cartoons are the starting point for Martin Arnold's new work. Sequences of short films form the basis of a process of fragmentation, deconstruction, dismantling and repetition. Arnold uses fun, family entertainment to create films with open-ended possibilities for association. His pieces, such as Hydra (2013), Charon (2013), Nix (2013) and Self Control (2011), feature characters whose anatomy is no longer recognizable as such, but rather resemble puppets, remotely controlled from the outside. Trembling hands, dancing tongues, blinking eyes and snoring mouths move like ghosts against an abyss-like deep black background, in which bodily elements constantly disappear, only to reappear once more.

An Experiment video by Ravin kamaran

The virtual world generated by the real world of the twentieth century is growing exponentially, like an organism in a Petri dish. Crossing its own borders in to new zones, it absorbs its founders and mutates in to something absolutely new. In this new world real wars look like a game on americasarmy.com. Prison torture appears more like the sadistic exercises of modern-day valkyries. Technologies and materials transform the artificial environment in to a fantasy landscape of a new epoch. This paradise is a mutated world where time is frozen and the past is neighbor to the future.

Abstract video art by John Sanborn and Dean Winkler. Dedicated to Ed Emshwiller.

A dejected homemade robot wanders through a bright and sunny landscape, only to encounter some bad luck.

A tutorial about guided meditation. Throughout the project, the spectator is invited to follow a series of steps that, if done well, will take them to a calm and tranquility state.

After concluding the now-legendary public access TV series, The Pain Factory, Michael Nine embarked on a new and more subversive public access endeavor: a collaboration with Scott Arford called Fuck TV. Whereas The Pain Factory predominantly revolved around experimental music performances, Fuck TV was a comprehensive and experiential audio-visual presentation. Aired to a passive and unsuspecting audience on San Francisco’s public access channel from 1997 to 1998, each episode of Fuck TV was dedicated to a specific topic, combining video collage and cut-up techniques set to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The resultant overload of processed imagery and visceral sound was unlike anything presented on television before or since. EPISODES: Yule Bible, Cults, Riots, Animals, Executions, Static, Media, Haterella (edited version), Self Annihilation Live, Electricity.

Minotavr II

IDFA and Canadian filmmaker Peter Wintonick had a close relationship for decades. He was a hard worker and often far from home, visiting festivals around the world. In 2013, he died after a short illness. His daughter Mira was left behind with a whole lot of questions, and a box full of videotapes that Wintonick shot for his Utopia project. She resolved to investigate what sort of film he envisaged, and to complete it for him.

Today, analogue video is attractive primarily thanks to the distinctive aesthetic quality of its pixelated image and raster errors. But for Czech artists who first explored the possibilities offered by video art in the late 1980s, this medium represented a path towards freedom. Through a portrait of her grandfather Radek Pilař, one of the pioneers of Czech video art, the director explores her own legacy of imperative creative fascination. Her film’s main story, i.e., the process of reconstructing the 1989 exhibition Video Day, contrasts this enchantment with life in the final days of the totalitarian regime, which different sharply with the adventures of those who decided to emigrate – whom the filmmaker also visits in order to discover forgotten works, get to know their creators, and re-establish broken ties.

Cóndor

Video art by Vibeke Sorensen made at Calarts in 1989

Abstract video art created in 1979. Video and audio by Dean Winkler, Glenn Van Alstyne, Tom Lucke, Elaine Lewis, and Brian Aitchison. Chirp-1 / Quantel was created in two separate effects passes: At the RPI Video Synthesizer Lab an old porno tape (on stock that was donated to us) was processed using an analog Serge modular music synthesizer to sequence the sounds and control the colorization of an analog Hern video synthesizer. The sounds are also inserted into the video, which are the stripes you see, changing with frequency. The tape from the first pass was taken to EUE Video and used to seed an analog feedback loop around a Quantel 5000 digital effects device.

El siglo de las luces

Performance video about a holiday romance at St Ives, Cornwall.

This is a didactic film in disguise. A progression of brilliant geometric shapes bombard the screen to the insistent beat of drums. The filmmaker programmed a computer to coordinate a highly complex operation involving an electronic beam of light, colour filters and a camera. This animation film, without words, is designed to expose the power of the cinematic medium, and to illustrate the abstract nature of time.

A feminine machine, stuffed with modern nano-technology and useless operations is depicted in this mixed-media 2D animation short, highlighting the consequences of consumerism and the downfall of civilized society. The machine reminiscent of a two-dimensional video game, leads to a destructive chain reaction after a strange malfunction, with people turning into clones and robots.

"Plasforms" is above all a visual composition, the relevance of the camera's absence, continuing in its time the plastic tradition of seeing. It is the exposure of the digital medium itself, a choreography of ghost images mechanically imitating the artificiality of a process.