Science New Wave Festival IX

Evolution

Lucile Hadžihalilović

In a remote seaside community, adolescent boys undergo unexplained medical treatment, or perhaps experiments, at the hands of female nurses, seemingly the only adults around. After spotting a body beneath the waves, ten-year-old Nicolas begins to question what he had previously taken for granted -- who he is, why he is there, and what exactly is happening to him. Broadly, these are the questions faced by any adolescent, but here they take on unexpected meanings. Part surrealist coming-of-age story, part eerie medical drama, part reflection on our place in the natural world along with our biological past and future, Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Evolution boldly draws on the scientific details of developmental biology and marine reproductive strategies to create an otherworldly vision of human life.

Things used to be hidden

Tara Mercedes Wood

How much do we really want others to know about us and what do we want to know about them? In the aftermath of a disaster causing everyone to loose their perception filters various characters tell us about their experience and new lifes.
This animated film is a mockumentary about human perception and the way the inhabitants of this world in which a natural disaster causes everyone to loose their perception filters cope with their new found unfiltered reality.

The Mirror System (Le Système Miroir)

Eva Zornio

Pictures escape from a dream. A curious forest made out of neurons where the young director wanders every night. A dream that brings together brain and cinema, memories and scientific experiments. She tries to understand the link which is being woven between Neuroscience and films. A poetic journey at the heart of the Mirror System, the mechanism by which we feel or not empathy for other, whether in the real world or on the screen. /
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Des images s'échappent d'un rêve. Une étrange forêt de neurones où la jeune réalisatrice se perd chaque nuit. Un rêve qui rapproche cinéma et cerveau, souvenirs et expériences scientifiques. Elle cherche à comprendre le lien qui se tisse entre neurosciences et films. Un voyage poétique au coeur du système miroir, le mécanisme par lequel nous ressentons ou non de l'empathie pour autrui, qu'il soit réel ou sur un écran.

Atomic Force microscope

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micro, imaging, atomic

Scanning Tunneling microscope

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micro, imaging, atomic

A Net to Catch The Light (视网膜 )

Erin Espelie

Digitally and energetically, light and its origins drive our circadian rhythms, our internal clocks, and affect the retina. Notably, blue light, in the realm of 400 to 500 nanometers, has become increasingly pervasive, just as our light sources have homogenized. How might this unwind us?

What No One's Ever Seen

Sandya Viswanathan

A day in the life of the world's most prolific spider scientist reveals the beauty and importance of a dying craft. "What No One's Ever Seen Before" follows the daily routine of Dr. Norman Platnick, Curator Emeritus of Arachnids at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Through his sunrise commute through Long Island, to the hidden halls of the still-closed museum, Norm shows us the relentless drive and deep excitement that has made him the world's most prolific spider taxonomist. But just as we begin to understand and appreciate the man and his work, we find that he's about to retire – with no successor in sight.

Planemo

Veljko Popovic

Planemo is a solitary wanderer, a sentinel of the galaxy. It is an orphaned world, a celestial body booted from its solar system by the chaos of planetary migration. In a society where everyone mindlessly orbits around their daily routines, what happens when a person gets ejected from the system? They might just find themselves rapidly pushed out of the habitable zone.

STED - Mikroskopie jenseits optischer Grenzen

Beate Häutemann

With microscopes, researchers have been penetrating ever further into the micro- and nanoworld for more than 400 years. Starting with the first light microscope, which was invented around 1600, to the fluorescence microscope and on to the electron- and STED-microscopes – optical instruments make ever finer details of the animate and inanimate world visible.

Atlas (2015)

Sara Hibbert

Exploring notions of observation, distance, and perception, Atlas is sited around a specific physical object in the history of optics and vision. This object is the first accurate 'map' of the retinal surface, traced using a camera lucida by Richard Liebreich, and published as the Atlas of Ophthalmology in 1863. The Atlas of Ophthalmology itself represents a desire to discover, to record, and to navigate the visible, the invisible, and the unknown. The film explores in close-up detail the landscape of the original drawings, exaggerated and distorted through an undefined optical device. Through the act of observing and documenting this fragile, parabolic, paper-thin terrain, emerges a parallel encounter with a phenomenological unknown. 'In total darkness, a curtain lowers and rises'; the layers of glass readjust, a crescent is burned onto the retina.

