Animation

For 200 Nanowebbers, Semiconductor have created a molecular web that is generated by Double Adaptor's live soundtrack. Using custom-made scripting, the melodies and rhythms spawn a nano scale environment that shifts and contorts to the audios resonances. Layers of energetic hand drawn animations, play over the simplest of vector shapes that form atomic scale associations. As the landscape flickers into existence by the light of trapped electron particles, substructures begin to take shape and resemble crystalline substances.

A Day for Cake and Accidents features a cast of animal characters — each of a different, though often indeterminate, species — who struggle with impending astrological despair and engage in absurdist dialogs, confessing various melancholic desires and transgressive secrets in poetic cartoon abjection.

A Day for Cake and Accidents is the third in a series of short collaborative animations.

A Day for Cake and Accidents features a cast of animal characters — each of a different, though often indeterminate, species — who struggle with impending astrological despair and engage in absurdist dialogs, confessing various melancholic desires and transgressive secrets in poetic cartoon abjection.

A Day for Cake and Accidents is the third in a series of short collaborative animations.

An animation developed from the collective experiences of a diverse group of LGBTQIA+ people to create a narrative. The result is a queer valentine having a fever dream.

A promotional vehicle with lane-changing tendencies, but both hands kept on the wheel at all times.

First video in The Variations cycle.

Computer graphics by Dan Sandin and colleagues.

Concept by George Francis, Louis Kauffman, Dan Sandin 
Computer graphics by Chris Hartman, John Hart –Dance: Jan Heyn Cubacub
Edited by Dana Plepys
Music by Sumit Das

A ship sets sail on an epic voyage through malignant natural and supernatural elements from which one man alone survives. An adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner illustrated by19th Century wood engravings which are animated by scratching directly into the surface of color filmstock.

Presented as a fictional documentary, the sound film All the Time in The World sees the millions of years that have shaped and formed the land, played out at the speed of sound.

Semiconductor have reanimated Northumbria's epic landscape using data recordings from the archives at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh. This data of local and distant seismic disturbances has been converted to sound and used to reveal and bring to life the constantly shifting geography around us.

Stop action animation, ink on glass.

A significant amount of the hand-drawn animation seen on television today is cartooned in sweatshop-like animation factories in Korea, China, and the Philippines. The writers and animators who form Animaquiladora sharpened their skills in one such factory located in Tijuana, Mexico. After years of animating logos for the American talk show Regis and Kathie Lee, Lalo Lopez and Alex Rivera escaped from the hellish sweatshop of Tijuana to seek better lives in Los Angeles and New York.

With the Watergate hearings as a backdrop, quotes from various newspapers and magazines--including the story of Robert Smithson's death in a plane crash--build a picture of the confusing and tragic events of July 1973. Sonnier uses appropriated footage and reproduced newspaper clippings to create a richly layered video that attempts to sort out the truth from the available information. Sonnier's instructions to the computer operator reference the making of the video, and thereby create a self-conscious, limiting frame.

Concentrating on abstract shapes and color value, Animation 2 is a record of images manipulated through computer animation. By recording the data screens of the animators and the voices of the controllers, Sonnier discloses the process of making the video.

“This tape is about media, and it seems totally unedited, because we hear him talking over the intercom with the engineer… The engineer interjects, ‘Do you want to save any of this stuff?’ Yes, indeed; Sonnier saves and shows it all, the whole process.”

For four years in the 1860’s, half of the United States was held hostage by an unrecognized white supremacist republic. Shot on 16mm in national military parks, swamps, forests and the suburban sprawl across the former battlefields, the film follows General Grant’s path liberating the southern United States. Part travelogue, part essay film, part landscape documentary, it moves from the Texas-Louisiana border to a prison island off the coast of New England.

This animation short translates Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy - Inferno into a catastrophic narrative about the environment. Incorporating extinct wildlife and vegetation, the animation aims to create a parallel between Dante’s depiction of 9 worlds of hell and the probable outcomes of climate change.

A psychedelic portrait of the founding theorist of Christianity.

The story of Paul the Apostle’s life, ideology, and influence is told by piecing together 20th century 16mm and cassette propaganda, board games, animation, reenactments, Roman Empire doom metal and covers of Catholic liturgical music. The gentle Paul themes of flute, acoustic guitar, and mellotron contrast with the Demonic Roman Empire themes of electric guitar, drums and synth. Performance artist Linda Mary Montano and Usama Alshaibi portray Paul on his journey.

Nine micro-essays on animation and death--with many appearances including Goethe, Pink Floyd and Bambi--leads to a final encounter and introduction.

An episodic adventure highlighting the riff between mind and body. Through a series of animated narratives, role reversals and associations, images are driven out and stacked one on top another. "A best friend is like a four leaf clover: hard to find and lucky to have. But I'm beginning to wonder if he knows something the rest of us don't."

Stop action animation, paint on a single canvas.

To make this animation, I painted scenes of my daily commute from memory and photographed them. Each frame was painted on top of the previous one, each scene triggering the following scene. I collected sounds from the places and environments I painted and edited them together with the captured frames to realize the piece.

— Ezra Wube

This title is also availble on Ezra Wube Videoworks: Volume 1

Kentridge's hauntingly beautiful series of animated black and white drawings brings viewers into the artist's unconscious.

This title is only available on Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image.

Babeldom is a city so massive and growing at such a speed that soon, it is said, light itself will not escape its gravitational pull. How can two lovers communicate, one from inside the city and one outside? This is an elegy to urban life, against the backdrop of a city of the future, a portrait assembled from film shot in modern cities all around the world and collected from the most recent research in science, technology and architecture.

