Soft Science
01:03:45 | 1 DVD
Collection: Curated Compilations
Tags: Animation, Body, Future/Technology
Soft Science is a collection of video-curiosities created by artists and scientists. Behind laboratory doors are some of the most astonishing "outsider" art projects around. Autopoetic bacteria, tethered flies, ebullient nanogears - these data gems create wonder, beauty - not to mention knowledge. Artists have been mining science for years - in diverse experiments with icky substances, authority figures, and the ever-elusive idea of Reason. This unique program includes digital movies by biologists alongside contemporary video art.
"Transgressive and smart, playful and introspective, Soft Science toys with the body as organism and simulacrum. Artists who become "objects of their own experiment" perversely story themselves and their other characters in an intersection of personal experience and "scientific" representation. In the process of passing through skin, psychoanalyzing clones, and swallowing a fantasy bee (among other activities), Soft Science succeeds in collapsing, for a moment, our assumptions about subject versus object, the virtual versus the real, organism versus machine, nature versus culture."
--Juliet Davis, University of Tampa
Included Titles
“It Did It explores my fictional character's story before and after I took Prozac. I used the scientific method to self-evaluate whether or not I needed anti-depressants while demonstrating how it affected my storytelling.” --...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: autobiography |
Part science movie, part storybook, Bug Girl is an ecological fable. A young girl has lost her cat. While searching for it she accidentally swallows a bee--her journey suddenly transforms into a visual tumble through nature, biology,...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: environment, youth/childhood |
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...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: animation, photography |
Ant paths sketch a fading pheromonal portrait of a colony. This title is only available on Soft Science.
Collection: Single Titles |
Part cloning experiment, part documentary, Stories from the Genome follows an unnamed CEO-geneticist whose company sequenced the Human Genome in 2003 - a genome that secretly was his own. Not satisfied with this feat, the scientist self-...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: aging, body, death and dying, future/technology, science |
Steve Seid of Pacific Film Archive calls it, “An episodic adventure about extra-evolutionary transformation. Organized as 'lesson plans’, this unique work is an ambitious tutorial for the neo-nauts of inner space." This title is only...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: body, performance |
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...
Collection: Single Titles Tags: animation, architecture, experimental film |
The Soft Science “Cinema of Attractions” is a series of short movies by scientists. Commission and concept by Rachel Mayeri, electronic compositions and musical accompaniment by Joe Milutis....
Collection: Single Titles Tags: documentary, science |
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