Perf Dance

Abstract video art set to the music of Philip Glass.

An NTSC space opera.

For the multimedia exhibition Tangenten I (Tangents I), Dammbeck and co-organizer, sculptor and painter Frieder Heinze had planned to collaborate on a film that would combine non-camera animation with 35mm footage of a train ride between the two Dresden districts of Radebeul and Pieschen. When the exhibition was banned in 1978, Heinze turned to other projects, but Dammbeck continued working on the film by himself. Metamorphoses I—the first experimental film ever to be shown publicly in East Germany—marks the filmic beginning of Dammbeck’s long-term art project the Herakles-Konzept (Hercules Concept).

A meditative journey through the surreal inner spaces of the filmmaker's mind as passing images and thoughts overlap, yearning to coalesce into a concept.

Decoherence is an audiovisual composition made with sound waves, water, and granular and spectral processing. A 60 cycle drone from a speaker cone below creates subtle patterns on the liquid surface, which grows increasingly turbulent. This piece explores interference patterns, the interplay of macro and microscopic patterns, chaos and continuua.

Experimental short animated film by Péter Molnár

An experimental avant-garde film where the character battles with herself, struggling to understand and embrace her true identity. Blending dream-like and reality sequences together, the film connotes inside the character’s mind. Escaping to different parts of her subconscious, she is met with confrontation, fear & desire. This piece of work highlights themes of identity, surrealism & subjectivity, where the instability of the self is at the forefront of the film. The film uses elements of mixed media montage to portray the character’s inner thoughts.

A hypnotic mise-en-abyme constructed from JVC camcorder footage of a parking garage. Produced in tribute to teacher, filmmaker and video artist Peter Rose and the work of Piet Mondrian.

An experiment in meditative and stripped down cameraless filmmaking, edited and sequenced using machine learning models.

In this short film, a young man, a girl and a dog attempt to fly with wings more symbolic than practical.

An experimental short from Oskar Fischinger

Hacking a claw machine inside C4D.

Sarah and her two cats go about their separate lives. The cats have strange dreams about their desires, and Sarah develops an unshakable paranoia that something is wrong with them. Sarah's paranoia bleeds into her social life, and her two cats have their dreams come true.

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.

In an alternate Manhattan, two researchers-Robert Lang and Jeff Hawthorne-are drawn into Project STARLING, a covert operation buried deep within the Titanpointe building. When Hawthorne breaks protocol and vanishes into a mysterious portal, the city reels from unexplained phenomena. Lang is forced to navigate a collapsing reality as STARLING agents turn ruthless and the boundaries between dimensions begin to rupture. As transformations unfold and the city descends into chaos, both men confront forces beyond comprehension-shifting identities, spectral adversaries, and a growing sense that something vast and irreversible is approaching.

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 important sensory organ, the eye, is damaged. The exhausting healing process takes us on an inner journey full of pain, fragility and mental unrest, in which even superstition and witchcraft seem to have an influence on recovery.

In a far future lies a strange city called The Axion. Within this city, a descendant of humanity known as The Prototype escapes from experimentation. Thus begins his quest to restore balance to The Axion, and search for what it means to be human.

Begins as a whimsical piece with 'sheets' of lines running down the screen, progressing into more and more complex geometic patterns but without deviating from the basic precepts of 'dot and line' animation. Jazz piano on a lazy Sunday afternoon, and a spring color palette. -- Stephanie Sapienza. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2001.

Maxed out, burnt out, and sex-starved, Amber Su falls under the spell of glamorous self-help guru Coco Ging, whose mentorship turns desire and ambition into different kinds of debt. Repression evolves into possession as Amber molts into a new ego: a worksona.