"It’s a complex architectural vision equal parts awesome and terrifying… This is a film – and city – to get lost in."

The Bats details the mating habits of flying mammals in an abandoned Mayan temple in the 14th Century.

This title is only available on Soft Science.

BE CAREFUL KYLE was produced over a few days shortly before Jacob Ciocci and Kent Lambert discussed their work with Scott Wolniak in a webinar for the University of Chicago's Local Produce series. Jacob sent some clips to Kent, who roughed out a basic structure and added an improvised guitar score. Jacob finished the piece off with some motion graphics and image processing magic. The video owes its tone to the general dread and paranoia of the early pandemic lockdown, and to the consolatory pleasure of first-time collaboration.

BE CAREFUL KYLE was produced over a few days shortly before Jacob Ciocci and Kent Lambert discussed their work with Scott Wolniak in a webinar for the University of Chicago's Local Produce series. Jacob sent some clips to Kent, who roughed out a basic structure and added an improvised guitar score. Jacob finished the piece off with some motion graphics and image processing magic. The video owes its tone to the general dread and paranoia of the early pandemic lockdown, and to the consolatory pleasure of first-time collaboration.

"Presented in seven parts, Beauty Plus Pity considers the potential for goodness amidst the troubled relations between God, humanity, animals, parents and children... (it) contemplates the shame and beauty of existence; it is part apologia, part call to arms."

— Duke & Battersby

Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.

"Presented in seven parts, Beauty Plus Pity considers the potential for goodness amidst the troubled relations between God, humanity, animals, parents and children... (it) contemplates the shame and beauty of existence; it is part apologia, part call to arms."

— Duke & Battersby

Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.

In Blood & Cinnamon Mott’s creatures discuss existential crises as they flip and rotate and disappear from view.

--F News Magazine, December, 2010

Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.

In Blood & Cinnamon Mott’s creatures discuss existential crises as they flip and rotate and disappear from view.

--F News Magazine, December, 2010

Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.

In this moment when the believability of our reality continues to stretch - blue people are hoping to enter into our reality environment.

In English, Chinese, Haudenosaunee, and Spanish. This video is originally a 2-channel video installation.

In this moment when the believability of our reality continues to stretch - blue people are hoping to enter into our reality environment.

In English, Chinese, Haudenosaunee, and Spanish. This video is originally a 2-channel video installation.

This classical animation explores personal memory, associations and atmosphere.

"I remember from the other room I could hear you violently buttering bread. I secretly hoped that I could be your next victim."

"Barry Doupé's lusty A Boy on a Dock Blowing His Nose features vaguely articulated, quasi-human doodles and Spirographs animated within a bizarre netherworld of its own humid imagination."

--Images Festival, 2005 catalog

"The content of the rogue computer animation Boy/Analysis is perfectly illustrated by the integral title, namely, a drastic abbreviation of Melanie Klein's 1961 key study on child psychology. The initial 93 sessions the psychoanalyst booked with a ten-year-old boy, are reduced down to 16 by Reinke, and thoroughly illuminated. Tumbling around, appearing and disappearing against a black background, are text fragments. A score from Benjamin Britten orchestrates this semantic ballet in which the most arbitrary associations can be made.

Das KunstKabinett or the Cabinet of Curiosities is a 'microcosm' or theater of the world, a memory theater which provides solace and a retreat for contemplation.

If asked to say what this work is about in one word, the answer — which is woven into the electronic musique concrète soundtrack — would be a Joycean one: it’s a “collideorscape.” The imagery is a return to materials Rankus dealt with as a young man in the video Naked Doom (1983). He has recycled imagery such as cages, a toy robot, and brain convolutions; newer motifs include a winged ballerina, Victorian corsets, and alchemical vessels containing birds.

My contribution to the group exhibition 1d for Abroad at Tintype gallery: a perky 4 minute consideration (made up) of a whole lot of postcards.

A Child Already Knows is a short film that describes a child’s retelling of an escape from Shanghai disguised as a family vacation through the south. Half-remembered scenes of a historical cusp are recalled alongside a montage of appropriated early Mao-era children’s animations of the same era. The work assembles fragmentary memories and images that must be conjured through the mind, in lieu of historical reenactments too costly to make and made impossible in a place of no return.

China Town traces copper mining and production from an open pit mine in Nevada to a smelter in China, where the semi-processed ore is sent to be smelted and refined. Considering what it actually means to "be wired" and in turn, to be connected, in today's global economic system, the video follows the detailed production process that transforms raw ore into copper wire--in this case, the literal digging of a hole to China--and the generation of waste and of power that grows in both countries as byproduct.

China, Beijing, I Love You! is an animated film about extraction of nickel and cobalt along China's Maritime Silk Road. The film focuses on the character of NICKEL DUST who is exiled from her home in Sulawesi Island due to nickel excavations there. On the other side of the world, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, cobalt is being extracted by artisanal miners. Both nickel and cobalt are the main components of batteries used in Electric Vehicle(EV) and mobile phones.

The Colors that Combine to Make White are Important explores the power structure within a failing Japanese glass factory. Two parallel story lines involving the investigation of a suspected employee and that of a stolen painting converge to reveal an exposition on gender and desire.

The small cruelties of a subliminal fog roll in.  A pandemic thwarts intimacy. Perched from their little planets, this cast of wildly colorful creatures question their futures and navigate the longing for connection.

This is the fifth collaboration between Jessie Mott and Steve Reinke.

The small cruelties of a subliminal fog roll in.  A pandemic thwarts intimacy. Perched from their little planets, this cast of wildly colorful creatures question their futures and navigate the longing for connection.

