Animation

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

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.

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.

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

First video in The Variations cycle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

Stop action animation, ink on glass.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.