How to make a prosthetic eye

Barry J. Gibb

"Art, medicine and engineering collide to create beautiful artificial eyes" A small, highly skilled team at Moorfields Eye Hospital transform the lives of people who have lost their eyes to accidents and disease. Each year, they work with their clients to create around 1,400 customised, detailed prosthetics, many of which replace eyes. Modern prosthetic eyes are far removed from the old misconceptions about 'glass eyes', combining modern materials, craftsmanship and artistry in an entirely unique way. In this film, ocularist David Carpenter talks us through the entire process of how a single prosthetic eye is made.
Topics include the artistry and engineering specialities involved in this modern scientific practice. Theme are the dedication and care required to create every single prosthesis and their importance to people who have experienced disfigurement, as they are freed from the stigma that

Nanoplanet

Monica Zoppè

If we could shrink by 10 million times, we would be able to visit a living human cell, as if it were a small planet. In this movie, based on scientific data and an animation technique developed for biological visualization, viewers can get a glimpse of some of the wanders that such trip could offer. During the short visit, we will witness a moment important in the life of all cells and organisms: the binding of a hormone to its receptor, followed by the first effects triggered by this event. Next, accompanied by an explanatory voice describing in simple terms the scenes that we see, we explore other corners of the same cell. The short is a first introduction to a new world that, despite its minute dimension, is incredibly rich with all sorts of fascinating environments, characters, and stories. Up to now these have only been available to the expert, and this movie is an example of the power of biological visualization for curious minds of all ages.

The Secret World of Moths

Hannes Vartiainen Pekka Veikkolainen

This singular film experience takes place in our planetarium - a 180 degree screening room at Grimstad Culture House. The film explores the world of moths and other insects through 3D Xray images. An upbeat adventure into the world of butterflies and inner structures of the insect world.
Moths are a highly diverse group of insects. In terms of species richness among all animal groups, moths come second only to beetles. Moths and butterflies belong to the same order, Lepidoptera, but the vast majority of all lepidopterans are indeed moths. Despite their abundance, moths have not attracted much attention and they may seem like an odd choice for a film. However, filmmakers Hannes Vartiainen and Pekka Veikkolainen show that moths do have fascinating tales to tell. This film presents stunning views of moths using 3D X-ray CT scans. The film, for example, explores the complex respiratory system of a moth which consists of branching tubes that deliver oxygen directly to the cells. Efficient respiration allows flying insects to exhibit higher metabolic rates than any other animals. We do not know much about how the morphology of the respiratory system is connected to individual differences in flight capacity, but micro CT scanning would be a promising tool for studying this question. The film does therefore more than just deliver existing information; it also provokes new scientific questions to be answered. In our changing world, the study of moths is more important than ever. Lepidoptera are very sensitive to environmental change and being cold-blooded, they serve as excellent indicators of changes in their environment. Kristjan Niitepõld, PhD Department of Biosciences, University of Helsinki

Hotaru

William Laboury

They told me: "You have a gift, Martha. Here, this gift is nothing to you. So we will show you the most beautiful things. You will never wake, but you will carry the most precious memories…"

Glove

Alexa Lim Haas Bernardo Britto

The true story of a glove that's been floating forever in space since 1965.

Bow Shock

Javier Diez

An object that appears in a series of recent telescope images will drive a young astronomer and her colleages to a shocking discovery. A new astronomical survey takes wide angle pictures to make a tridimensional cartography of the sky. It will find out position and distances to far galaxies, stars in our Galaxy and objects of the Solar System like minor planets and asteroids. A young astronomer discovers a strange object in a series of pictures from the survey which shows a curious behaviour. And it'll bring unexpected results when reviewed with her colleagues.
A real new astronomy obsevatory built specially for a wide field optical survey of the universe in the Northern hemisphere. A brief overview of how the observatory works and how data is used later by scientists. And, a realistic approach to a First Contact.
For more on the science project, visit: http://www.j-pas.org

Black

Tomasz Popakul

'Black' ('黒') tells about a pair of astronauts trapped on an orbital space station because of a nuclear war that erupted unexpectedly on Earth. They lost contact with Earth and all attempts to communicate with their base or anybody else have failed. All they can do now is watch nuclear explosions taking place on the surface of the Earth and try to survive together somehow.