This is the fifth collaboration between Jessie Mott and Steve Reinke.

"A cast of computer-generated, quasi-human smears star in a Gothic Western about Oedipal anxiety--when they aren't careening through a hyper-modern metropolis and babbling in German."

--Images Festival, 2006 catalogue

Earthmoves is a continuation of Semiconductor's exploration into how unseen forces affect the fabric of our world.  The limits of human perception are exposed, revealing a world which is unstable and in a constant state of animation as the forces of acoustic waves come into play on our surroundings.    

The fourth collaboration between Jessie Mott and Steve Reinke continues its melancholic musings on desire and mourning, this time with more twerking. Hypnotic backgrounds and eccentric animals lend to its psychedelic children's cartoon vibe, and the signature Madonna and Stockhausen soundtrack enhances the desperation for paradise among those extra long tongues and snake-y bodies.

The fourth collaboration between Jessie Mott and Steve Reinke continues its melancholic musings on desire and mourning, this time with more twerking. Hypnotic backgrounds and eccentric animals lend to its psychedelic children's cartoon vibe, and the signature Madonna and Stockhausen soundtrack enhances the desperation for paradise among those extra long tongues and snake-y bodies.

Encoded Facial Gesture #1 is a frame-by-frame animation of two mouth gestures that have been encoded into ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchanges) to spell out a brief text by Sigmund Freud on paranoia.

This title is also available on Les LeVeque Videoworks: Volume 1.

An animation that combines narrative experimentation with the abstraction of motion capture about two groups of misfit hackers in a city of traffic. They speak a language of advertising, corporate branding and self-help, while engaging in a battle to control traffic lights. The discovery that the entire social code is embedded in the access code that regulates traffic lights, begins a twisted ride of cultural espionage techniques. These techniques include surveillance cameras and costumes, as they attempt to untangle the social codes of characters caught in an endless rush hour.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

Animals debate the sticky subject of body dysmorphia and the merits of reconstructive surgery in this short animation.  

"Jessie Mott wrote the script for this, recorded the voices and made the drawings.  I constructed the soundtrack and animated her drawings."
--Steve Reinke

Animals debate the sticky subject of body dysmorphia and the merits of reconstructive surgery in this short animation.  

"Jessie Mott wrote the script for this, recorded the voices and made the drawings.  I constructed the soundtrack and animated her drawings."
--Steve Reinke

Inspired by an unaccomplished personal project, in this animation, I’m exploring ideas of intention, extension, and failed romanticism. I used images and texts from mass-produced postcards, packaging, calendar booklets, books, posters, and pamphlets that were created and used as political propaganda devices for the invasion of Ethiopia by Fascist Italy during WWII. Some of these prints were on the front covers of school notebooks, some were games that taught the geography, history, and natural resources of Ethiopia.

The filmmaker accepts the challenge of the philosopher and changes not only a table but also chairs, shoes, jugs, teapots and almost everything else lying around his house.

"What prevents me from supposing that this table either vanishes or alters its shape when no one is observing it and then when someone looks at it again changes back? But one feels like saying – who is going to suppose such a thing?"

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969)

Using the Islington Gazette and local pigeons as my guides I strolled, re-strolled, and strolled some more along the Essex Road: updown, downup. Paving stones, buses. Railings railings railings. More buses. Abandoned dummies and mystery blotching on the concrete – is that gum or lichen? – as shadows sundial the day away.

A combination of live action, stop motion and table top animation – my contribution to Essex Road IV draws on the glee of motion through cinematic artifice: a 25 fps flick book of a film.

Stop action animation on a single canvas, exploring the idea of pluralism through autobiography.

This title is also availble on Ezra Wube Videoworks: Volume 1

A newsletter that turned into a film about hands (fast forwarding through slow times).

Second video in The Variations cycle.

A buoyant character struggles with hazards in a cloudy gray environment in this animation inspired by the Dylan Thomas poem Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed. The look of the entire animation is shades of gray.

Fragments of Motion Capture data from two dancers were used to drive physical simulations of cloth, smoke, particles and fluids along with geometry for all the 4 “characters.”

Dancers: Michael Walsh and Maribeth Maxa

"Starring an inflatable wig holder that I got at a car boot sale in Bremen, Germany, this film began as a demonstration of different film animation techniques, but evolved into a bizarre improvised narrative in which the head escapes from the violent clutches of a mixed-up model girl, is sent to Poland in a wicker basket, where it has a nice holiday (I took it on holiday to Poland with me and animated it in the countryside), and finally returns on the ferry."

-- Jennet Thomas

Super 8 film, cut-out animation, model and object animation.

"Here is Everything presents itself as a message from The Future, as narrated by a cat and a rabbit, spirit guides who explain that they've decided to speak to us via a contemporary art video because they understand this to be our highest form of communication. Their cheeky introduction, however, belies the complex set of ideas that fill the remainder of the film. Death, God, and attaining and maintaining a state of Grace are among the thematic strokes winding their way through the piece, rapturously illustrated with animation, still and video imagery." 

"Here is Everything presents itself as a message from The Future, as narrated by a cat and a rabbit, spirit guides who explain that they've decided to speak to us via a contemporary art video because they understand this to be our highest form of communication. Their cheeky introduction, however, belies the complex set of ideas that fill the remainder of the film. Death, God, and attaining and maintaining a state of Grace are among the thematic strokes winding their way through the piece, rapturously illustrated with animation, still and video imagery." 

