Bits and blocks are the home of the Super Vario Birds who are dancing to the 8bit symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven.
Social & External
The Karikpo masquerade - a traditional dance of the Ogoni tribe - is transposed onto the remnants of a faded oil industry programme in the Niger delta.
The innovative and influential British filmmaker Derek Jarman was invited to direct the Pet Shop Boys' 1989 tour. This film is a series of iconoclastic images he created for the background projections. Stunning, specially shot sequences (featuring actors, the Pet Shop Boys, and friends of Jarman) contrast with documentary montages of nature, all skillfully edited to music tracks.
A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).
This is a didactic film in disguise. A progression of brilliant geometric shapes bombard the screen to the insistent beat of drums. The filmmaker programmed a computer to coordinate a highly complex operation involving an electronic beam of light, colour filters and a camera. This animation film, without words, is designed to expose the power of the cinematic medium, and to illustrate the abstract nature of time.
Furio’s Furious Fragments & Friends - Furio Jesi (1941 Turin -1980 Genoa), enfant prodige moving between a plethora of disciplines – egyptology, history of religions, German philology, literary criticism - passed away prematurely, not without leaving bright fragments which throw light on mechanisms beneath many socio-cultural practices, for instance regarding cultural belonging, the functions of myth in modern society. He saw kind of “mythological machines” at work underneath our cultural production of meanings, historically determined, departing from a void, something that is still in culture but as residue, a missing link to an alleged authentic experience nowadays compromised up to the point to became just rhetoric, a byword, which is in no way neutral, but a tool, a macchina, for maintaining the status quo and serving the power apparatus. As in the case of holidays, celebrations and festivals.
CGI collage short film originally premiered as part of the 'Extinction Renaissance' exhibition at the Loyal Gallery in Stockholm.
Today, analogue video is attractive primarily thanks to the distinctive aesthetic quality of its pixelated image and raster errors. But for Czech artists who first explored the possibilities offered by video art in the late 1980s, this medium represented a path towards freedom. Through a portrait of her grandfather Radek Pilař, one of the pioneers of Czech video art, the director explores her own legacy of imperative creative fascination. Her film’s main story, i.e., the process of reconstructing the 1989 exhibition Video Day, contrasts this enchantment with life in the final days of the totalitarian regime, which different sharply with the adventures of those who decided to emigrate – whom the filmmaker also visits in order to discover forgotten works, get to know their creators, and re-establish broken ties.
After concluding the now-legendary public access TV series, The Pain Factory, Michael Nine embarked on a new and more subversive public access endeavor: a collaboration with Scott Arford called Fuck TV. Whereas The Pain Factory predominantly revolved around experimental music performances, Fuck TV was a comprehensive and experiential audio-visual presentation. Aired to a passive and unsuspecting audience on San Francisco’s public access channel from 1997 to 1998, each episode of Fuck TV was dedicated to a specific topic, combining video collage and cut-up techniques set to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The resultant overload of processed imagery and visceral sound was unlike anything presented on television before or since. EPISODES: Yule Bible, Cults, Riots, Animals, Executions, Static, Media, Haterella (edited version), Self Annihilation Live, Electricity.
A dream where obsession for German as a second language mixes up with an obsession for neatness and cleanliness as a distinctive feature of the national culture in question seen from the perspective of a foreigner. The dream is not a nightmare only because the set it is dreamt into is the seashore of the mare nostrum, where the dreaming subject is perfectly at home. A homeland which she, in turn, in her more secret thus naïf dreams would dream of being cleaner and tidier as in the reality, especially in front of such beauty of nature. As is right and proper.
In his book "1984", George Orwell saw the television of the future as a control instrument in the hands of Big Brother. Right at the start of the much-anticipated Orwellian year, Paik and Co. were keen to demonstrate satellite TV's ability to serve positive ends-- Namely, the intercontinental exchange of culture, combining both highbrow and entertainment elements. A live broadcast shared between WNET TV in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, linked up with broadcasters in Germany and South Korea, reached a worldwide audience of over 10 or even 25 million (including the later repeat transmissions).
Pia Yona Massie's Sayonara Super 8 uses personal archival footage to ask questions about the fragile nature of memory, human relationships and the foibles of the medium itself.
A collaboration between Kadet Kuhne & Alba G. Corral.
From his photo-text canvases in the 1960s to his video works in the 1970s to his installations in the 1980s, John Baldessari’s (b.1931) varied work has been seminal in the field of conceptual art. Integrating semiology and mass media imagery, he employed such strategies as appropriation, deconstruction, decontextualization, sequentiality, and text/image juxtaposition. With an ironic wit, Baldessari's work considers the gathering, sorting, and reorganizing of information. “Something that is part of my personality is seeing the world slightly askew. It’s a perceptual stance. The real world is absurd sometimes, so I don’t make a conscious attempt, but because I come at it in a certain way, it seems really strange,” Baldessari says in this interview with Nancy Bowen. A historical interview originally recorded in 1979 and re-edited in 2003 with support from the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund.