Beyond Neptune

Alex Parker

The history of discoveries of icy worlds in the fringes of our solar system - trans-Neptunian space. In 1930, Pluto was the first such world discovered; it remained the only known trans-Neptunian object until the early 1990s, when the discovery of 1992 QB1 introduced us to the rest of the Kuiper Belt.
This animation illustrates the approximate relative sizes and the true orbital motion of all known trans-Neptunian objects with average orbital distances (semi-major axes) greater than Neptune's. The objects are revealed on the date of their discovery.

Gagarine

Fanny Liatard Jérémy Trouilh

Youri is twenty years old. He lives with his mother in Ivry, the city where he grew up. But his apartment complex is to be demolished and the scene of his childhood dreams will disappear. How will he lift off without a spaceship?

In Limbo

Antoine Viviani

A surreal vision of the digitized, quantified world, drifting from internet innovators to sterile data centers, as poetically narrated by the internet itself.

Transistors: Teeny Tech that Changed the World

Abby Kent

TRANSISTORS is a short animated film about the history and science of the tiny devices that brought about the Information Age.

Voyagers

Santiago Menghini

Travel along with the Voyager spacecraft as they traverse the solar system on their planetary expedition spanning over three decades.

Microsculpture

Tanya Cochrane

Microsculpture is a unique visual experience. The beautifully lit, high magnification portraiture of Levon Biss captures the microscopic form of insects in striking high-resolution detail. The film shows Levon Biss and his pioneering photographic technique as he captures beautifully lit high magnification portraits of insects from the collection of Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Levon takes the genre of macro-photography to a new level as he captures in breath-taking detail the beauty of the insect world. The resulting high resolution images are composited from 8000 individual photographs. Microsculpture Exhibition is a unique photographic study of insects in mind-blowing magnification. A 10mm insect is shown as a 3-meter print in Microsculpture exhibition from 27th May until October 2016 at Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
Macrophotography, entomology and the juxtaposition of art and science, the exploration of detail and scale developed by photographer Levon Biss and his groundbreaking insect photography "Microsculpture".

A Film Is A Film Is A Film

Eva Von Schweinitz

Digital projection takes over the movie screens world wide. As celluloid slowly disappears from her workplace, the director, a movie projectionist herself embarks on an investigation into what makes the material special. Digital projection is taking over the movie screens world wide. As the material of celluloid film slowly disappears from her workplace, the director, who has worked as a movie projectionist for more than 10 years, embarks on an investigation into what makes film special. Is it just nostalgia? Is there a connection between how we watch movies and how we see the world? She starts bleaching, painting and scratching film in order to find answers and accompanies Roger Getzoff who has likely fixed every film projector in New York's movie theaters over the course of the last 40 years on his trips. These days, he is being called by the very same houses to take out those still-functioning machines and replace them with digital equipment. A Film Is A Film Is A Film is about time, about fleeting moments, aging, and the turning wheels of history. A personal look into a changing profession and a visceral portrait of a vanishing material.

Shrinking Microscope Lenses

Chris Burns

While batteries, screens and other electronic components get smaller and smaller, lenses have not done their part. Now, with a material science approach, scientists have created tiny meta-material lenses.

Still Holding Still

Sarah Vanagt

The ghostly "invisible mothers" of early photography.

Eyelid

Francesco Mattuzzi Renato Rinaldi

What was once a simple, Spartan hut in wood and metal sheeting, designed to shelter passing climbers, has today become a cutting edge structure. New forms of architecture high in the mountains seek a strong relationship with the landscape, deliberately contrasting with the environment, to the extent that the new refuges look like submarines, spaceships or the fuselage of airplanes. The film follows the planning of an alpine station that was to become the highest Eco-Hotel in the world, but also a 'viewing machine' capable of shaping the gaze of its guests.
The central idea of the film is a relation between high quote architectures and hard nature as gym to studies in a kind of scenarios. All the film follow the construction of an architecture on a mount Elbrus in Caucasus at 4500mt and the sensation to watch through this building. All the process was a real challenge for architects and constructer.

Nina and Flick

Robert Duncan Vera Babida

Nina and Flick was made in 48 hours in a hotel lobby in Glasgow, basing on the word 'trip', all hand-drawn on paper and using limited materials for filming and recording sound, a girl and a light switch's journey has begun.