Hidirtina (Sisters) is based on a mythology from Eritrea and northern Ethiopia. It is part of a larger story collection project that began in 2004. Folklorist Alan Dundes describes mythology as "a story that serves to define the fundamental worldview of a culture by explaining aspects of the natural world and delineating the psychological and social practices and ideals of a society". For this project, I sent out an open call for folklore to a Habesha diaspora (Ethiopian and Eritrean) New York City community email group.

A journey into the centre of Hell; Dante's The Divine Comedy, illustrated by Gustav Dore's wood engravings and animated by scratching directly into the surface of the film. 

In i am wise enough to die things go (2023), Syms explores the idea of psychosis through an unnamed protagonist reciting a monologue. Responding to the work of iconic animator Chuck Jones, Syms transfers the form and narrative structure of an animated short into live-action. Working with the inherent challenges and restrictions brought about by this sort of translation, she delves into both the breaking up of images and the breakdown of the psyche.

Does she ever! A tiny gem that utilises paper animation and a snippet of sound to humorous, kitschy effect.

This short animation explores various ways to narrate an incident that once took place in the mythical Hotel Carlton. Against images of the deserted hotel today, the artist sketches situations that evoke the rumors that once circulated around the place and the people who inhabited it.

This title is only available on Radical Closure.

Impetigo is the story of passion and possession in a steamy nocturnal landscape. The title is a reference to the poem A Man All Grown Up is Supposed To, by Terry Stokes. The characters: Zeke, an inhibited birdlike creature, Flake, a post-industrialist robot and Fish, a fish, live in a barren tract amidst surveillance and entrapment. Their main concerns are lust and what to do on weekends.

A young girl buys a weird toy from a charity shop. She forms such an intense relationship with it that it develops special ways of communicating and a strange connection to her that seems to defy the laws of physics. As the situation escalates, it seems that repression is the only way forward. First conceived of as a kind of fairy tale that goes wrong, this is a piece about learning the “rules” of grown-up reality and an extrapolation of the consequences of “over-identifying” with toys. A digital video with digital video effects, live-action, and model/object animation.

"A chamber drama set in the confines of an apartment’s sun room, this video further explores visual themes and obsessions found in my earlier works and adds in a few new ones for good measure. Earlier motifs seen here are lightbulbs in pendulum movement, tabletop antics with simple household objects, Christo-like fleshy textures, sketchbook pages torn from their binders, book pages, bookshelves, and flowers. I play a vaguely Walter Mitty-ish figure, who imagines himself as a conductor, as Orpheus, and as conflicted characters in a Greta Garbo movie.

These five short videos introduce Judy, a paper maché puppet who ruminates on her position in society. Like Judy, of the famous Punch and Judy puppet duo, Benning’s Judy seems to experience the world from the outside, letting things happen to her rather than making things happen around her.

This title is also available on Sadie Benning Videoworks: Volume 3.

In the second part of the Classics Exposed series, a neurotic scholar (Gibbons) leads a "buggy" ride tour through historic Charleston where, according to the professor, Franz Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis after taking a wrong turn on his way to Hollywood. Live-action with six-legged animation.

This title is also available on Emily Breer: Classics Exposed.

La Mesa explores the intersections of memory, identity and queer desire. It recreates fragmented and romanticized stories of a childhood in rural Mexico as told by the artist’s father. These disjointed vignettes are interwoven with queered reenactments of scenes from popular culture. The artist casts himself in the old Mexican films and American Westerns he grew up watching with his family in California. He appears as the romantic lead opposite the male actors, including Pedro Infante, Mexican national hero and the filmmaker’s childhood crush.

"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances" wrote Oscar Wilde. Lay Bare is a composite portrait of the human body, revealing it as it is only rarely seen in the most intimate relationships we have with our family or our lovers -- erotic and comic, beautiful and vulnerable.

Music, sound design and mixed by Andy Cowton

Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.

Lesser Apes tells the story of a love affair between a primatologist, Farrah, and a female bonobo ape, Meema. Bonobos are the species with which humans share the most DNA, but unlike our species, they are matriarchal, live without conflict, and are unabashedly sexual. A paean to perversion, the film combines animation, live action and song to challenge attitudes about sex, language and our relationship to nature.

Lesser Apes tells the story of a love affair between a primatologist, Farrah, and a female bonobo ape, Meema. Bonobos are the species with which humans share the most DNA, but unlike our species, they are matriarchal, live without conflict, and are unabashedly sexual. A paean to perversion, the film combines animation, live action and song to challenge attitudes about sex, language and our relationship to nature.

Unable to locate the grave of Letine—leader of a 19th century acrobatic cycling troupe (and buried locally)—I went home and wondered.

And then I made this film.

Equal parts experimental animation, stylised domestic drama, and autobiography accompanied by reflections on mortality, filmmaking, and magic. Plus more.

— Paul Tarragó

In this 2013 interview, experimental animator and School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumna Jodie Mack discusses the developments that have taken her from an interest in musical theater and playwriting to organizing microcinemas and DIY filmmaking.

Mack describes her interest in early cinema history and the relationship between its technologies and spectacle, particularly the manner in which video production incorporates planned obsolescence. Referring to the “scavenger nature” of her work, Mack discusses her interest in waste and her desire to use reclaimed materials in her work. Using fabric and paper to create shifting fields of color, Mack references corroded and glitched digital media in her work. Her use of quotidian materials reflects upon the role of abstract animation in everyday life, and serves to draw audience awareness to the spectacle of televisual technology.

– Kyle Riley

Prestidigitation before the age of the pixel. Very lively stop motion and open shutter piece, shot on Super 8, with all effects done in camera – but transferred to video for ease of viewing.

The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries. All action takes place around NASA's Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries. Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent 'whistlers' produced by fleeting electrons. Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?

