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