Scenes from an Island

After concluding the now-legendary public access TV series, The Pain Factory, Michael Nine embarked on a new and more subversive public access endeavor: a collaboration with Scott Arford called Fuck TV. Whereas The Pain Factory predominantly revolved around experimental music performances, Fuck TV was a comprehensive and experiential audio-visual presentation. Aired to a passive and unsuspecting audience on San Francisco’s public access channel from 1997 to 1998, each episode of Fuck TV was dedicated to a specific topic, combining video collage and cut-up techniques set to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The resultant overload of processed imagery and visceral sound was unlike anything presented on television before or since. EPISODES: Yule Bible, Cults, Riots, Animals, Executions, Static, Media, Haterella (edited version), Self Annihilation Live, Electricity.

Dislocation in time, time signatures, time as a philosophical concept, and slavery to time are some of the themes touched upon in this 9-minute experimental film, which was written, directed, and produced by Jim Henson. Screened for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in May of 1965, "Time Piece" enjoyed an eighteen-month run at one Manhattan movie theater and was nominated for an Academy Award for Outstanding Short Subject.

Egglantine loves salt on her eggs. Eggbert prefers pepper. Who blinks first in this playful Easter ritual?

When forest animals invade our cities, the world is in disarray. Office vixen Fiona struggles with her banana phone addiction. Will she succumb to it? Temperamental bunny Barbara only gives her stag sugar daddy Nestor his special massage, after he dines her and plays the big spender. This obscure short film pinpoints postmodern tropes of consumerism, eroticism, and art with an homage to the theater stage and references to literature. This work uses a fantasy language and needs no subtitles.

Experimental cartoon which unites various techniques: puppets, sand & water (ebru) animations. About friendship, love and necessity to pay attention not only to the visual appeal.

A commissioned music video for Emmit Fenn’s instrumental track, Wind.

A gang of leather-clad, powerful women take over a traditionally male domain, and hairspray, eyeliner, and bare flesh are on full display in Beth B’s music video for the Arthur Baker–produced club hit from synthpop band Dominatrix. Banned at the time of release, it was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art.

Exploring impressionistic, emotional and sensory environments found within the vast natural and urban landscapes of America. Neither image nor sound takes precedence: the two interact and combine preserving a raw sense of the discovery that field recordings and in-camera edited film rushes often yield.

William K.L. Dickson plays the violin while two men dance. This is the oldest surviving sound film where sound is recorded on the phonograph.

A young boy creates a make believe world to escape his truth, a world where, at the water's edge, beneath the shade of an ancient tree, a mother forms a perimeter to protect herself and her child from an unspeakable darkness.

Video Fanzine featuring: Half Japanese, Redd Kross with Sky Saxon as Purple Electricity, R Kern, Sonic Youth, White Flag, Psycho Daisies, Charlie Pickett, Nick Zedd, Morbid Opera More R&R, Film, Prose. Pencil numbering indicates there was a run of 600 tapes.

Perfector: Every Day Is The Same

Dancers, shown in photographic negative, perform a series of ballet moves, solos, pas de deux, larger groupings. The dancers glide and rotate untroubled by gravity against a slowly changing starfield background. Their movements are accompanied by music scored for a small ensemble of woodwind and percussion.

PSICOTRÓPICA

During a 6-hour performance and in a additional Film, REA and Yannick Mosimann dedicate themselves to the stretching of time and space based on observations of different trees. The tree, the mammoth of floral time, seems to be a gnarled, proud and place-bound existence, nevertheless in low-frequency, flowing movement. Breathing is here a symbol of time and rhythm, carrier of tonal frequencies of our vocal cords.

A stop motion/collaged based independent short film plays with the recontextualisation of memories and how time distorts them.

Türkiye’s modernization adventure is an intermittent one that carries the pains of transition from empire to republic and of geographical liminality in every aspect of culture. At the center of this arduous modernist attitude in art is İlhan Usmanbaş, who was born in 1921 in the Ottoman Empire, whose atonal music of the 1950s influenced not only the field of music but also literature. As an essay film, Modernist: Usmanbaş both traces the composer's insistence on playing 20th century music in his compositions and visual notation and follows him in the private nursing home where he lived from the age of 100 to 103. While the film records Usmanbaş's curiosity in natural history and the intellectual structure he built between music, science and mathematics with the testimonies of the last years of his life, it also makes references to modernist art in formal terms as a meta attitude.

Living in forests untouched by man, these gracious and mysterious fairies use their magical powers to send blessings upon Earth. Do not take their kindness for granted. Especially on the night when the sky opens.

Nima Yooshij (Iranian poet) for his son’s 1st birthday. He says: “my son, by now, you have seen a spring, a summer, an autumn and a winter. From this point on, everything is simply a repetition except kindness.”

A dynamic, contemporary dance performance about how it is impossible to explain your deepest wishes or desires... how these can only be expressed in dreams and sleep. In the final sequence, we see the importance of effort and hope in the dancers' attempt to escape gravity. The all-male company performs to the music of David Byrne.