Guy Ben-Ner, one of Israel's foremost video artists, gained international recognition with a series of low-tech films, starring his family in absurdist settings carved out of their intimate spaces and their everyday surroundings. Many of his videos are inspired by screenplays for films, folktales and novels. Analyzing these literary and cinematographic passages allows him to exploit the conventions of film narrative: how to tell a story, captivate an audience through a tale, sustain a degree of tension and entertainment, and so on. At the same time, he corrupts the magic of fiction by openly showing us the entrails of everything he records, without worrying about revealing the tricks of the trade. A large part of his filmic oeuvre features a conglomeration of cinematic and literary references which the artist quotes, adapts or interprets. Ben-Ner self-referentially links the great themes and their literary, cinematic and artistic realization.
The quixotic journey of Nam June Paik, one of the most famous Asian artists of the 20th century, who revolutionized the use of technology as an artistic canvas and prophesied both the fascist tendencies and intercultural understanding that would arise from the interconnected metaverse of today's world.
'Hibiscus' highlights the city's hidden beauty and the warmth of its people that may go by unnoticed on a daily basis but are beautiful reminders to appreciate.
SPEED is the result of an artificial intelligence transforming bin footage into something beautiful in order to free the planet from pixel pollution. By video recycling trash shots into video art using the latest algorithm technology, visual art may help to understand our limited resources on earth and how to use them in a respectful manner. Every day we produce millions of clips sharing them on social media without even noticing anymore how much pixel garbage we create. At the same time, we produce every day millions of tons of plastic waste, polluting our environment without even noticing it anymore. SPEED wants to be a symbol of change as we are running out of time.
A memorial mourns as time passes
A compilation of avant-garde artwork and talent of the mid to late 20th century hosted by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
"We are powerfully imprisoned by the terms in which we have been conducted to think.” - R. Buckminster Fuller
One man's love is personified in superhero form inside the mind of his drug addicted girlfriend as she goes through withdrawal.
Based on a polemic novel by Amy Yamada, Bedtime Eyes is about the intense love relationship between a second rate Japanese jazz singer and a black American GI on the margins of the law.
In a desolate place called the Badlands, four men stand off with guns drawn, their fingers ready at the trigger. Among them are a fugitive seeking redemption, a son out to avenge his father's murder, a loyal servant with a secret and a murderous criminal hired to kill with a vengeance. This is their story...in a place where revenge, deception and cruelty are a way of life.
Upon waking up in a strange forest, a young man questions whether or not the environment around him is real or a figment of his imagination.
Mobile Suit SD Gundam Mk. II delivers with more tongue-in-cheek humor than the first series. In "The Rolling Colony Affair," a colony is hosting a cabaret show featuring the girls of Gundam. But the show turns disastrous when men and mobile suits go crazy over the girls, sending the colony rolling out of control. A parody of the videogame RPG genre, "Gundam Legend" has Amuro, Kamille and Judau sent on a perilous quest to rescue the princess of the Zeta Kingdom from Char Aznable and his vicious Zeon MS forces.
Standup Comedy by Varun Grover on Security Check and Heckling & Hukum Singh ...
A little boy pulls out one Martian toy from a vending machine and it turns into a real alien who takes him to his planet, where he is surronded by the toys from the vending machine, but much bigger.
Experimental film with desert scenes in which optical printing is used to achieve unusual effects.
Exit / Entrance is a visual and poetic essay on what it is like to be displaced as a person. The protagonist is a painter who wanders the town in which he lives to sketch and paint oscillating between nostalgia and desire to belong.
A sad young man, faced with the death of a loved one, is faced with a ghostly being that leads him on an unexpected journey.
With only 24 hours left to live, a private investigator follows a trail of confounding clues to uncover the disappearance of his childhood friend.
When a secret US defense satellite containing missile activation codes crashes on a remote island off the coast of Thailand, one spy, one rebel, and one criminal race to recover the hard drive.
During a heated argument with her sister Joan, Gail discovers the shocking news that she is adopted. With the reluctant support of her adoptive parents and baby sister Penny, Gail goes in search of her biological mother and true identity.
Tomás is an old man who suffers from Alzheimer's disease dependent on his family who has a complicated relationship with him due to his condition, which causes a conflict of interest with Tomás' daughter wanting him to live, her granddaughter being completely indifferent, and his son-in-law. wanting him to die.
Perry Mason ventures to Paris to defend a U.S. Marine Corps Captain accused of murdering a man suspected of being a Nazi SS Officer.
When college coed, Cindy, inherits the Old Dracovich Mansion, she gets a lot more than she bargained for. The victim of a violent death, Lady Dracovich, still haunts the house from beyond the grave, plotting to bring the dark forces of evil back to rule the Earth; but first, she needs to satisfy her age-old lust by possessing her new tenant!
Sugar State Women’s Prison. An Everglades hellhole where innocent girls are forced to slave in the swamps by day then turn tricks for the warden by night. A prison camp where corruption, brutality, and sexual abuse are all part of the daily routine. But when reporter Valerie March goes undercover inside Sugar State, that’s when the powder keg really explodes! Follow Valerie through prison life - catfights, knife fights, rape, whippings, prostitution, and the “hot box” - before she and her fellow inmates take bloody, unforgettable revenge on their captors. Inspired by the great women-in-prison films of the past, SUGAR BOXX takes everything one step further. SUGAR BOXX has it all.