Bright Spots

Jilli Rose

An animated portrait of conservation biologist Nick Holmes and his work preventing extinctions on islands.
80% of the world's extinctions have occurred on islands. In the 1990s, two surfer / biologists decided to do something about that. Today, their company Island Conservation employs dozens of people around the globe, removing feral animals from islands, preventing extinctions and making our world a little more hope-filled. I interviewed their chief scientist under a tree at the IUCN World Parks Congress, and the resulting film is part nature documentary, part fairy tale and chock full of blindingly beautiful, big-hearted science.

Eyes on the Stars

The Rauch Brothers

Carl McNair tells the story of his brother Ronald, an African American kid in the 1950s who set his sights on the stars. On January 28, 1986, NASA Challenger mission STS-51-L ended in tragedy when the shuttle exploded 73 seconds after takeoff. On board was physicist Ronald E. McNair, who was the second African American to enter space. But first, he was a kid with big dreams in Lake City, South Carolina.

Newton in Space

Amaël Isnard

Fun kids sci-fi explanation of Newtonian Physics.

Simulados

Guillermo Marin Fernando Cucchietti

Simulados is the story of a hunter-gatherer from 12000 years ago trying to survive in one of the most extreme climates in the world. In this journey we'll learn how computer simulations help us understand the workings of our societies, and how they might help us face the consequences of complex challenges such as climate change.
The main topic of the documentary are the computer simulations of human societies, which lies within the so called digital humanities field. More in particular, the research described is a multidisciplinary collaboration between archeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and computer scientists. The theme addressed by the documentary is the idea that computer social simulations can help us understand complex systems like societies, and in particular find some insight into the consequences of their decisions in the face of large challenges such as climate change.
Credits:
Directors: Guillermo Marin y Fernando Cucchietti;
Script: Cristian Selvas;
Technical Director: Fernando Cucchietti;
Art Direction and Animation: Guillermo Marin;
Colorist: Pablo Mejlachowicz
Junior 3D artist: Juan Carlos Nava
Sound design: eDic Edi Calderón
Music: Jazzquezz y eDic Edi Calderón;
Narrator: Karina Matas;
Produced by: BSC Scientific Visualization Team

Symbiogenesis

Ramin Rahni

Every living thing is made up of cells. These cells contain stories. The earliest life forms on earth were made up of only one cell, while we are made up of many many cells living together. The evolutionary history of how we came to be, from our single cellular ancestors, is one of cooperation between individuals. Team work between organisms is as important to our evolutionary life history as it is to our lives today. Here is one of these stories.

In Defense of Pondscum

Danielle Parsons

Oft-reviled, pond scum is actually the vital foundation of a freshwater aquatic food web. Comprised of photosynthesizing algae and bacteria, pond scum can be surprisingly beautiful up close. This short film features various microorganisms feasting on a jewel-like underwater bounty. Ushering the sun's energy into the larger food web, the single celled constituents of pond scum are the gatekeepers of life on Earth.

Enlighten Me

Roxane Philippon

From a scientific point of view, light has various appearances : as a ray, as a wave, or even as a particle. This movie shows how light would look like if we were able to see it propagating around us.

Golden Shot

Gökalp Gönen

Rusty machines living in their small houses imagine that the sun will come and take them to the sky someday. A small light keeps them alive and dreaming. But one of the machines wants to see the sun itself and has a plan.

Of Slaves and Robots

Milos Tomic

A visual response to a speech by legendary Serbian mathematician Radivoj Kašanin on freedom of spirit.

Stems

Ainslee Henderson

Stopmotion process film, a self-assembling robot band of sorts.

What's Inside a Black Hole

Amaël Isnard

In "What's Inside A Black Hole' Royal Observatory of Greenwich astronomer Rad explains where black holes come from, how we know they're there, and the strange effects they have on surrounding matter. We'll even find out what would happen if we were to approached one!

Quantum Fluctuations

Markos Kay

In Quantum Fluctuations, particle simulations are used to visualise the distinct micro-events that occur in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) during a proton collision. Made as a series of conceptual experiments, the film aims to show the complexity and abstract nature of these unobservable aspects of the world that create concrete reality.
Quantum mechanics, high energy particle physics, standard model, copenhagen interpretation, elementary particles, emergence, complexity theory, information theory, simulations, The quantum world is impossible to observe directly and visualisations of quantum interactions have been forbidden since the time of Heisenberg. The presence and properties of elementary particles are ascertained by measuring the minute changes they make on instruments such as the LHC which are then compared to data collected from supercomputer simulations. It is perhaps the most indirect method of observation imaginable, an abstract form of observation mediated by computer simulations.

