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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A brief glimpse of a confessional detour during a pictorial drift.
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.
The set of Bewitched is a spiritual battleground of overlapping zones — human, alien and cyborg — in Bobby Abate's latest ontological mystery film.