In the spell of one of the most exquisite pop songs I know, with the most rudimentary of animation skills, I sought to produce a smooth and rapid transition from innocuous kindergarten silliness to faux-Lynchian horror. As with Gaijin, I exploited the then-novel Google image search heavily for this video.

A journey through home life where hope hangs by a tangle of fine and fragile threads.
A document of insecurity coming to rest on distinctly shaky ground.
An 8 minute video in which few answers are supplied, but much meaning is gathered along the way.

Displaying a broad range of Golden Age Hollywood animation, Manifestoon is an homage to the latent subversiveness of cartoons. Though U.S. cartoons are usually thought of as conveyors of capitalist ideologies of consumerism and individualism, Drew observes: "Somehow as an avid childhood fan of cartoons, these ideas were secondary to a more important lesson—that of the 'trickster' nature of many characters as they mocked, outwitted and defeated their more powerful adversaries.

Combining collage and animation with an Asian-influenced soundtrack, images of women dancing sensually and devotional imagery, Matsushima Ondo compares religious devotion with sexual representation. The viewer is invited to make connections and recognize the irony in some of the similarities.

A post-apocalyptic computer animated vision of humanity lost in an industrial wasteland, Maxwell's Demon was animated on a low-cost, consumer computer model - an IBM PC. The tape takes its title from an early 20th-century physics theory postulating the existence of an impossible intelligence, a being that knew the exact location, energy, and direction of every particle in the entire universe - something akin to your home computer, but a lot bigger."

Jacqueline Goss and Jenny Perlin retrace the journey of two 18th-century astronomers tasked with determining the true length of the meter. From the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel, The Measures explores the metric system’s origins during the violence and upheavals of the French Revolution. Along the way, Goss and Perlin consider the intertwining of political and personal turmoil, the failures of standardization, and the subtleties of collaboration.

Jacqueline Goss and Jenny Perlin retrace the journey of two 18th-century astronomers tasked with determining the true length of the meter. From the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel, The Measures explores the metric system’s origins during the violence and upheavals of the French Revolution. Along the way, Goss and Perlin consider the intertwining of political and personal turmoil, the failures of standardization, and the subtleties of collaboration.

In this piece I am exploring the idea of belonging by tracing the outline of the shifting skyline. Through imagination, learning, and a continuous adjustment, I strive to relate the communal with personal identity.

— Ezra Wube

This title is also availble on Ezra Wube Videoworks: Volume 1

A Memory of Astoria, commissioned for Museum of the Moving Image, is an impressionistic portrait of the blocks surrounding the Museum in Astoria, New York. Artist Ezra Wube walked the neighborhood to observe the area’s confluence of cultures, focusing on everyday moments, sights, and sounds. He reconstituted these experiences into a poetic visual collage, inserting himself as a silhouetted observer exploring the memories of his walks.

Based on Emanuel Admassu's essay Menged Merkato, an architectural analysis and historical journey of the largest open-air market in Africa, located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Merkato was developed during the Italian occupation of Addis Ababa to segregate the markets of the locals and the newcomers. Unlike the earlier circular formation which centered the royal palace, Merkato was built on a grid which allowed for a dispersed flow facilitating dynamic interactions and exchanges.

In this reinterpretation of the mikveh — a purifying ritual bath performed by Jewish brides about to marry — the filmmaker and his husband’s immersions are disrupted by a government who refuses to recognize their marriage. While the couple is required, again and again, to prove their relationship legally exists, the mikveh they share helps them overcome unforgiving bureaucracies and return to what truly matters.

A brief glimpse of a confessional detour during a pictorial drift.

Faced with the possibility of return, the dead consider their next move. Whilst hesitation holds sway at the point where here meets there, others from the non-corporeal realm venture forth… An experimental narrative tale with live action, animation + pathos. 

Winner of the Kodak Cinematography Prize at NYUFF.

“This Super-8 jewel from the prodigal Tarragó masterfully considers the state of loneliness and things inbetween.”    
–Antimatter

The everyday performance of domestic labor is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers.

In this world, motion capture technology translates movement into data that can be unbound from the human body. Yvonne’s No Manifesto becomes a framework for understanding the existential impact of this new dataset. What happens to movement when it is divorced from affect and feeling? What happens to dance without the basic premise of embodiment and breath?

A newsletter meets home movie, made by an experimental filmmaker who was constructing a paper mâché skeleton but whose leg (the filmmaker’s) suddenly went wrong. It got fixed, but (spoiler alert) that’s just kind of incidental. 

Possibly a diary but probably not a documentary: this is a play with form, animated with glee, edited with joy.

Nebula is a hallucinogenically immersive spectacle: a complex, long-form audio-visual composition, which pays playful homage to science fiction fantasies. Captured for video by means of stop-motion photography, objects made of glass, glitter and tulle, are nestled within a kaleidoscopic flow of computer-generated imagery. Drawing from Thomas Wilfred's Clavilux color organs as well as experimental abstract filmmakers such as Mary Ellen Bute, and James and John Whitney, Nebula also recalls liquid light shows and the marvelous sightings of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Nebula is a hallucinogenically immersive spectacle: a complex, long-form audio-visual composition, which pays playful homage to science fiction fantasies. Captured for video by means of stop-motion photography, objects made of glass, glitter and tulle, are nestled within a kaleidoscopic flow of computer-generated imagery. Drawing from Thomas Wilfred's Clavilux color organs as well as experimental abstract filmmakers such as Mary Ellen Bute, and James and John Whitney, Nebula also recalls liquid light shows and the marvelous sightings of the Hubble Space Telescope.