Loop

Samantha Moore

Loop is about what can be seen and what cannot, how scientists imagine their work and how they describe it. The film is based on the work done in Dr Serge Mostowy's lab on septin assembly in cells, using a zebrafish model. Lab members describe the intricate sub-cellular septin dynamics and structure. Their explanatory drawings, and discussion with the filmmaker about how they see the research, are incorporated into the animation. Each person's unique and idiosyncratic vision of the process brings a different facet to the complex and secret world of septin cytoskeleton dynamics. The scientists' different theories of assembly reveal the creative and discursive nature of science. The scientists' original sketches, included at the end of the film, emphasises how closely they worked with the filmmaker to translate their individual vision to the whole.

Process: Breathe

Line Klungseth Johansen

Chemical and cognitive dissonance. A love story between oxygen and nitrogen.

Love (2016)

Réka Bucsi

Watch LOVE on ARTE
LOVE is a short film describing affection in 3 different chapters, through an impact on a distant solar system. Abstract haiku-like situations reveal the change in atmosphere on one planet, caused by the change of gravity and light. This pulsing planet makes the inhabitants become one with each other in various ways.

Tropical Birds Confront Global Warming

Daniel Grossman

Gustavo Londoño hunts birds' nests in the Manú National Park in Peru. He rigs them with cameras to identify what predators eat eggs and chicks. His research results suggest surprising challenges that some birds will face as the region warms further.
Director | Daniel Grossman
Editor | Simon Werdmuller von Elgg
Music | Cedric Conti
Daniel Grossman has been a print journalist and radio and web producer for 30 years. He has reported from all seven continents including from near both the south and north poles. He holds a Ph.D. in political science and a B.S. in physics, both from MIT. He was has been awarded a Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism and an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship. He is author of Deep Water: As Polar Ice Melts, Scientists Debate How High Our Oceans Will Rise, and coauthor of A Scientist's Guide to Talking with the Media: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Season of Wonder

Lisa Crafts

Season of Wonder is a cine-poetic work that situates us amongst the irregular cycles of a destabilized world. It intertwines that which I witness with that which I imagine. A perceptual blur arises, where the freakish quietly morphs into the everyday. I am working in the area of unnatural history in an intervened place. Cycles of time are disrupted, and loss is complicated with the spark of possibilities.

The Researcher’s Article

Charlotte Arene

Watch this film at Physics Reimagined
How do scientists publish their discoveries? From first idea to publication, this film takes you through the long, painstaking, but ultimately elating process of a discovery in physics. This film is an animated documentary that deals with the technical, as well as the human aspect, of a scientific publication process. It is also a more general outreach attempt at explaining what research is, and how it is organized.
Physics Reimagined is a research team from the Laboratory of Solid State Physics (LPS) at the Université Paris-Sud and CNRS that works on many ways to present solid-state physics and its recent discoveries to the broader audience.)

Gobbledigook

Andrea Rassell Katharine Adcroft

Experimental short video in which guanine flakes in solution reflect light to allow the observational turbidity around a fictional elemental symbol. Flow visualisation is a fast-evolving field that often sees the merging of technology and scientific endeavour. For this work, a sans-serif logo was designed and 3D-printed, before being placed in rheoscopic fluid - a substance traditionally used to investigate liquid-flow in engineering research. Rheoscopic fluid was designed to exploit the optical properties of guanine flakes - as they move amongst vortices created by the flow of the liquid they are suspended in, they reflect light in a way that elucidates those patterns of fluidic flow. High-speed videography was used to document the dynamic nature of the fluidic movement around the typography, which illuminated unusual vortices and turbulent flow specific to the fictional chemical Gobbledigook symbol. Rheoscopic fluid is no longer made, disregarded in favour of digital modelling techniques, and this short film is a paean to this soon-to-be-lost interaction of light and liquid.
Gobbledigook celebrates an analogue technique of flow visualization which is being lost to computer modelling techniques. The film is also an interdisciplinary experiment in the enmeshing of typographic design and scientific visualization.

