Our July Issue program explores the nocturnal world, its ghostly manifestations, sensory exaltations and how we both crave to pierce into the darkness and shelter from it as well.
Jesse Barber of Boise State University headed to Gorongosa National Park with two graduate students to study bat-moth, predator-prey interactions. They design several experiments to determine the strategies that have evolved in these Gorongosa moths to avoid being eaten by bats. The strategies invol
'Brilliant Darkness: Hotaru in the Night' explores the importance of darkness, and the erosion of it, through the study and preservation of firefly habitats in Japan and the United States. Fireflies are reportedly disappearing, as artificial night lights disrupt their 'languages of light'. 'Brillian
One day the sun turned black. White people must pigment themselves or die. A daughter does. Her father refuses.
A study of ants and the inner life of one who studies them. Recommended Read: Taylor Hart's article " World's first transgenic ants reveal how colonies respond to an alarm" This film was made as part of the Imagine Science Symbiosis competition
A hypnotic voice-over narrates a text based on personal experience as a night porter. Here, the nightshift becomes a metaphor that tells about the mechanics of perception, describing a particular state of mind caused by working at night in relation to an self-generated filmic illusion in which one p
Having worked with Landsat satellite imagery for a number of years now, one of my emerging obsessions has been how to access and process the incredible high-resolution multi-spectral data produced by the Himarari 8 satellite, run by the Japan Meteorological Agency and processed here in Australia by
Night Visions developed as a conversation about psychic energy, sleep cycles and synaesthesia. The result is a haunting spell of colour and rhythm.
Light is information, a signal sounder than recollection. If there's anyone out there to receive the message. Alone in a sealed apartment until time loses meaning, the world outside unreal or unreachable, archaic illuminations crawling across the walls, connections fraying. What is happening here? A
The global problem of light pollution is growing exponentially every year, but we have not found a real solution to solve it yet. The problem that negatively affects the lives of animals and plants, the work of astronomers, but most of all the health of each of us, although we are not aware of it, y
Isidro meanders through the rainforest as he and his brother recount the times he found himself face to face with death itself.
A collage of collected imagery turned ritual travelogue: from the Sahara to the oceans of South America, passing through an old ancestors abode.
A WhatsApp audio begins, and with it, a downward spiral unfolds. The voice of a woman sinking into a health anxiety attack, quickly entangles a complex labyrinth of fears and emotions. The Spiral is a dive into a lonely ride, an hypnotic escalation towards childhood, family, and the loneliness of "h
As her team digitises the traces of an unidentified creature, a palaeontologist mourns a loved one. A meditation on preservation, daughter of discovery and mother of loss.
An exploration via superimpositions and slow motion cinematography into the known layers of outer space using the rotation of the sun on its axis as a motif.
Another Presence recounts the unique and often curious experiences of people living with dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), the third most common form of dementia in the UK. A multi-sensory condition that can cause dream-like symptoms, it's a condition like no other. Told through the testimonies of th
Sociology of Nostalgia: avant-garde documentary on the phenomenon of the Nostalgic Paradigm, discoursing on a late capitalistic landscape of social emotions, in a postmodern Neo-noir Paris, escorted by the spirits of French post-structuralists. How would Artificial Intelligence imagine the Nostalgic
When a mysterious creature stalks the night, a group of rangers employ camera traps and radio frequencies to enter this animal's secret world.
A mysterious outbreak of tic disorders among young people leads Dr Robert Bartholomew to question whether social media is making us sick. Doctors have recently identified a concerning trend among young people: tic disorders potentially spread via TikTok videos. For sociologist Dr Robert Bartholomew,
GUARDIANS OF THE NIGHT (15′) is an experimental and sensorial short-length ethnographic film about the cyclical and spontaneous life activities that emerge at nighttime in Guantánamo, Cuba. The film engages with the synesthetic aspect of practices associated with the night in Cuba, from
A man returns to his job in a company that transports animals. On his first trip, he discovers that there seems to be a person inside one of the cages. The mystery lurking in his own truck pushes him to the limit of his own sanity.
The rain in Oakland, my grandmother's home in Baghdad, my aunts' voices in What's App, my daughter learning to count to 10, my brother playing the darbuka, the cicadas in Texas, the walls of my studio, the search for new forms.
