Fascinations

A visualization of the workings of the high-frequency oscillators once used to test military sonars and medical ultrasound devices is juxtaposed with abstract illustrations of a Chinese mathematician’s differential equations, and their visualization through analogue computer processes shows the subtle exactness of changing textures.  "Technology is a deforming mirror that shows us what humans think and do. For that reason I make my work in a dialogue with machines that I develop myself, trying to learn from what they tell us." J. Rekveld

Raw film material consists in part of gelatin, which is made of the skin and bones of animals, including horses. The traces of light that shape our audiovisual dreams are thus imprinted on parts of animal bodies. Through the subtle use of audio, this found-footage collage focuses on images of the horse as an attraction, an animal of burden, and a mythological creature.  "In 1900 there were 130,000 working horses in Manhattan. Horses were a central part of our lives. Jeremy Bentham: "The question is not: can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they suffer?" M. Hoolboom  

Strictly working with the film material inside the camera, Tuohy updates slowly forgotten approaches to create a collage of architectural geometries. The monolithic nature of the image blurs the outlines of the buildings as the film frame disintegrates into grids cutting through the layers of the image in multiple exposures. The buildings depicted represent the cultures of the three main ethnic groups of Malaysia. "This film is dedicated to Paul Clipson and Robert Todd, both of whose works were specifically on my mind while filming this film in Malaysia in 2016." R. Tuohy  

Through the use of animation, the backlit photographs blend with the director’s aunt’s memories of the mountains, the local views, and the inside of the home from which she was forced into exile. The fragments of memory offer insight into life in the diaspora through architectural projects by which the aunt has recreated her native Tajikistan in her new home in Darmstadt.   "Film is grounded in found footage through the photographic, constructing an assemblage from fragments of exile. I focused on colour, texture, and materiality in both image and sound, resuturing diasporic time and space through the slowed-down gesture of animation." K. Friesen  

Desire without its object is like an image made unrecognizable by cutting out its parts; by scratching away part of the visible image, the image becomes a hole sliced into a pained body, fumbling about for what is missing, seeking physical contact and tangible proof of co-existence.  ""Exhumation" is my interpretation of the reports of Dali's death mask recently. I worked to physically peel back layers of representation to reveal disintegrated memories of figures that once were." D. McIntyre  

The melancholic atmosphere of wandering a landscape scarred by kitschy disco rainbows and colorful illustrations opens up the possibility of an extra-planetary consciousness sending a message in which references to the laws of thermodynamics and Mayan symbolism encounter critical interpretations of an expected confrontation between humanity and the cosmos.   "‘IT‘ knows." Yin-Ju Chen

Inspired by Italian Renaissance art, the filmmaker transforms news reports of protests in the Gaza Strip into a painting of people and the landscape, as if the boundaries of fields and meadows were a place for overcoming political limitations and the ability of an expansive viewpoint presented the ideal of inhabiting the visible.  "The struggle for liberation intertwines with nature rejuvenation, creating an array of reflections." G. Silberstein  

Fragments of a body chiseled from darkness carve out a study of a nude female figure, sensual at specific moments, and in places disappearing into digital darkness. A lyrical treatise on intimacy and secrecy and an implicit polemic with a voyeuristic gaze create a longing for constrained completeness. "I dissect the perception and the mental state that arise while being watched, penetrated and examined and the experience of the viewer, involuntary being forced to follow the gaze of the camera." T. Kjellmark  

A miniature inspired by the leading contemporary French philosopher. The fragility of examining the possibilities of uniqueness and subordination in relation to something different. Objects here do not function as symbols; a crystal pendulum and anonymous figures highlight the multitude of loopholes and fundamental non-discursiveness of expressing delicate subjectivities. "The film is about the duality of one’s search for their own individuality versus the desire to belong." A. Zwirchmayr  

Genre conventions cleverly broken down with animations, breaking through the scenery of rural Mexico, where in the area surrounding the director’s family farm, symbols of stories of physical desire conceal a layer of idyllic childhood memories and come into conflict with the traditional concept of masculinity and identity expression.   "By centering queer desire within the story of my Mexican-American family, I validate my own lived experience as well as challenge popular representation of masculinity, power and vulnerability." A. G. Gomez  

