Toroid

La Maison en Petits Cubes tells the story of a grandfather's memories as he adds more blocks to his house to stem the flooding waters.

A contemporary man in the eye of the cyclone created by information. He finds no support for his hands and feet. It’s like in a poem by Tadeusz Rozewicz (‘falling in every direction’), he turns to dust when his time finally comes.

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

Norman McLaren made Scherzo early after his arrival in North America in 1939, but the film was subsequently lost. In 1984 the original materials were found and the hand-drawn images and sound were reconstituted. Picture and sound dance triple-quick in this animated version of a musical scherzo. A film without words.

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.

Krešimir Zimonić's take on the underlying nature of a hard-fought soccer game.

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.

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.

Dramatic story of a man and a woman that had a short but passionate love story.

Three memories that become one. An attempt to merge heterogeneous materials: a film sequence shot in Rome, a photo from the 1930s, a noisy soundtrack. Fragmented lines, exploding bass frequencies and flickering.

Untitled / Aubrac

Claire is composed of digital scans and blow-ups of a series of three ink-on-paper artworks created in 2012 by French-Spanish researcher, publisher and artist Claire Latxague. While collecting drawings, written documents and other printed materials for a (yet unreleased) project called Un film de papier, I’ve stumbled upon Latxague’s artwork, entitled À la renverse. The blow-ups were made in an attempt of unearthing cartographic imagery in abstract compositions.

This is one of those abstract animated films in which colored, richly textured light moves in a black, three-dimensional space. The pictures and the electronic score are unified in a strict structure made of three main sections which progressively develop three subsections. This film may look like it was made using computers or video to the uninitiated, but only animation and much optical printing are to be seen herein. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with iotaCenter and National Film Preservation Foundation in 2007.

Of late, Kago has also taken to posting his even less-known video work to his YouTube channel. In these jokey short films, many of them crudely animated, Kago's sick sense of humor reaches its full heights of absurdity. There's a playful surrealist sensibility to Kago's work, as well as a tendency to revel in the ridiculous, the crude and the disturbing. His work straddles a weird boundary between avant-garde experimentation and low-brow fart jokes — the punchline of one of these films is literally an oozing torrent of shit — although, admittedly, his videos seem to lean a bit more heavily towards the fart jokes than his comics. But hey, who doesn't appreciate a good fart joke once in a while?

Shot in Ireland and Poland - a journey that explores ideas of decision, choice, consequence, circumstance and time among other things, a personal perception on how we try to find whatever it is we are searching for.The film looks at objects, people, and places which share common properties, our connection with one another and our environments in the very similar yet very different paths we share.

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.

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.

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.

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)