This episode includes: two more adverts, considerations of the future, a multiple projection spectacular in miniature, a riverine jaunt, much fog, and an ending x 2.

This is the fourth and final episode in The Variations cycle.

Made using voicemails the Kuchar brothers left on her home answering machine, the artist reveals George and Mike in all their candid honesty leading up to and following George’s untimely death in 2011. McGuire floats their voices along a river of digital scribbles and her own voice in singer/songwriter mode. The beauty of the piece lies partly in how the voicemails, used as-is and chronologically, contain an entire narrative about love and loss in a DIY style reminiscent of the Kuchars.

Take a joyride through comfortable suburbia—a landscape molded by seductive television and corporate America (and keep in mind: disaster is another logo for your consumption...). This is the age of the "culture jammed" consumer preened with Friends hair, Survivor courage, and CNN awareness. A generation emptying their wallets for the most important corporate product of all: lifestyle. The psychological road trip across a slightly battered America travels at One Mile per Minute.

Oral Fixations is a single channel video installation that evolves over a seven hour time period. The project is a darkly humorous look at a habit of endless consumption and the resulting accumulation of waste. A narrative gradually emerges from the on-screen action that depicts a large mouthed character who dances while flossing its one protruding tooth. A conveyor belt regularly delivers factory-farm fresh hams that the character delights in taking one large bite from and then tossing aside.

The expansive cycles of time vs. the ever smaller circles of life under lockdown. Includes: a journey to the river, some rat facts, more adverts, anagrams, and a noticeable build up of ideas.

Third video in The Variations cycle.

Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing aftermath destroyed Noel's community and home. He is rebuilding, and as he rebuilds, he evokes the past through the enlistment of his personal archives. His memories are complicated by the tragic events that occurred on the Danziger Bridge on September 4th 2005. As Noel reflects back on what has been lost, the story that he tells about his neighborhood is affected by the story of innocent people gunned down while attempting to cross a bridge in search of safety, and for Noel their plight clarify many things.

A high and low fidelity record of obsessions past and present. A hooded man named Cobra Commander (drawn naked) and a boy with black glasses. A fanged woman named Shadow-La and a girl in a rose colored wig. Belinda (Heaven on Earth), Madonna (Live to Tell), and headphones (worn naked). An airport terminal. Home. The Montgomery Ward catalog circa 1980. That orange bedspread, that red flowered couch.

The orchestra begins and a male and female dancer move from opposite sides of the stage. The dancers embrace and begin the White Swan pas de deux from the ballet Swan Lake. However this is not the ballet as it is normally performed. The choreography has been re-staged so that in every single frame the two original dancers have been replaced by the bodies of four new dancers. The movement remains continuous, the characteristics of the dancers’ movements and gestures the same, but in each frame a different person occupies the dancers’ body spaces.

This feature-length video follows several inflicted characters and recounts the ways in which they find resolve. A series of entropic scenarios held together by an attraction to failure and its spectacle describe the characters' malfunction - their inability to fulfill personal desire. Compelled by the consequences and rewards of their attempts they question their own trajectory. Using elements of melodrama, performative monologue and traditional narrative structure Ponytail presents a unique society of characters that destroy the distinction between memory and invention.

This real-time video-meets-digital-animation trilogy of shorts features the highly excited and mildly delusional Joe Gibbons, whose springboard becomes a surfboard as he fantasizes about his days as a lifeguard in 1963, when the young Brian Wilson would sit and jot down the songs he would sing while saving lives.

Created and commissioned for Little Sun, Fast Forward short film series exploring a sustainable world. For this project over 100 interviews were conducted in five destinations throughout Ethiopia; teachers, brokers, farmers, students, engineers, carpenters, soldiers, merchants, taxi drivers, cashiers, security guards, housewives, managers, nurses, designers, cameramen, accountants, pharmacists, architects, mechanics, technicians, retirees, and more.

A short animation commissioned for Peter Burr’s touring media project Special Effect connecting Tarkovsky’s Stalker to its original text Roadside Picnic by the Strugatski Brothers.

If second lives have grown into the landscape of social network space and avatars engage a full range of human emotions and experience, it follows that they would eventually encounter existential questions. A plot of land is purchased in the online network of SecondLife and a simple questions is asked: Where do discarded 3D objects go and can we build a dumpster to accommodate them? To find out eteam set aside a year to let this virtual land use problem unfold and what is captured in Prim Limit is the lived experience of avatars managing and recording this dumpster.

Primavera is a frenetic experimental animation that documents the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests as they intersect in springtime Brooklyn. Shot during isolation on a phone, the video explores the effects of imposed distance on touch and intimacy, the proximity of an invisible virus and invisible deaths, and the revolt against the racist, corrupt systems that commodify, exploit and render their most vulnerable citizens disposable.

Animation of a 1967 constructivist sculpture by Hans Breder.

Re-Animation 3,4, & 2 are short animations created by looping images of dead insects taken from the artist’s own amateur entomological collections. Each frame of video within a loop is an image of a separate insect in its own distinct contortion. The variety of contortions, coupled with the similarity between insects of the same species, creates the stop motion movement of an individual insect in the final video.

Based on a set of drawings that depict George W. Bush's administration as wounded soldiers in the war against terrorism, RE:THE_OPERATION explores the sexual and philosophical dynamics of war through the lives of the members as they physically engage each other and the "enemy." Letters, notes, and digital snapshots "produced" by the members on their tour of duty become the basis of video portraits that articulate the neuroses and obsessions compelling them toward an infinite war.

Red House is an animation that playfully explores metamorphosis in relation to the stability and structure of housing. Created using the AMIGA computer console and Deluxe Paint IV software, hand drawn sequences delight in the constant reconfiguration of images, characters and forms.

