In the Dark

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.

IDFA and Canadian filmmaker Peter Wintonick had a close relationship for decades. He was a hard worker and often far from home, visiting festivals around the world. In 2013, he died after a short illness. His daughter Mira was left behind with a whole lot of questions, and a box full of videotapes that Wintonick shot for his Utopia project. She resolved to investigate what sort of film he envisaged, and to complete it for him.

This video installation explores the representation of Black bodies in the French cultural and media landscape. Jérémie Danon and Kiddy Smile bring together personalities from diverse backgrounds in cars, allowing them to share common reflections and personal experiences.

If a machine would possess a soul it might be a beach. Every single sand corn symbolizes a data-set of a memory captured in the world wide web saved deep down in the ocean. From there the bytes condense and finally reach the cloud. But how would it feel for a machine to see the glitch waves and feeling the shore stones on its case? What would be the colours of the coastline? Glitching Offshore tries to portrait the soul of an AI and the universe behind it. Glitching offshore, alike drifting away as in a psychogeographical dérive (furthermore, away from the "rive": bank) where human intentional yet chaotic action is substituted by pixels' stirrings of the soul.

Queen of the Luna Par(k)ing is a moving image produced by Sara Ferro and Chris Weil. The title itself is a combination of the element moon (from the Italian “luna” ) shining over a parking slot, where a girl is waiting for encountering someone, perhaps the king of the luna park. While acting in the gap of certainties like a lonely queen the moonshine splits its aura into the colours red/blue/yellow, interpreting the interstellar communication signals of Voyager 1 launched by the NASA in 1977. Exactly the year when the protagonist Wundersaar (Luna Queen) was born. Therefore the journey of the Voyager space probe can be seen as a metaphor for the expedition of every human being discovering the unknown in the deep space of life.

SPEED is the result of an artificial intelligence transforming bin footage into something beautiful in order to free the planet from pixel pollution. By video recycling trash shots into video art using the latest algorithm technology, visual art may help to understand our limited resources on earth and how to use them in a respectful manner. Every day we produce millions of clips sharing them on social media without even noticing anymore how much pixel garbage we create. At the same time, we produce every day millions of tons of plastic waste, polluting our environment without even noticing it anymore. SPEED wants to be a symbol of change as we are running out of time.

Skin Shade Night Day explores the daily routine and rituals practised by the artist’s Cambodian-Australian family, which are reperformed and documented through a process of embodied empathy. Acts of service, such as gardening and cooking, play out as echoes from the past across a sound and image installation displayed in a shadehouse. Spectres, shadows and aural textures conjure up impressions of a place that remembers how its inhabitants once lived.

While travelling the roads of the Quebec countryside, one often sees off-beat structures and fabulous installations. These curious constructions are the work of local people who, even with no artistic training, are compelled by an almost-visceral desire to create. This film shows us the work and everyday life of three such artists. Harshly judged by their compatriots, they face the devastating reality of living on the fringe of a society that seeks to ostracize them at all cost.

In the present work, the artists appears lying on his back, his eyes mostly closed, dreamingly listening to a walkman that plays, a recording of 'The Best of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground'. The artist can hear the music through his earphones, but as viewers we are only privy to the sound of his voice that whispers the melody. As we listen to the hypnotic interpretion of the familiar songs - as emblematic for pop music history as 'Psycho' is for film - we are forced to mentally 'reconstruct' the remaining orchestration, instrumentation and vocals. We must attempt to reassemble something we already know to be a fact by negotiating the sticky mess of interpretation, meaning, and memory.

"Three Women, is an ambitious work designed to be shown on multiple screens in a movie theater. Moving a step forward from the use of multiple screens as an expansion of cinema as exemplified by Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927), it presents what is literally a conceptual expansion of cinema in the form of a filmic work experienced in a theater in which the 15-channel, surround-sound audio constructed by Araki Masamitsu and Ito’s visuals organically intertwine."

An experimental film comprised of Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING played forwards and backwards at the same time on the same screen, creating bizarre juxtapositions and startling synchronicities.

A nameless drifter navigates a barren landscape punctuated by satellite dishes, radio towers and droning airplanes. Stopping periodically in anonymous hotel rooms, she makes attempts to connect to an unidentified second party.

CREMASTER 3 is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect...

HIDEO, It's Me, Mama is a psychological melodrama that introduces narrative and structural devices that are integral to Idemitsu's work. Exploring the flawed universe of the contemporary Japanese family, she focuses on a woman's identity as mother through mother-child and husband-wife relationships. Hideo, a young man living away from his parents, is kept under constant surveillance by his doting mother via an omnipresent television monitor. In a cogent metaphor for familial relations in the media-saturated culture of contemporary Japan, Mama can only communicate with her beloved, absent son through the video screen. Idemitsu's poignant irony is embodied in the scene in which Mama, blind to her husband's needs, caresses Hideo's video image. (Electronic Arts Intermix)

'Ki or Breathing' is a spare concoction assembled from slow motion shots of nature and set to a score by the much-acclaimed Tohru Takemitsu.

Flooded McDonald's is a new film work in which a convincing life-size replica of the interior of a McDonald's burger bar, without any customers or staff present, gradually floods with water.

TEMPORALLY tells the story of an Italian thunderstorm through the eyes of a Japanese painter. The lightning itself fusions with its environment and creates a hypnotic point of view. The sound in the video was recorded on the occasion of the exceptionally high water alert in Venice, Italy. The alarm is composed of two parts. The first was the sirene in use under bombardments during WW2, whereas the second is designed by the University of Venice and should be heard during all the sleep phases, yet not causing any panic. The images themselves were shot during multiple thunderstorms in the mountains between Lake Lugano and Lake Como. So, an interplay of salt and sweet water. Furthermore, the title TEMPORALLY is a combination of the Italian word for storm "temporale", and the word for atmospheric weather "tempo" which in English means rhythm and rally, thus a race of lightning, in the end, following in a recovery.

The Nightwatch documents an action realised by Alÿs in 2004 in which he released a fox into London’s National Portrait Gallery in the middle of the night and used the museum’s CCTV system to follow its movements. The institution was chosen because unlike other institutions it does not conceal its CCTV cameras.

SHIFTING VISIONS is a video essay that revolves around the transition between the different stages of human consciousness. From the most intense state of full attention to the most abstract and dreamlike state, passing through all its nuances. We know that the mind remains a mystery to science, but, through combining neuroscientific theory and personal perceptions, we represent these mental dynamics transferred to images, sounds and metaphors. We thoroughly analyse each of these stages to translate concepts and create audiovisual imaginaries through symbolic mental limbos. A piece that drags the viewer on an inner journey to their own lucidity.

A remarkable walk through the life and work of the French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), one of the most important creators of the 20th century, revolutionary of arts, aesthetics and pop culture.