The disappearance of flowing textures of fluid and rocky landscapes alternates with patterns set in a grid of homogenous horizontals in a simple lyricism of hypnotic image and sound compositions and views of unexpected rhythms in flowing montages. "My ongoing questioning of the oscillations between my internal visions and the outer world comes with its own intrinsic intuition and metamorphoses my perceptions." S. Cho  

After spending two years studying and collecting images created using various wet development processes for 16mm film, Wang explores the visual forms of material fluidity in order to celebrate invisible micro- and macrostructures whose chimeras are laid bare in moving patterns.   "I am often inspired by the beauty of errors produced in analogue film production and use unwanted analogue visual noise and patterns, such as dust or watermarks to create imaginary cinematic landscapes." N. Wang

A found footage reminiscence of the beginnings of Ukrainian TV broadcast in 1957 and the first 20 years of its operations, when the first factory for manufacturing televisions began operating in Lviv, presents not only programs broadcast at that time, but also the way television transformed the household and family structures. "Despite it’s archival form, our film is not about the soviet past but today’s virtuality - a dramatic story of the the gaze and the sedation of a newly emerged TV-spectator, which continues until now." A. Onufrienko, S. Menzelevskyi, E. Parvulesco  

The image of a city broken down into a series of planes of view rolls towards us, its echoes enabling us to fill in the imaginary whole. This urban symphony of minimalism builds up a panoramic view into the distance while calling into question reality by visualizing the overcrowding of the urban environment.  "Life is surprisingly simple. Because all human beings are in a moment of repetition of the irreversible destiny of nature. Everything is only a trace and disappears." M. Yi

A pensive analysis of the vision and perception apparatus shared by all two-eyed beings gazes far ahead and in an intriguing perception experiment, explores the imagination of the depth of field and the illusory consistency of the image while dissecting the routine perspective on objects, shapes, motion and the phenomena around us."This is a dance between your brain and the world. We are bathed in interferences from sensual data to what might be out there. We will go to another land, we will try another sea. One plus one equals three." R. Kohlberger

A visual composition based on a study of the rhythm of sleep cycles during REM sleep. The flowing images melt into overlapping splotches of color to create shapes of fleeting sleep images at various speeds, thus reflecting the impossibility of capturing any concrete motifs.   "Connecting my observation with an intuitive way of filming, I document phenomena in the natural world to reveal evocative visual rhythms through the ecstatic clash of color and form." M. Szlam  

This conceptual experience in which differences in color are translated into notes on a piano looks at the area surrounding the port of Marseille. The result is a musical composition created through an abstracted reflection of the nature, look, and visual diversity of a place where ships arrive and depart. "Through video artworks, I ruminate both on the notions of temporality and duality of digital arts - the interplay of the sound and the image - to build new realities to the world around us." J.-M. Rolland  

This ironic found-footage collage created from raw footage originally shot for the Közért (“For the Public”) retail chain, a state-run network of shops in Hungary during communism, shows the problems of eating and nutrition in state-run economies, lives and images. "35 mm reels of socialist food advertisements were put in the soil to rot and decay." P. Lichter  

The filmmaker takes hundreds of photographs of ocean trash that has washed up on the shores of Japan and uses the photogrammetry technique to turn them into sculptures. When filmed in the virtual space, they become mementos of environmental irresponsibility and examples of the excesses of our affluent way of everyday life. "Looking through the eyes of new technologies, we can have unexpected and incredible views of the reality." Y. Nishimura  

In the middle of the Teviot River in Scotland, the filmmaker saw a color in the sky like in the paintings of Gustav Klimt. He translates his amazement at this moment into fluid patterns of a digitally decomposed scene, all the way to its radical ending when the variously colored grids flowing on the screen like a calm horizon again dissolve into Klimt’s golden color. "Making films is opening my heart and letting the magical powers of life shine in my imagination to merge them in images. I try to thrill those who watch colour and time flow in my films." J. Perconte  

A digital miniature in which the form into which the image is deconstructed emphasizes the things we leave in our wake – trajectories of movement, actions, decisions, gestures. This guide of the traces we leave behind dissolves into a depiction of the things that remain; the simple visual approach raises the imperative of understanding the consequences of the movements of mind, body, and things. "Choreography of an imaginary journey 
Color / 7 minutes 40" P. Bokanowski

