Operas, concerts, performances, music videos, chants and spoken word - we present to you "Scientific Musicals" to kick off this new year. Moving away from the passive score, the music is in the propeller of these narratives. Our musicians - animals, human, plants, machines and hybrids - are expressing themselves in response to their situations. What happens when we migrate from speech to song? Do musicals need to be harmonious or does dissonance have its place in the musical genre. A sonic rupture indicates a gaping wound in our bleeding habitat. Perhaps, a world in crisis captured in images is more attuned to disturbing sonic interferences. How do we make sense of scientific practices and experiments through music. These musicals defy the very nature of a science film or a musical or both.
A rendering of the possibilities of the Whole Brain Catalog ( http://wholebraincatalog.org ), an open source, multi-scale virtual catalog of the mouse brain. Part of the Whole Brain Project ( http://wholebrainproject.org ).
'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
For White Night Melbourne 2014 the State Library of Victoria's four-storey domed reading room was transformed into a vast microscope with a magnifying power of one billion times. At this magnification an infectious virus, which is usually an unimaginably small 30 nano-meters across, becomes enlarged
Part road movie, part musical, part serious inquiry into the caverns of the mind, The Hero's Journey to the Third Pole is at once an artful, sensitive and amusing examination of mental health, told through an unexpected story of friendship. The film follows Anna Tara Edwards, an Icelander raised in
An old lady finds an injured bird. She takes care of him and gives him shelter. They quickly make friends with each other. One day the bird finds out that he is in danger: in the other room the old lady keeps hundreds of birds, locked in cages.
Spinning drawings guide us along the flow of energy through our planet, and let us ponder our place in the natural cycle.
An unknown force pushes a man to a place of extraordinary characteristics in the high Arctic. In its limits, is where he may find the answer. Between an introspective adventure and the poetry of the absurd. A a short film wandering around the idea of the North, its limits and the construction of lan
Biochemistry as you've never experienced it before: The Science Rapper makes you feel as if its your first time replicating DNA.
In a deafening noise of chainsaws, loggers happily humming while they cut down trees to be used as decor for a fashion show. A contemporary cartoon satire, in the form of a burlesque action musical tragi-comedy, leads us into a delirious whirlwind of chain reactions as chaotic as they are grotesque.
A cybernetically-dreamed music video for the song "Algorithmia" by BenBen. Do neural networks listen to simulated rock bands? Algorithms have dictated much of what we see and hear for years already; they've only much more recently become able to reproduce semblances of it on their own. With the adve
Alexis Phon, 18, never left "Here", the suburbian area he grew up in. A world under supervision, where boredom nums the hearts of the youth. Yet, a new horizon exists: it's "There". Thanks to Aïssatou, who shares the same anger, Alexis will gather enough courage to leave. But here, love and fre
Global Windshield, The Musical replicates the state of hypnosis produced by the prolonged driving in a highly predictable environment in order to rethink, propose and imagine preferable futures. A trip in a scenario in completely disconnection with nature that investigates from the most human the se
A powers-of-10 exploration of the microscopic and molecular landscapes inside Björk's body. The animation was constructed from molecular models of DNA and proteins derived from various forms of scientific data such as x-ray crystallography. My work is usually defined by goals of didactic scienc
"Twelve Thousand Years in Fragments" re-imagines 12,000 years of human influence on earth as a 40-minute film "symphony" created from the materials we left behind. Throughout the anthropocene, humankind has collected, measured and recorded aspects of our lives and our planet - much of this informati
65 million years ago, a rock of unknown origin travelled through space to percute the Earth to put an end to three quarters of the life on the planet. At the region of the impact, a group of searchers venture into the darkness of a Mayan cave to explore the acoustics of the place. They set in a stra
Hybrid: an Interspecies Opera unfolds in 5 movements as we journey from cutting edge genetic engineering to the very origins of pig domestication 10 millennia ago, and back to the wild boars still inhabiting our forests. This documentary and personal narrative is set to an original score by composer
Part science and part fiction, Other Voices is an experimental documentary about the enigmatic life of plants and the people who love them. We meet Mileece, a sound artist who claims to have given her plants a "voice" through a process of amplifying the electrical current produced in plant leaves an
Heat is made visible and audible – or the other way around – the pulse and harmony of particular instruments is translated into thermal images: the synesthetic profit of the transformation fuels ever new image/sound discoveries. Florian Kindlinger and Peter Kutin brilliantly adopt this a
'Biocomputer Music' is a short documentary looking at the cutting edge technology behind a remarkable composition for piano and biocomputer. The biocomputer is an unprecedented musical machine built by Professor Eduardo Reck Miranda in his research laboratory at the ICCMR (Interdisciplinary Centre f
A portrait film about the pollution in Brooklyn NY and beyond. Extromophiles are organisms that exist when nothing else can survive.
