M'es en abyme

Impressions about fighting the passing of time, living in a constant hurry and the uphill battle of finding the natural tempo to life itself.

Poems by some of the greatest writers of all time are brought to life through lyrical animation and readings by some of today’s most respected performers.

In a certain fishing village, a memorial service is held to burn abandoned boats, and old fishing boats that have finished their duty have a dream on the verge of death. Deep-sea fish galloping through the alleys, fishermen pulling long ropes, ghosts of screaming girls...

In a lush and lively forest lives a hedgehog. He is at once admired, respected and envied by the other animals. However, Hedgehog’s unwavering devotion to his home annoys and mystifies a quartet of insatiable beasts: a cunning fox, an angry wolf, a gluttonous bear and a muddy boar. Together, the haughty brutes march off towards Hedgehog’s home to see just what is so precious about this “castle, shiny and huge.” What they find amazes them and sparks a tense and prickly standoff.

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 spring night is a poetic film which is based on the motives of the poem by V. Lugovsky. The film is devoted to the theme of fidelity to the battle traditions of revolutionary past, to the theme of human happiness the sense of it in the battle for high ideals.

Six poems written by six young prisoners animated to tell their stories, thoughts, fears and hopes.

Loose impressionistic brushstrokes sketch a series of portraits of two faces, one male and one female, while the verse on the soundtrack tells the tale of both one and a thousand relationships.

Rubén tries to describe the color blue as "The color of dreams, of art, of the ocean and of the firmament", thereby unleashing half a century of poetry.

In a gargantuan city lurking in the sky, powerful immortals who have become jaded with eternal life. Most of their time is spent monotonously constructing bizarre and unusual objects while waiting for the ultimate gift to arrive.

The Hypergaussian Wars is an AI-generated feature-length audiovisual work exploring algorithmic warfare, obsolete media and the transformation of images through repetition, saturation and collapse. Built from thousands of generated images, synthetic landscapes and references to 14th–16th century painting, the film stages a continuous conflict between historical visual culture and contemporary computational systems. Fragments of obsolete video games, ruined architectures, military simulations and post-human figures circulate through increasingly unstable environments. Rather than telling a linear story, the film operates as an image system in which visual excess progressively erodes meaning. The Hypergaussian Wars reflects on memory, obsolescence, artificial intelligence and the persistence of images after their original function has disappeared.

Reynivellir is a representation of the transit that is generated when approaching the art work, described with visual games that can well be evoked by the same brain when witnessing the impossible figures of Jose María Yturralde. Reynivellir is also a beach in a country that is a musical sonnet, and this is so because the mental image does not always connect the articulated parts of a sensation, it is systematic, but aleatory, and it is from these notions of the field of observation, that it approaches and moves away from understanding, linking and unlinking forms, movements, sounds, sensations and knowledge.

Sunmoon is a visual experiment in "blended reality," seamlessly integrating live-action with computer-generated animation. The film follows a young woman's confrontation with her inner selves: Piper, a bionic manifestation of her doubts; Phany, an animal spirit totem; and Sunmoon, her human core. As the timer counts down, poetry and imagination become the only tools left to bridge the gap between digital isolation and human emotion.

Death follows a poet for his whole life, being a parasite to the poet.

A corridor of an apartment is transformed into a claustrophobic and vertiginous vortex that swallows and imprisons you in an infinite fall through a mise en abyme: it’s a pure enclosure inside the image world, it’s the Descent into the Maelstrom.

A cellist attempts to rescue a woman swept out to sea, only to find he must battle a series of overly possesive sea creatures.

X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.

Bits of found film and different types of animation illustrate a classic chase scene scenario: A woman is abducted and a man comes to her rescue, but during their escape they find themselves in the enemy's secret headquarters.

An animated poem about a dog, her human, and the consequences of a nasty habit.

In this mesmerizing experimental film, a Stephen King television movie is compressed and transformed through hypnotic black and white collage animation that meticulously reconstructs and reshapes its supernatural drama to an eerie and profound effect.