Humor

A distinguished looking man (performance artist Richard Layzell) is apparently trapped in an ever changing void of colour, locked in a power play with a perversely operated camera. A mute, caged, charismatic TV presenter he is by turns charming, menacing, educational, confused. At times he appears to have great powers. A voice over tells us extraordinary things - how this man is special - the first man to 'have a baby'. Hallucinogenic flash-frames punctuate the colour field to give us a view of his world's disturbing and alien futuristic logic.

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

Known for his fast-paced and hilarious videos exploring Hapa identity and Asian American media portrayal, artist Kip Fulbeck has been featured on CNN, MTV and PBS. A professor of Art at UCSB, he exhibits and performs throughout the world and is the author of several books.

Volume 1 includes: Game of Death, A Day at the Fair, Banana Split, Lilo and Me, A Man for You, Rock & Roll Pug Run and Special Feature

"Hilarious from the start." 

--Giant Robot Magazine

"The films of John Smith conduct a serious investigation into the combination of sound and image, but with a sense of humour that reaches out beyond the traditional avant-garde audience. His films and videos move between narrative and absurdity, constantly undermining the traditional relationship between the visual and the aural. By blurring the perceived boundaries of experimental film, fiction and documentary, Smith never delivers what he has led the spectator to expect."

—Mark Webber, Leeds International Film Festival catalogue 2000

Jim Finn's short works encompass a world of communism, dancing, karaoke and small animals.

Rescue Series is a HalfLifers project that attempts to articulate deep-seated anxieties about the loss of functionality or purpose through a series of spontaneous “crisis re-enactments.” As these fears overwhelm the psyche, the simplest and most mundane activities become potentially hazardous. The inhabitants of Rescue Series (Burns and Discenza) exist in an obsessive psychic space, where emergencies, mishaps, and training sessions are continually catalogued and explosively re-staged in a desperate and absurd attempt to restore a sense of security.

Cuevas is obsessed with the micro movements of daily life, with the border between truth and fiction, with the "impossibility" of reality. Her work relentlessly seeks out the layers of lies covering the everyday representations of reality and systematically explores the fictions of national identity and gender.