Abstract shapes morph in and out of focus.
Sabine is looking for a missing image: a day that has left its mark forever and that everyone remembers but her. But maybe this absence is what allows her to move on with her life?
Taking inspiration from 20th-century avant-garde experiments in graphical sound generation, the entire image in O/S functions as an optical soundtrack. Abstract motion becomes sound.
"A film version of a videotape. In it my drawings are animated and colorized by using computers. Walter Wright and Richard Froeman were on the computers. John Godfrey helped with the video editing. I did the sound score. The original tape was done on 2" high-band color videotape, two computers, a Paik-Abe video-synthesizer, with studio chroma-keying and multi-generation video editing." A version of Computer Graphics #1, one of Emshwiller's very first video works.
Utilizing super 8mm and an economical shooting method of quick, short shots building idiosyncratic rhythms via rapid editing techniques, time, nature, and even the body folds in on itself. Everybody Dies (2020) is a poetic journey into the desert. It’s a reflection on the nature of death as something not to be feared, but embraced as a part of a personal and universal human experience. Super 8mm.
Music: Carl Stone. Colored pen-and-ink drawings, like topological maps of biomorphic objects, grow and evolve from the red star. Once the master image is formed, this continuously throbbing, pulsating sight is used to ring changes based on years of optical work. Music and picture work together to create a mood of ecstatic tranquility. The bright colors, beautiful music, surprise at the end, etc. make this a good film for young children. Awards: Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival, 1973; Washington National Student Film Festival, 1974; Brooklyn Independent Filmmakers Exposition, 1974; Vanguard Int'l Competition of Electronic Music for Film, 1974; Humboldt Film Festival, 1974. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with iotaCenter and National Film Preservation Foundation in 2007.
High Voltage is constructed from footage James Whitney contributed to Belson for use in one of his Vortex concerts.
"In an effort to explore the flexibility of Telidon, Canada's videotex system, Pierre Moretti, animation artist from the National Film Board, used, in the graphic mode, the geometric figures which form the basis for Telidon's picture description instructions. Thus he created this short animated film."
Schwartz reordered and combined angular contours, broken planes, and distorted proportions in her own pictorial structures in an homage to Picasso's style.
What happens when two hands touch? How close are they like? And how can proximity be measured, and even more so, in times of a pandemic and distancing? We think we touch things, that we can take other people by the hand, but physics tells us quite another story.
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.
Computer imagery dances before a techno soundtrack.
Life’s Musical Minute, recently re-discovered, is a short promotional film of this kind, based on Gene Krupa’s drum solo from “Golden Wedding” by the Woody Herman jazz band. It was Lye’s attempt to gain support from Life Magazine.
Propulsive Polish avant-garde animation following clouds of shapes that resemble nebulae or stellar surfaces.
Following a morphing blob of flesh through an artificial landscape of urban textures we take part in a process of creation and adaption. From a simple square to increasingly complex moving patterns, the organic seems to get lost in the artificial which begins to dominate rhythm and structure of the world.
A minimalist optical sound meditation on simplicity and repetition building complex arrangements of audio-visual oneness, where the most basic geometric shapes draw intricate visual and sonic patterns.
Seraphim Cloud and his life size doppelgänger enter the netherworld of Calico Ghost Town deep within the Mojave Desert.
Beckett created a significant number of animation loops which display his playfulness and also evidence his process as many are variations of ideas and images that he used in his animations. Thirty-one loops are included, selected to show the variety of approaches as well as his intriguing results. - Pamela Turner
It is said that if a man is fading away, he sees his life running quickly in front of his eyes. What does a hundred-year old film strip see before it gives way to digital vehicles? Does it see broken frames, scratched film stock or something else? This is a film about time and its ephemeral nature.
With this abstract digital video, Murata presents viewers with a field of seething colors and line, within which a suggestive, Rorschach-like formation manages to retain its structure even as it is in a constant state of flux. The mesmerizing tableau that results is accompanied by a cyclical, dronelike sound track.