Perf Dance

An attempt to bring texts from Dante's "Divine Comedy" to life. Nine episodes from the Inferno with a concluding episode from the Purgatorio.

The sun’s energy circulates throughout the earth, feeding the cycle of life. Everything is connected in a natural loop, which repeats, like the circular discs of magical optical toys. This perfectly balanced rhythm is disrupted by human excess, throwing the cycle out of orbit and temporarily stopping the circulation of energy in nature.

An experimental short from Oskar Fischinger

A comfortable rhythm composed of light and shadow. Director Ogino-style absolute movie which freely manipulates geometric figures.

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

Polish avant-garde animation in which a periodic series of aggressive starbursts interrupt the melodic dancing of fluid shapes, one raid even freezing the image for a moment.

Iwasaki’s ink oscillates like an evil lava lamp that might actually be alive and its progression into more and more disturbing images create an impressive sense of dread in a film that is basically just some pencil drawings on a blank background. (Film School Rejects)

undressed

“[T]he sense of moving forward [in space or time] alternates with a sense of expansion and contraction, as the finished cycle [of movement] returns to itself and rushes to catch up with its successor.” (Gadassik) Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with iotaCenter and National Film Preservation Foundation in 2007.

An essay in colour harmonics and visual overtones. Conceived and produced as part of the Images Film Festival's Minute Movies.

A sparkling geometric play of shapes and forms in the M+ Museum of Hong Kong.

Len Lye usually timed his films with great care to match their soundtracks, but for All Souls Carnival, he and composer Henry Brant worked separately, preferring to see if the score and visual track would synchronise by chance. Lye also experimented with a new Direct Film technique, drenching the filmstrip in colourful paint and marker pen.

An experimental sampled film which shows the pleasurable art of movies about movies through scenes inside of theaters.

An experimental film created from 3 years worth of abstract pencil drawings with the goal of being a catalyst for unveiling a new mental landscape in viewers.

An abstract animation. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive, in partnership with the iotaCenter, in 2007.

Flashing lights explode across an apartment as images of a naked woman in bed flicker in and out. Light paintings and projections illuminate a space of confrontation and an assault on the senses.

Exploring the conscious, the unconscious and the self, By Winds and Tides takes a deep experimental dive into the birth of an idea—how it takes shape, how it is released. An allegorical quest, the film combines images and words into a singular sigh.

An experimental short from Oskar Fischinger

Fragments of a collective post-human dream construct a world that straddles hyper-technological, ecological, and mythological dimensions.

Ozymandias recites Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem of the same name. Selected AI-generated images and text-to-speech narration - with their vutlure-like generative methods, and already rapidly-dating aesthetics - are placed in parallel to the poem's explorations of legacy, decay, futility, and the future.