Issue

In Celebration of Inventions

December 2019

A spark of insight! A concept seen in a flash of premonitory clarity! A creation that overtakes and remakes society! Few aspects of the scientific process capture the imagination quite like the invention of something wholly new. There's a dynamism even in the word itself: it suggests a sudden overwhelming breakthrough and practically demands the finality of an exclamation point. If this cultural conception of the "Eureka!" moment persists at the expense of the less thrilling reality that most technology advances by incremental hard work, it still captures something significant: that once a pivotal creation or convenience enters our lives, even if by years of slow progress, it creates a sense of critical advancement in retrospect. Soon, it's hard to even imagine life before the light bulb, the radio, the internal combustion engine, aeroplane flight, the home computer, the modem, fidget spinner, the hoverboard. And by this, the unitary act of invention maintains it mythic status in our pop-scientific narratives.

Marius Borodine

FILM Canada 2010
Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais

Genius Marius Borodine's spectacular new invention that can transform any and all objects into drinkable water, bewilders the public, scientific communities, and the family of the misunderstood creator, especially after he takes one step too far.

Tagged

FILM Canada 2010
Shawney Cohen Mike Gallay

Tagged introduces us to the raging debate over the ubiquitous Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip, touted as a tool with invaluable medical applications by its supporters and denounced as the death knell for civil liberties by privacy advocates. This playfully smart short doc lets the audienc

Hoverboard

FILM United States 2012
Sydney Freeland

After watching Back to the Future 2, an imaginative young girl and her stuffed teddy bear try to invent a real, working Hoverboard.

4D

FILM Australia 2016
Laurence Rosier Staines

An engineer, hired by a venture capitalist for an impossible task, gets trapped in physics and the creative process. Written & Directed by Laurence Rosier Staines Produced by Agnieszka Switala Director of Photography – Pavel Trotsenko Production Design – Hugh O'Connor Edited by Laurence

Bonne nuit Albertine

FILM France 2017
Charlotte Arene

A fictionalized retelling of one of the great discoveries of the 20th century: the rabies vaccine. France, 1885. Little Albertine lives just across the laboratory of famous professor Louis Pasteur. Every night, from her bedroom window, she watches him as he works… But what is he doing to thes

I Saw the Future

FILM France 2018
François Vautier

In a dark expanse that could be the cosmos, we hear the voice of Arthur C. Clarke, whose face – taken from a BBC archive dating back to the 1960s – appears in the distance. His features quickly dematerialize into a multitude of shimmering pixels, creating an enveloping and immersive spac

Teslamania

FILM USA 2011
Joel Schlemowitz

Two 16mm camera rolls shot at the Collective Unconscious during a performance of "Teslamania" featuring Gecko Saccomanno and Tesla Coil Engineer Jamie Mereness. The film's visual effects, double exposures, and refracted images, were all done in camera, just as we see them here.

Information Superhighway

FILM United States 2018
Mat Nelson

At the height of the Internet age, the first driverless car casualty sets off a chain of events for CEO Lazarus, Chief Executive Officer of technology conglomerate and driverless car company, Dyne Motors. Amid plummeting stocks and investor faith, Dyne Motors enlists the aid of a former race car dri

The Age of Invention

FILM Canada 1984
Albert Kish

This short film serves as a poem-on-film about the coming of the machine age on the eve of World War I. Images and sounds combine to recreate a bygone era of scratchy phonograph records, faded photographs, hand-cranked movie cameras, staccato Morse telegraph messages, and rhythmic steam pumps. Machi

Home Cooked Music

FILM Canada 2014
Mike Maryniuk

Is there anything more Canadian than a moose-antler electric guitar? After a near-death experience, retired machinist Lorne Collie started making whimsical stringed instruments. His DIY inventiveness transformed lawn rakes, stop signs, and bent pitchforks into fully playable banjos, fiddles and viol

Heliotropism of the Future

FILM France 2019
Hadrien Téqui

After a long one-shot journey through crackling dead leaves, the camera slowly comes to a stop perched ontop a small robots with four wheels in the forest. This curious machine with spherical charm held by a wooden structure holds inside its heart a crystal ball that reflects the landscape at-large

INVENTION!

FILM United States 1990
Loren S. Miller

Journey of a Bright Idea. A beginner needs to literally kill time, and invents the world's first throwable alarm clock. Professional inventors cheer him on, by sharing independent research, prototyping, and marketing wisdom.

Ohm

FILM Canada 2009
Santiago Menghini

One man's exploration of his desires leads to significant consequences that go far beyond his control.