This is a music video for the song "Insect Express" by Brooklyn-based musician, El Tryptophan. The video explores an intersection of species; insect flight patterns and modes of industrial travel merge as collective rituals in a fever dream.
What does it feel like to watch the thing that you love the most in the world slowly die in front of you and there is not a thing you can do about it? That is how science based artist Mara G. Haseltine felt as she collected plankton from water bodies around the world and found microscopic fragments
Three Sisters go to the River on Kupala Night, to fulfill the rite of throwing a wreath to see the Elder Sister's future. To do this, the girl enters the bridge. There she hears the Voice who prophesies her death in this river. Terrified, Elder Sister is turning around and next falls into the water.
Back in the days i used to hate it Was it the smell? Was it the taste? Well.. i had no choice for lunch Choice was for adults But that's OK, i was a child. And as i remember that time, i guess i remember a different person. Yes, i recall a different me. By twilight On standby if i live through my pa
In a covid-plague Singapore, people begin to fear reality and feel a growing sense of uncertainty. Plastic Sonata tells the story of three individuals as they face the global crisis, impending loneliness and their family.
A fraught passage of the camera's eye through fantastical architectural and psychological spaces. Somewhere between a body and a building, the lens tumbles and lurches through time and space, caught between observation and escape. Themes of construction blend with surgical examination while the joys
I Like Tomorrow is a sci-fi comedy musical that combines live action and animation. This short hybrid film is set in an orbiting space station where a lonely lady astronaut works out a love triangle between her past, present and future self. Each woman has a different but meaningful relationship to
"Augmentation and Amplification," was presented as a live-streamed project, performed during the Covid global pandemic on July 30th, 2020, as part of SO⅃OS on July 30, 2020, at Fridman Gallery and CT::SWaM, NYC.. The performance continued my ongoing investigation into creative collaborations between
A short documentary following the preparation and performance of the musical composition 'Activating Memory' by the Paramusical Ensemble, comprising of four severely motor-impaired patients and a string quartet at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability, London. The parts for each instrument are gen
In Disenchanted Island, composer Olga Neuwirth re-created the antiphonic acoustic space of the Venetian San Lorenzo church in a black-box gallery environment, webbed with multiple speakers. Tal Rosner's digital assemblages, some simple and some complex, illustrate the soundscape with an additional p
There has not yet been any applied work of Metacinema. It was necessary to give the path to methodological problems. That is the reason why I decided to choose the purest subject to analyze. That is a subject composed of a single "substance".
"Quantum Theatre of the Aquatic" is a short film composed of a poetic theatre of small shorts that explore the quantum nature of water, and an interplay between perspectives in art and science. Visual effects and illusions interact in ways that mimic superposition states in quantum mechanics. Quantu
A scientist working on memory in the amygdala of the brain sees a vision of a lost love through the microscope. He decides to go visit her and have a last moment of intimacy. A music video for Mind Over Matter song, part of the new album Theory of my Mind of the American rock band from New York The
Brain scientist Dr. Sheri Myes lives through a bombing that changes her forever. She is on the verge of a scientific breakthrough to revolutionize human understanding of the world, when she is fired from her job and must climb up from the bottom. In a home lab, she develops drugs and body augmentati
Singular value decomposition (SVD) is a mathematical technique used throughout the sciences and engineering, which decomposes data, represented in terms of matrices, to construct an "optimal base" that can contain key information. SVD serves as a conceptual framework in Singular Value Decomposition
A young drifter's journey through Poland's 1990s rave scene goes from hallucinogenic to harrowing in this Day-Glo-drenched animated odyssey.
A homage to thousands of ambitious YouTube users and video bloggers on the internet. No less than George Bizet's Habanera from Carmen has been re-interpreted for MeTube and enhanced with electronic sounds. A YouTube anachronism as the overture of a clever opera-remix spectacle: A man's surrounded by
At sunset a large orchestra, a choir and a group of young people position themselves against the backdrop of a mountain landscape. The musicians play the first section of Mahler's 8th Symphony, moving in precise choreography. Then, almost unnoticed, groups of them start disappearing and in the dying
The second in a series of "quilt films" that pay homage to the work of pioneering female artists, "Athyrium filix-femina" reimagines Anna Atkins' founding work in photography as a moving image. In 1843, Anna Atkins published the first book of photography, "Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imp
Orfeo Nel Canale Alimentare (Orpheus in the Alimentary Canal) is an animated opera about the digestive tract. In the film, Orpheus attempts to rescue Eurydice from a bout of indigestion by crossing the river of her inner-under world. But in the alimentary canal there are no heroes, only the multitud
In marketing and the retail sector, data analytics is widely used to profile and microtarget consumers and to predict behaviour. The ultimate goal, apparently, is for humans to be able to outsource all decision-making to machine intelligence (make Google do it!). What is at stake within the politica
Singularity Song" is a meditation on black holes, pairing legendary butoh dancer, Oguri, with the voices one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, Kip Thorne and black hole physicist Rana Adhikari. Oguri performs the human embodiment of imagined life within a black hole as a narrator descri
Traditionally production and distribution circuits tend to function with a separation between visual art spaces and those linked to music. Zahra Poonawala tries on the contrary to marry the sensations and find a means of expression connected to her dual background as artist and musician. She questio
In a handcrafted world where nature exists in harmony, a handful of greedy businessmen exploit a mountain's riches. The female body creates both landscape and characters in this darkly comedic myth about human hubris.