Animated by Barry Doupé
With sound design by James Whitman

The fleeting memories of a melting infant – live action, animation and re-photography (through ice).

Bookended by moments of kitsch, the main section of ‘RFAIB’ - which makes up 3/4 of the film’s running time - suddenly takes a decidedly more experimental tack. Here’s how and why… 

Having read in Visionary Film how Ken Jacobs went around his apartment projecting a 16mm print of Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart.

Steve Reinke has long been lauded for his irreverent, philosophical, and often acerbic works, which typically adopt the form of personal essays to wryly bend and reread wide-ranging topics, from pop culture, to sex, to theories of visual perception and beyond. Reinke’s video, included in the 2014 Biennial, Rib Gets in the Way, is narrated in the first person by Reinke, and addresses mortality, the body, the archive, and the embodiment of a life’s work.

To the background of village celebrations a father questions his daughter about a suspected lover. She cleverly deflects him with her answers but the passions rise, the villagers take sides and what began as harmless banter becomes bitter and angry. Inarticulate with rage the father mounts his horse and the male villagers set out to begin a cycle of violence seemingly without end. In this traditional Nordic song a pattern of developing and irrevocable anger emerges which we are familiar with both in domestic violence and international conflict.

Separation of the (Earth by Fire) is a multi-disciplinary project that includes print collages, audio, and video. Together these works rethink the politicization of the image of the child, using David Wojnarowiczʼs “One Day This Kid Will Get Larger,” as a conceptual springboard. From pre-existing mainstream films, the video uses imagery of violent encounters between children and adults.

Small Miracles is a suite of eight video animations in which the artist conjures up and controls forces of nature. Ignoring rational constructs of what is possible, Hechtman creates imaginary works to ground science fiction in the everyday experience. Coupling feminism and natural phenomena, the videos are located in the liminal space between fantasy and the everyday.

Some Ghosts incorporates embroidery and stop-motion animation techniques to create a colorful dreamscape in which an unwitting spaceman releases angry spirits from a haunted medicine cabinet.

Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure is a fourteen-minute experimental video that unfolds through a series of short episodes. "To describe Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke's new video as ironic doesn't do it justice.

Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure is a fourteen-minute experimental video that unfolds through a series of short episodes. "To describe Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke's new video as ironic doesn't do it justice.

Prophecies of doom, disaster and political catastrophe envisioned by some of the world’s most famous psychics between the 1960’s and the year 2001 are conjured up through 3D-animation, industrial films, text and historical footage -- the sum of which combine to form a visually stunning meditation on the forces that are driving us into a dark, paranoid and uncertain future. Soothsayer reconsiders yesterday’s daunting and sometimes whimsical predictions for the future after they’ve been outpaced by time. 

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

A radical reworking of an etching by Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, brought to life by engraving fame by frame into the photographic emulsion of color filmstock. The viewer is taken on a journey through the etching, accompanied by the sounds that the artist might have heard from his window as he worked.

In Stitch, computer graphics are altered with image processing effects. Beeps and electronic music provide a soundtrack as abstract structures and evolving shapes and patterns rotate in space. About halfway through the video, the music takes on a jazz and blues quality and at the end, Tom Defanti, a collaborator of Phil Morton’s, introduces an event with thanks to the artists and other people who made it possible.

They say there are only two stories in the world: man goes on a journey, and stranger comes to town.

Six people are interviewed anonymously about their experiences coming into the U.S. Each then designs a video game avatar who tells their story by proxy. Goss focuses on the questions and examinations used to establish identity at the border, and how these processes in turn affect one's own sense of self and view of the world.

Animation by Dan Sandin
Algorithms by John Hart and Yumei Dang
Programming by Dan Sandin and Shalini Venkataraman 
Visionary Leadership by Tom DeFanti
Mathematical leadership by Louis Kauffman
Music Composition and Performance by Stephan Vankov

Produced at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, UIC, and Calit2, UCSD

The set of Bewitched is a spiritual battleground of overlapping zones — human, alien and cyborg — in Bobby Abate's latest ontological mystery film.

Tender Bodies is a 3-D computer animation that uses the logic of computer games to collapse and reconstruct narrative space. Narrative scenes are connected through a constantly shifting environment of bridges and tunnels. The inhabitants of this landscape are genetically or cosmetically altered. They like to eat and go to parties and experiment on things they don’t understand.

Shot in a creaky, wooden floored Parisian recording studio at an inaugural three-day “forum of ideas” focusing on the manifold possibilities of Resistance (the title of Jean-François Lyotard’s unrealized follow-up exhibition to his 1983 Les Immateriaux), occasional collaborators Ben Rivers and Ben Russell have produced what initially appears to be a structuralist document of a philosophical discussion in-the-round. This “appearance dimension” is deceptive, of course, and with the aid of an immersive 5.1 sound-mix, a Green Man, a Green-Man-shaped

Shot in a creaky, wooden floored Parisian recording studio at an inaugural three-day “forum of ideas” focusing on the manifold possibilities of Resistance (the title of Jean-François Lyotard’s unrealized follow-up exhibition to his 1983 Les Immateriaux), occasional collaborators Ben Rivers and Ben Russell have produced what initially appears to be a structuralist document of a philosophical discussion in-the-round. This “appearance dimension” is deceptive, of course, and with the aid of an immersive 5.1 sound-mix, a Green Man, a Green-Man-shaped

Experimental but heartfelt, all fiction + mostly video.

Featuring: phantoms, parakeets, some animation, much smoke, Super 8 hi-jinks, several actors.