The Five Minute Museum

Paul Bush

This is a romp through the museums of England and Switzerland in which the objects on display come to life and reveal the stories of their creation. It is a celebration of the chaotic diversity conjured by the human hand and mind, and the eccentricity of museum collections. It's the history of man-made objects from prehistory to the present day.

Immortality, home and elsewhere

Sasha Litvintseva

Weaving around a theory of immortality based on the premise that our lives are a summation of all the information we consume and process, gleaned from existing theories from a number of scientific disciplines, the film draws on my personal history's brush with a global nuclear disaster, to precipitate a meditation on the potential role of an individual in the imaginary film/event of our individual or collective death: as a protagonist, or as an extra appearing in a handful of frames at the very moment of their death. The (im)possibility of a singular setting for such an event is at question, and there is a temporal flattening accompanying the spacial flattening, both as a collapse of history implied by the end of potential futures, but also the flattening of time implicit in our fascination with ruin. The uncanny familiarity we gain with spaces through mainstream cinema, which is itself becoming increasingly domesticated, is not unlike what is made possible with streetview. By releasing locations such as the pyramids and the Taj Mahal, themselves monumental attempts at immortality, streetview is declaring itself as a competitor to tourism, tourism itself a chase of experience and self-documentation. The virtual experience may not quite compare to the real thing yet, but the mediated virtual experience carries the same indexical value as the mediated real thing, being one step removed from the physical world. The question of authenticity in terms of cinematic authorship as well as consumption remains to be answered. If you could experience everything that ever was, would you still be afraid?

Infinitude

Scott Portingale

Infinitude is a meditation on the cosmic evolution of matter and energy over time. Experimental filmmaking techniques such as time-lapse, high-speed, and stop-motion photography were used to photograph handmade props, fluid dynamics, and angular momentum. Infinitude is a handmade representation of the exponential growth of complexity in the cosmos.

Sila and the Gatekeepers of the Arctic

Corina Gamma

The concept of sila—a term that encompasses weather, balance, consciousness—frames a story in the world's northernmost inhabited town of Greenland. Here, a tiny community of Inuit subsistence hunters and a team of polar scientists bear witness, in different ways, to the transforming environment. For the Inuit, drastic recent changes in weather patterns are spelling an end to their centuries-old way of life. As the international researchers track the effects of those changes on Greenland's vast Inland Ice Cap and the far-reaching consequences they will have, the film weaves together distinct narratives to put a human face on a highly politicized issue. The specifically Greenlandic idea that weather acts as the conscience of nature informs a unique story at the frontlines of climate change.
Corina Gamma, / Greenland, 2015, 70 min

Subatlantic

Ursula Biemann

The science fictional video essay unfolds across the Subatlantic, the latest climatic phase of the Holocene that began about 2,500 years ago and is still ongoing. With its peaks and drops, this climatic period has registered major civilizational changes and movements, juxtaposing the science of geology and climatology with human history. The voice-over alludes to a she-scientist who is making instrumental observations about a changing environment around the last glacial melts. From an increasingly submerged place of oceanic observation, her objects of examination are as much the physical world and atmosphere that is engulfing her as the thoughts that are formed, reconfigured or released under the changing conditions. Subatlantic, of course, also means the submerged space of the Atlantic Ocean. Set in the Shetland Islands, Greenland's Disco Bay and a tiny Caribbean Island, the video implicates far apart locations yet connected through invisible Ocean streams, which determine the temperatures in the North Atlantic, sea and land. The video addresses two submerged dynamics that ensue from the melting of the Arctic ice, the slowing down of the Ocean streams and the release of massive new genetic materials that have been locked in the ice sheets for longer than human time. In both instances, the dynamics driving these physical processes are non-localized and invisible to our eye."

Domestication

Sylwia Gawel

"Domestication" shows a particular dependence between a man and the animals he owns. The protagonist - a collector of exotic reptiles - lives in a flat cluttered with aquariums. Surrounded by the luxuriant plants he once planted each day he attentively looks after his animals yet strictly controls their behaviour. A small caiman that he brings home will unexpectedly disturb the inner harmony that the man managed to build. In her animation Sylwia Gaweł captures the essence of human domination offering an interesting remark on the trap of eponymous domestication.

