Maya

“This film offers a metacinematic study of tempo and change and a figure of velocity. […] Ota recorded [three different locations in Tokyo] at the interval of hours, and sometimes even days, by using different filters and by alternating the camera speed. The result…represents an inquiry into the abstract space-time of cinema where Ota plays with the physical fact that time is a ‘function of movement in space.’” –Malin Wahlberg

“My attempt at a filmic interpretation of Haraguchi Noriyuki’s ‘Inclined Horizon,’ a three-dimensional physical work featured in the ‘Dance Hakushu 2006’ exhibition held in the Hakushu district of Hokuto City, Yamanashi Prefecture. Haraguchi’s work was modeled out of earth that will return to its original form after about a month, and my aim was to resurrect the concept of this work on film.” - Yo Ota

“This film was made for an event that included an exhibition of artwork by Eishi Yamatomo. Yamatomo’s metal sculpture is often finished with a chromium plating, which reflects its surroundings. For this project, I tried to obtain the image of a metal sculpture as an existing entity and its reflection as an illusion on a film medium, which can hold an image as an object. It was originally shot on 8mm film, hand-processed, edited, then re-photographed on 16mm film.” - Yo Ota

“The ‘exhibition’ held by ‘artist’ Katsuhiro Fujimura in Tokyo during the very hot summer of 2013 was one that made viewers suffer. The ‘painting’ that stood leaning against the window had very faint colors and regular scratches that could not be seen very well because of the light streaming in from the outside. The light changed with the time of day, and the surface of the painting also shifted. The paint on the front of the panel can only be perceived as ‘color’ by reflecting light. The fact that if the light changes what is seen also changes is quite obvious, but because it is a ‘painting’ viewers find this hard to accept.” - Yo Ota

“There was an art event at a closed school, Kataura Junior High School, in Nebukawa, Kanagawa Prefecture. If I did not participate in this event to show my films, I would never have got off at Nebukawa Station. I saw the sea from the school building. The installation by Tetsuya Iimuro was placed in a science room at the school, where one could see the ocean through the windows.” - Yo Ota

Arriving in the US with a background in abstract art, opera, and film—including work with German director Werner Schroeter—Vogl began making Super8 films in New York that stripped away the stylistic markers of Hollywood, New Wave cinema of the 1960s and ’70s, and classic avant-garde film, leaving only traces of their generic conventions. For the first hour of OK Today Tomorrow, he stages a series of fraught encounters around the city between four gentrified New Yorkers before abandoning his vague narrative of youthful angst altogether in favor of documenting the urban landscape itself. The dusk-to-dawn “city symphony” that ends the film resembles similar Super8 social studies by Vogl’s uptown contemporary John Ahearn; both recorded the daily lives of working-class black and immigrant communities on the streets of a city on the verge of the corporate takeover and sweeping gentrification that followed in the 1980s and ’90s. Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

“Peter Kubelka…was teaching at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule (Städel) at the time. His classes, filmmaking and cooking, were very unique, and this film was made around the time I was studying with him at Städel… This is a single-shot film, moving along the passageway using a handmade dolly. I used an Arriflex 16ST camera, and I changed the filming speed from 48fps to 4-6 fps while shooting.” - Yo Ota

“The visual harmony of the landscape is disturbed by a screen that allows us to see into the distance (television). The film is composed of six scenes that feature a television in the landscape. The speed of the television (in NTSC) is 30 frames per second, and never changes in this film. But the landscape views pass at different speeds.” - Yo Ota

“The structure of human vision is the visual knowledge of the world. Individuals do not visually understand the world through the eyes, but through the brain. That is to say, human vision has been formed by knowledge and experience. The film can show a new vision, provided that the cinema is also a kind of visual experience and visual knowledge.” - Yo Ota

“One can not speak of time as a thing in itself. It is movements and variations that give the feeling of time. Men have always linked time and spatial movement.” - Yo Ota

“Sequences of space-time manipulation that raise the problem of continuity in the shot.” - Yo Ota

Translated from German, Die Verwandlung means, 'The Metamorphosis', a title that aligns with King Kong Magazine's 'Metamorphosis Issue' (September 2017), in which Jacobsen's imagery also appears. This notion encompasses a variety of the elements that were studied during Jacobsen’s residency at SHOWstudio in London. Jacobsen cites human shapes found in everyday objects, the intervention of the body through digital techniques, his experiences living abroad, and a focus on raw-looking materials and the unfinished in this work. Working with materials including plastic, dough, and inflated latex condoms, Jacobsen collaborated with mistress of make-up Alex Box to create a shape-shifting character played by dancer Jonathan Luke Baker. The final film and imagery reflect states of discord and harmony in the natural world, manipulated by Jacobsen's digital skill.

The life of Ukrainian-Soviet avant-garde composer Alexander Mosolov inspires three stories about creation and individualism in the face of state power, set against the Great Purge of the 1930s and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The pantomime of two characters exchanging roles is accompanied by a three-layered phonogram, where sophisticated narrative text is interrupted by slightly accelerated excerpt from Brezhnev’s speeches, as well as by fragments of statements of the mentally ill person with the schizophasia symptom.

A representation of my own memory during the course of this year, illustrated by visuals.

The inner world of the great painter Max Ernst is the subject of this film. One of the principal founders of Surrealism, Max Ernst explores the nature of materials and the emotional significance of shapes to combine with his collages and netherworld canvases. The director and Ernst together use the film creatively as a medium to explain the artist's own development.

Changes of spatial relationships, scales, locations, and materials are intimated with recognisable clues which nevertheless do not always eliminate the former understanding of the images. These and other levels of ambiguity are instilled, which shake the photographic image’s authority as a principle of reality by confronting it with its illusory nature. We are back with magic, made possible with black and white film, shadows and lights, the limitations of the screen and the depth of field. So as when film grains, dots in deep space, disintegrate the solidity and enclosureness of a wall, the intentions of the film and the transforming events accumulate at a very intimate level of the viewer, that is at the level of the mechanism of his understanding.

Staggeringly simple films: a man itching his back, a man thinking, a man yawning, but like the works of Samuel Beckett, these minute gestures stand in as grand statements of the human condition, akin to the films of Bas Jan Ader and Marcel Broodthaers.

An unseen character observes the cold, harsh world around them while listening to The Beach Boys, hidden away in the safety of their bedroom.

Staggeringly simple films: a man itching his back, a man thinking, a man yawning, but like the works of Samuel Beckett, these minute gestures stand in as grand statements of the human condition, akin to the films of Bas Jan Ader and Marcel Broodthaers.