NIGHT is a stunning and cinematic feature that explores the universal nature of night and how we experience it. People and places, urban and rural, are reflected in its wonder. It captures the mystery, mood and magic of the night and weaves these images into a lush and dramatic symphonic score. Voic
Set in Dubrajpur (West Bengal, India) during the summer monsoons of June and July, Niishii – Night Worlds is an ethnographic film that attempts to capture the essence of the semi-urban night in a small town from its pre-electrification years as a village before 1958 to its radically altered pr
CAMERA TRAP is a comparative installation using moving images a hundred years apart. The first half of the work looks at Muybridge as both animal and landscape photographer, compared with the second half which works with current animal camera/video traps from the rainforests of Sabah (Malaysian Born
In the depths of winter, a historic power outage. The absence of electric heating quickly gives way to mutual aid and human warmth, suggesting that loneliness might be more dangerous than the cold.
Luminous traces obtained through in-camera optical manipulation of nocturnal imagery.
Unlike the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building, Montreal's iconic urban landmark is horizontal and spectral, not vertical and solid. Le Phare is a filmic portrait of the Montreal's nocturnal marker, a spinning beacon that has been raking four long beams of light across the city's environs sinc
Inspired by humanities relationship with the sun throughout history, Nocturnal Sun explores a future, a not so distant past and the spaces in between where myth, magic and chaos reside and with it the possibility of deeper forms of human connection. Nocturnal Sun is an inter-disciplinary project cre
A film reel found in earth's orbit, damaged by radiation and space dust, suggesting a possible contact.
ZERO IRONY is an experimental, structuralist film that finds its form in a series of poetic, repeating loops, set atop a soundtrack of modern-day prayer petitions. A man walks from window to window, gazing at a clear blue sky as the petitions are read. The petitions are resolved in darkness by the s
A bat tells his story. He lives near a Mayan temple in a cave with bats of nine different pitches. His mother cares for him, teaching him to echo for worms. But all is not idyllic: his brother dies learning to fly; not everyone gets along (babies can be attacked by bats of other pitches). After thre
In "A Valley Without Trees," the lowly onion that burrows into the soil and spends most of its life underground is cast as an interpreter or potential sensory prosthetic that offers a different way of understanding (and perhaps communicating with) the land, planet, and cosmos in which it grows.
From someone who moved away to learn about fear. The flight in the dark to Greenland begins with a farewell to the sun, which glows as a red ball in the cabin window. Upon arrival, camera and microphone have to battle the ice-cold wind. Only fragments of bundled-up figures that have somehow gotten i
Dream Work does not so much present dream content than filmic methods of representation corresponding to Freudian dream work: mechanisms of displacement and condensation are seen in relation to figurative elements found in Tscherkassky's source material. Tscherkassky processes these in a manner that
She: Sometimes you can´t sleep; then the moon is like a pipe whose echo lets it talk to itself. The pencil is soft and takes the loneliness in a new city to heart. "Shut up Moon." But it whizzes back and forth outside behind the window. She´s friends with the Epson printer, which also kn
White flashes in the dark of the night. As though etched out, dabbed in. Flickering specters, ghostly visions. A veritable phantom ride, a film of tension. In carte noire , Michaela Grill's sinister road movie miniature, she continues her cinematic movement from an object's abstraction to its aliena
The sky´s blue hanging above the black of a forest. Lightning flashes over a clearing. And the white ball of the moon with dark spots. These are the three suggestions that make Night Sweat an examination of a visual effect´s technical aspects. The film was shot in analog Hi-8 video. Its
Accompanied by fragile sounds a few flocks of clouds hurry over the peaks of the Dachstein mountain range. Behind windows at solitary mountain stations, lights blink like Morse code. Gondolas flit past as if in flight. Thick blankets of fog envelop cliffs. A windmill spins. Here and there human figu
The film´s title designates a luxury housing block in Moscow, built around 1930 for Stalinist officials. This is something we cannot see. Not really. But somehow, we can, because we are being shown the interior and the roof of an empty-looking building: dark stairways, rooms, corridors and hal
In darkroom , Billy Roisz surveys several pitch-black interior spaces from different perspectives and turns a cinematic darkroom into an abstract chamber of wonders. An explosion breaks through the black image. With changing camera, light, and microphone positions, the artist looks into a cinema, a
in ocula oculorum interrogates the unknown and the internal, in both subject matter and experience. Dealing with the contemporary state of perpetual doom, the film contemplates various stages of life and death from the point of view of our human bodies and perceptual systems. It explores beta moveme
Inspired by the aridest landscapes in southern Utah, those of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and the many contrasts these landscapes present, this experimental film, looks at the sacred qualities and fragility of our environment. It depicts geologic space with a focus on how wind,
The Bat Rescuer is a short film is a film released in 2016. In this short film, we meet bat rescuer and educator Corky Quirk, the founder of NorCal Bats, an organization that provides care for injured bats and educational programs for libraries, schools, nature programs, fairs and other events throu