Important Bird Opera (music and film by Ryan Moritz with a libretto by Anjuli Raza Kolb) is an experimental opera in three acts about birds, migration, climate crisis, and rewilding. The piece began as an experiment in nature photography, sound documentary, and the twentieth-century tone poem. Built
"Holed up in London during lockdown, my work for Televistas ( morethanponies.info/televistas ) involves being inside a wood – a deep pocket of nature that has been protected, an asylum of sorts. Forest bathing. I wanted to be on the inside, looking out. But the woods are also a dangerous place
Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that's a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with t
I visit several cities and I hit my head on different surfaces. A microphone, which is mounted on my head, records the sound of these head-beats. A camera, located off to the side, records each action. In this way, all is made visible: the action, the sound recording, the surface upon which I hit my
"The Elephant's Song" tells the true and tragic tale of Old Bet, the first circus elephant in America, as recounted in song by her friend the old farm dog. Their story is portrayed in colorful clay-on-glass animation, where oil-based modeling clay is spread thinly on a glass sheet and moved frame-by
Male animals perform a variety of courtship behaviors to attempt to lure females to mate with them. Fly species in the genus Drosophila often use their wings to sing species-specific songs or perform wing displays to convince females to copulate. Here, Drosophila elegans males dance in front of choo
THE COLONY is a story about sisterhood and the evolution of communication in two of the most social creatures on earth: humans and ants. In this film of a live performance, Mona struggles to reconnect with her estranged sister Hennie, and she turns to the ant colony for inspiration. With more than 5
Hitting the streets exactly one year following its recording, Third Man is proud to present a full length document of the August 21, 2017 total solar eclipse in Nashville, TN as interpreted by Quintron's Weather Warlock, a handmade weather-sensitive analog synthesizer. The A side, Path of Complete T
Follow the eco-acoustic composer David Monacchi on his quest to record pure continuous 24-hour 3D soundscapes in the area with the world's highest biodiversity in Ecuador's remote primary forests. A unique listening experience of fragments of the disappearing sonic heritage of millions of years of e
The film is set amongst the eroding, forested cliffs of a creek. The hand-processed, black and white images are a direct response to Linsey Wellman's soundtrack of layered baritone saxophone and electronics, which filmmaker Matthieu Hallé listened to for the first time while exposing each fra
Quantum computers can now perform certain kinds of tasks faster than the world's most powerful classical computers, and quantum processing power doubles with each new qubit (quantum bit) added to the system. How high can an exponential go? The song "Qubits" was written and produced on commission wit
Computers have evolved to become an essential part of the music industry: in the last century, musical composition, instrumentation, distribution and consumption have all been impacted by advances in computer technology. Quantum computing offers the potential for a further technological leap. As thi
A scientist has created her own android clone to replace her in the outside world so that it can face it for her.
Revealing the molecular mechanisms that power your cells and tissues, converting food and oxygen into the flow of chemical energy that makes your body be alive. Created in collaboration with HHMI BioInteractive part of a new collection of free bio-molecular animations for science education and publi
Bordering on the fantastic, Senescent Vivarium represents four distinct seasons created by plants and insects selected to imitate authentic biospheres. These macro worlds are architectural masters of their own domain yet defy traditional still life representations. Transient narratives of familiar e
Inspired by solar science research and in collaboration with scientists from STFC RAL Space, The Alexander Whitley Dance Company's production "8 Minutes" represents the relationship between the Sun and life on planet Earth; 8 minutes being the time it takes for light to travel from the Sun to the Ea
In the physical sciences, entanglement refers to sets of data that cannot be described independently of one another. In a more general sense, it refers to a complicated relationship or complex situation. It can be very useful in describing interdisciplinary inquiry, as well. Artist Janet Biggs, math
Get Out Alive is an autobiographical musical documentary giving voice to a troubled artist's recovery after a suicide attempt. Using storytelling, song, dance, and visual media, Nikki Lynette's personal and unapologetic approach to sharing her personal mental health journey shows that even when life