A compilation of too-close observation, animation, and stolen moments, The Seven Wonders of the World adds an eighth: survival at the edge of the known universe — bare-plus life. 

Combining shaky close-ups and stop-frame animations, the video examines people living at the margins of the society, struggling to survive.

In order of appearance: Raymond Beaudoin, Beverly Murray, Ralph Monk, Pauline Mellor, Robert Smith.

Hatsune Miku is a co-creation platform, personified by a cute and oddly seductive animated character. Fans bring her to life by creating content that she “delivers”. Her entire persona: lyrics, music and animation – is fan created, and that's her charm. Cosplaying Hatsune Miku, Ann Oren goes to Tokyo for a performative journey among these fans and explores the Miku phenomenon as an expression of collective fantasy. The habits of Miku's fans is a familiar exaggeration of our social media habits, that flood us with crowd creativity.

The disparate chronicles of a high school wrestling team, a flooded town of aliens, and the love affair between two young men. Performers responded to individual drawings and prompts to collectively generate improvisational dialog during the Pilot Conference: Experimental Media for Feminist Trespass, in Chicago, 2004.

With Becca Taylor

The desire to own and name land and the pleasures of seeing from a distance color this personal survey of the history of mapmaking in the New World. There There Square takes a close look at the gestures of travelers, mapmakers, and saboteurs that determine how we read - and live within - the lines that define the United States.

The evolution of man from ape to yuppie flashes before the viewer amid 3-D animation, paint box images, and digital compositions while a narrator provides satiric play-by-play commentary. Conceptually, verbally and graphically, man leaps forward through the centuries to master the litany of pop clichés and consumer culture acronyms of the modern age; and yet, he's never quite free of his original grunts. 

Tugging the Worm is an allegorical film that takes place in a utopian society which has faced the prospect that complete annihilation is an ever present possibility. Cork, an innocent bird-like creature, in a militaristic world that is dominated by high fashion and flashy billboards is befriended by the not too trustworthy bad boy named Vouku. Vouku’s tendency toward violent entertainment and vehicular homicide only serve to increase Cork’s angst. After a trip to the game their attitudes are changed by a vision of angels dancing at a ho-down on the head of a needle.

Computer graphics and RT/1 programming by Dan Sandin 
Original music and audio effects by Laurie Spiegel 
Algorithms & ray-tracer by John Hart
Mathematical research by Lou Kauffman
Visual leadership by Tom DeFanti

Walt Disney's re-imagineering of Martin Scorsese's classic film Taxi Driver follows Mickey Mouse-obsessed Travis Bickle as he looks for love in a rapidly transforming New York City. A 'fair use' parody by Bryan Boyce.

"A brilliant video essay."

-- Roger Ebert

A 19th Century etching of a bedroom in the Palace of Versailles is animated and depicts the room in the midst of an earthquake. Every detail, from the moldings to the small figures in the hung paintings, trembles. Eventually all the elements — objects, furniture, decorative features — fall and pile-up on the floor. The once crowded walls are left empty, with only a few lines signifying the space. As the objects fall and break, their initial significance is questioned. The once strong, solid symbols of power and glorification fall and break to useless shreds on the floor.

I could not remember anything about my childhood before the age of twelve. I made a decision to remember. West Fingerboard Road relays how I remembered my forgotten childhood memories, and references the writings of philosopher Gilles Deleuze that echo my ideas on memory and the process of remembering.

-- Susan Youssef

More than three thousand insects appear in this film each for a single frame. As the colours glow and change across their bodies and wings it seems that the genetic programme of millions of years is taking place in a few minutes. It is a rampant creation that seems to defy the explanations of evolutionists and fundamentalists. It is like a mescalin vision dreamt by Charles Darwin.

Live action and animation adaptation of an episode from Lautréamont’s 1868 anti-novel Maldoror.

This film has led a double life: in one version it forms part of an Anglo-German feature film collaboration (see below) based upon the eponymous anti-hero. But here it stands alone, and self contained - the same source of inspiration but a different edit with all new sound.

Angel appears to Weirdo and forces a distasteful issue.

An invitation to riff on Chapter 10 in the book of Revelations resulted in this short experiment. It merges full body motion capture and facial motion capture on both characters and blends between them.

Animation by: James Duesing
Technical Animation: Jessica Hodgins
Assistant: Vidya Vinnakota
Motion Capture Actor: Freddy Miyares
Motion Capture Tech: Justin Macey
Voices: Brady Lewis, Jimmy Dee

Thanks:
Wendy Arons, Anna Houck, Michael Mallis

Created with artist Jolie Ruelle. 

You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born is a visually stunning work that follows a woman through a life characterized by damage and loss, but in which she finds humor, love, and joy. With a score that follows the span of Lenore’s life, from her birth in the early 70s to her death in the 2040s, the film takes us from moments of harrowing loss to those of poignancy and dark humor.

You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born is a visually stunning work that follows a woman through a life characterized by damage and loss, but in which she finds humor, love, and joy. With a score that follows the span of Lenore’s life, from her birth in the early 70s to her death in the 2040s, the film takes us from moments of harrowing loss to those of poignancy and dark humor.

In the next chapter of Bobby Abate’s mysterious lo-fi cyborg tale, we find ourselves roaming the set of a 1960’s evening newscast. The mysterious unearthly being has claimed a new test subject and is making use of the station’s control room in attempt to communicate and perhaps reunite with his unshaven counterpart. Zenith is a celestial space, high above the clouds, where lonely frequencies and frantic spirographs pulse the dimension that separates the real from the rendered, the now from nostalgia--and ultimately divides these two beings (alter egos or lovers?)