Irinyi

FILM Hungary 2018
Nikol Cibulya

Irinyi is a steampunk short film about the secret invention of the famous scientist. In 1858, ten years after the downfall of the Hungarian freedom fights, Irinyi János (the inventor of the non-explosive match) is still working on restarting the revolution. The success of the new fights would

The Balgonie Birdman

FILM Canada 1991
Brian Duchscherer

A small prairie town has few secrets but in Balgonie, Saskatchewan, Bill Gibson had one. Each night, when most folks were home asleep, Bill was busy in his workshop. You see, Bill had a dream. He was building a flying machine. This charming puppet animation film tells his story.

Film ist. (1-12)

FILM Austria 2004
Gustav Deutsch

Film is. consists almost exclusively, of sequences from existing scientific films. These films are about the acrobatic flights of pigeons, the intelligence testing of apes; about reversed worlds and stereoscopic vision; hurricanes and impact waves in the air. How glass breaks, children walk and how

MODERN No.2

FILM Japan 2011
Mirai Mizue

We went for it without any hesitation. We've formed the world at a quickening pace. What on earth is this world that we've created?

Litterbugs

FILM UK 2016
Peter Stanley Ward

Young inventor Alice likes to keep to herself but is cruelly humiliated by three spiteful girls who post a video of her online. Stanley, an eccentric little boy and wannabe superhero, vows to avenge Alice, leaving her feeling obliged to protect him. With Stanley overpowered by the bullies, three mec

Muybridge's Disobedient Horses

FILM Austria 2019
Anna Vasof

Muybridge´s Disobedient Horses is a series of four episodes in which the artist Anna Vasof investigates where she can find the essence of cinematic illusion when she looks into everyday life and what happens when she uses everyday objects and movements as cinematographic mechanisms. Even if th

Down to Earth (2014)

FILM Austria 2014
Anna Vasof

It is no secret that shoes say a lot about the person wearing them. The shoe´s form, material and condition provide insight into social status, character, and, last but not least, potential desires. In Down to Earth , Anna Vasof refers to this multifunctional significance while putting a very

Machines (2015)

FILM Austria 2015
Jeremias Altmann

In the warm light of a glowing filament the moving machine parts resemble spools, wires and gearwheels. A turntable with a numerical scale spins slowly and shows various readings, though their significance is never revealed. Details, parts of which are out of focus, appear on a black background, and

Re-Writing Life

FILM USA 2019
Kelly Nyks

David Liu and his team at Harvard have taken the basic premise of CRISPR technology and enhanced it in a way that is simply stunning. CRISPR 2.0 is one of the most important scientific innovations in the last 100 years, and like everything else in the natural world, it's all Chemistry.

Under The Skin

FILM USA 2019
Miao Wang

Zhenan Bao and her team at Stanford University are one of many teams around the world harnessing Polymers to help us develop a near perfect replcation of human skin.

Azurite

FILM France 2015
Maud Garnier

Salome, 15 years old, works in her father's workshop, a famous painter for his blue color. But now that the painter, too old, is no longer able to make his famous color, jeopardizing his workshop. Salome begins to hope that her father forward its closely guarded secret until then ...

Icare (Icarus)

FILM France 2017
Nicolas Boucart

On a small island crowned with sharp cliffs, a single house looks out to sea. Obsessed by the dream that humans may one day fly like birds, an inventor experiments with his machines on this parcel of abandoned land. For this man, only a pure, light, and naive person would be capable of this feat. Re

Ghostcode

FILM UK 2016
AUDINT

Ghostcode is a 3d animated science-fiction film set in 2056 uncovering advancements in sonic warfare, holographic entertainment and its weaponization, the synthesis of corporation and nation state, and the unstable intentions of net-born artificial intelligence. This is an era in which human flesh h

Oramics: Atlantis Anew

FILM United Kingdom 2011
Aura Satz

'Oramics: Atlantis Anew' is conceived of as an artist's film in homage to Daphne Oram, the pioneer of British Electronic Music and co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic workshop in 1958. The film features a close-up encounter with her unique invention, the Oramics Machine, housed at the Science Museum i

15 Corners of the World

FILM Poland, Germany 2014
Zuzanna Solakiewicz

Eugeniusz Rudnik revolutionized the idea of music itself with a pair of scissors and a magnetic tape. As part of the legendary Experimental Studio of Polish Radio, he revealed hidden value in rough and rejected sounds long before the rise of the DJs. In an era of electronic music created in a worksh