Protests against austerity measures, read as an expression of resistance to the state, are intermingled with an expression of intimate consonance. A demonstration of connection, this essayistic collage blurs the boundaries between private and public as it reflects on the politics of co-existence. "What if the revolution started at home, in the micro-politics of hand to hand, of our kitchen life, our bedroom life? If we said no to the old models of family, could we bring together bed and street?" M. Hoolboom, H. Frise  

A re-construction of the illegal smuggling of a family across the border from East to West Berlin in 1988. Told in photographs, the film shows a chilling story of escape in the trunk of a car and an encounter with agents of the East German secret police. The images’ unknown origin adds a sense of the universal and calls into question the course of events.  "While researching my first feature, I stumbled across these photos in the Stasi archives and decided to try to make a story around them. I was shocked when I found out the true identity of the people " S. Calonico  

The color of skin and of film become the center of discourse: The filmmaker’s mixed-race background is reflected in imprints of the landscape and ruptures within it, but also in the color of the faded Kodachrome film, whose typical visual characteristics have dissolved in time. Hues are barely visible and only with difficulty capture the image of a body that does not fall into any clear categories.  "Where does film fail or resist us? Working on celluloid I make images which affirm mixed race culture and the cultural in between." R. Storr  

Images originally from the tests of spotlights are inserted into models where they evoke the phases of the Moon and in regular intervals combine to hint at a harmonic line of bright reflections. A fleeting arrangement of the traces of humans and machines forever trapped in the depths of the night.  "The Moons of Palaver had to be short, quiet, with soft light, gently mechanical, edited late in the night, a paradox and a mystery. It had to be a poem that I couldn’t possibly write." E. Gaucher  

Philosophical reflections on Israel blend into a personal struggle for identity: The filmmaker’s father came to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1946 as a Jewish refugee. The call for harmonic co-existence is imprinted in the falling grains from one image into another. Some of the scenes come from the documentary film Israel: Land of Destiny (1977, dir. Jacques Madvo).  "By constructing the film entirely with an optical printer, moving images and pictures are drawn to rhythm and meaning. The philosophical words of Martin Buber invokes the reflection upon the reality." M. Piller  

The use traditional multiple exposure techniques combine with the search for formal similarities to create a lyrical work in which the outlines of rivers and plants merge together and vibrant colors alternate in a constant rhythm of overlapping and multiplication. "Colectivo Los Ingrávidos arises from the need to dismantle the audiovisual grammar that the aesthetic-television-cinematic corporativism has used to guarantee the diffusion of one audiovisual ideology." Colectivo Los Ingrávidos  

A meditative evocation of the South Korean “Candlelight Revolution” in the winter of 2016/17. The hybrid mosaic, in which archival and contemporary footage is altered by visual manipulation and performative moments, shows artifacts, situations, and gestures reflecting the desire for political change.  "The sense of vulnerability facing the unimaginable change made it only possible to borrow the quotations from the past and the future." S. Kim, J. Cho  

64 trees in a valley are presented in 3D, becoming both the object and space for every eye – exteriorized on the basis of various principles. The filmmaker continues to explore various possible approaches to spatial representation of creates ingeniously thrilling wanderings among images. "Stereo3D films shall be done of such a kind that they make no - or another - sense than if they where only in mono2D. What we know from flat filmmaking is no help." B. Speidel  

A sensitive, impressive collage of intimate reflections, detailed observations, fragments of memories, and visual and musical allusions conducts an imaginary dialogue about how memory works and identity construction with a father who died a year earlier."What is a film if not collective dreaming made by conscious minds. Symbolism and myths are present in both dreams and films and rely on our memory and imagination for relating to the produced imagery." M. Lizides   

Images recorded on a Lomography Supersampler, which photographs four immediately sequential moments on one frame of 35mm film, multiply the illusion of rhythmic movement and create a visual melody that hurtles forward, while the imprint of the moment remains fixed in place. The drum performance emphasizes the minimalist sharpness of the patterns. "Where do we go, in a time where borders are going to be closed again? The feeling of freedom has gone. I try to break down visual borders to rebuild a base for the spirit of freedom again." S. A. Fruhauf