Gaze and Hear

This metaphorical surrealist tale is an allusion. NIGHTINGALES IN DECEMBER is a trip into the memories, and the fields of the current realities. What if the Nightingales were working, instead of singing and going south? Is the innocence the only savior of birdsongs? There are no Nightingales in December... What is left, is only the history of our beginning, and our end.

When taking a microscopic view of a dot of the printer ink, it begins to transform into unstable forms. The other sphere/eyeball which appears when moving away from the dot, suggests the overlay of the swaying of the retina that occurs when staring, and the motion within animation.

The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.

An early experiment in employing computers to animate film. The result is a dazzling vibration of geometric forms in vivid color, an effect achieved by varying the speed at which alternate colors change, so producing optical illusions. In between these screen pyrotechnics appears a simple line form gyrating in smooth rhythm. Sound effects are created by registering sound shapes directly on the soundtrack of the film.

The human eye, a well-known psychedelic motif, is multiplied and sharpened in Keiichi Tanaami's film trip 4 Eyes. Using his experience designing nightclubs, Tanaami projects two copies of the same film with a slight delay, so that it appears as if the ghost is losing consciousness. (IFFR)

The experimental animated short is a collaborative work between Keiichi Tanaami and Nobuhiro Aihara.

Landscape

The bridge as the channel between worlds: between the living and the dead, between male and female, between sacred and profane.

The experimental animated short is a collaborative work between Keiichi Tanaami and Nobuhiro Aihara.

A small white box. Everything happens in that little world. A woman's face comes out from the side of the room and roars, birds peck at human flesh, trains run through, and a couple quarrel begins. When the billiard ball penetrates the room, the billiard ball changes into various shapes ... Each room is a world, and what happens there is a microcosm of modern times.

The hilarious hour-long episode follows the bipolar, beer-swilling dog, Barkley, and the Critters, the band he fronts. His rocker menagerie includes a vulture, a snake, a tracksuit-clad paranoid schizophrenic crow, a Buckethead-esque farm boy on harmonica, and a manic- depressive canine drummer.

In 2013, Lei Lei and Thomas Sauvin collected numbers of black-and-white photos from Chinese flea markets and imagined that all of them belonged to one fictional Chinese person. Through rendering, collage, and a cyclical process of hand coloring, scanning, and printing, connections among the photos were created.

Short animation produced in a 3D animation course using the MAYA software.

The walls of video rental shops in Japan are lined with hundreds upon hundreds of animation DVDs, but experimental and art animation on DVD are rare. To remedy this situation, Image Forum put together this showcase of the work of contemporary avant-garde animators trained in Kyoto and Tokyo.

A boom operator attempts to record the noise mushrooms make in this semi-experimental animation inspired by the world of sounds.

A short animated feature which Fred Burns created with 2,000 inked, painted, and photographed images.

Someone falls off the scene and a tree is upside down. In the search for the roots, people are torn from their usual order, while in the dark connections are made. A woman tastes of the primordial soup and we end up in a system of people spinning around themselves. Only one person remains alone, but he gets unexpected comfort from somewhere.

In a bold and original approach to memory, this Lettrist-inspired film maps an anxiety-ridden plane journey from Tokyo to Helsinki without the aid of photographic images. A variety of interventions on the film strip are combined with an atmospheric sound design to create a subjective story of displacement and containment. In an age when experience is increasingly mediated through digital technologies, Taanila seeks out an alternative language in the sensuous surfaces of the celluloid material.

This dazzling stop-motion animation provided Vorkapich with a forum to demonstrate complex perceptual theories related to the persistence of vision and phi phenomenon. The dance of objects and their movements before the camera lens–somewhat similar to Oskar Fischinger’s abstractions–illustrate many visual sensations playfully executed by Vorkapich.

Prelude 14 begins in deep brilliant red which darkens into deeper reds and lavender shapes, disrupted by a variety of colors settling into browns and grays and shapes most rock-like, all of which is then shot-thru with sufficient yellow to break up all hard-edge form and give a molten aspect to the mixtures of shapes.