Archives of Extinction

Alyse Takayesu

Throughout the 19th century scientists transformed living birds into dried, stuffed, and otherwise preserved scientific specimens. Today scientists seek to transform these lifeless specimens into living birds through the emerging science of de-extinction. Exploring these transformations, Archives of Extinction evokes questions about de-animating and re-animating forms of life and about the human role in disassembling past and reassembling future ecologies.

Heaven

Isamu Hirabayashi

Nature is beautiful. On the gushy actualities of the natural world. Decomposers, dirt, and decay, beautifully shot with a soundtrack of only breathing.

Expert Dreamers

Nguyen Khoi Nguyen

At the Dream & Nightmare Laboratory at the University of Montreal, Elizaveta Solomonova is searching for expert dreamers: people who can visit dream land and report back accurately what they see, hear, feel, and even smell. For most of us, remembered dreams are filled with sights and maybe sounds. But so much more can happen when we sleep.
Expert Dreamers is part of "The XX Files - Extraordinary Science, Extroardinary Women" produced by Science/AAAS and available at: http://specialprojects.sciencemag.org/xxfiles/episode-2/
Production Credits
Producer, Editor & Animator | Nguyen Khoi Nguyen
Interviewer & Supervising Producer | Sarah Crespi
Produced by Science/AAAS
sciencemag.com

Animals Under Anaesthesia: Speculations on the Dreamlife of Beasts

Brian M. Cassidy Melanie Shatzky

Part lyrical document, part farce, Animals Under Anaesthesia: Speculations on the Dreamlife of Beasts explores the imaginary unconscious minds of animals. Images of sex, death, and the natural world are made manifest in the murky and disquieting dreams of a dog, cat, pig and rabbit.

Amy Karle: Bringing Bones to Life

Amy Karle

Amy Karle is an artist who has always been fascinated with mysteries of the body. (http://www.amykarle.com) Her most recent work uses the building blocks of life: cells. As an Artist in Residence at Pier 9, Amy collaborated with Autodesk to create "Regenerative Reliquary," a sculpture consisting of 3D printed scaffolds for cell growth in a bioreactor. The intention is that stem cells seeded onto these scaffolds will grow into bone. She hopes that this project serves as a foundation for further exploration and opens conversations about the awe and mystery of life, transhumanism, synthetic biology, the future of medicine and implants, and things that could be made from the building blocks of life. For those who wish to experiment, Amy has shared her workflow with open source instructions @ (instructables.com/id/3D-Printed-Scaffolds-for-Cell-Culture).

Second Life

Eugeniusz Pankov

Iryna Myenova decided to go to the transhuman company to sign a contract to froze her 98-year old mother. This process should happen when heart stops beating but the brain is still alive for a few minutes. She did that in hope that in the future technology would be so advanced that it will be possible to unfroze her mother and bring her back to life, later even bring her young again. Iryna also signed a contract to freeze herself also after her death. She did that to start new, better relationship with her mother, who was extremely strict and selfish. She didn't allow Iryna to have any friends or lovers, so her daughter lived her whole life with rough mother, who was the closest person to her. Right now Iryna waits for death and to be frozen and doing plans for the future with her mother.

Las Mariposas del Alma (Butterflies of the Soul)

Ana Martínez

Nobody would have guessed that Santiago, curious and creative born born in a small village near Navarra en Aragon would become the father of neuroscience and the first Nobel laureate in Spain in 1906. This journey through brings us into the life of this scientist who was also an artist, philosopher, photographer, writer. This documentary came out for Ramón y Cajal's 100th anniversary of his Nobel Prize and merges archival footage with with animations and interviews to merge the past, present and future of the impact of his discoveries.
Travel through time to the world of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, who was equally passionate about dissecting and mapping through eyes and brains as he was about painting and photography. This film was produced by Spanish TV RTVE and the screening is possible with the permission of the Cajal Institute that is responsible of the Cajal legacy.

Bluebrain: Year 7 Preview

Noah Hutton

Begun in 2009, Bluebrain is director Noah Hutton's 10-year film-in-the-making that chronicles the twists and turns of the Blue Brain Project—neuroscientist Henry Markram's audacious and controversial attempt to reverse-engineer a human brain, neuron by neuron, in a massive virtual simulation on supercomputers. For the past 7 years, through his exclusive access to the project personnel and Markram's facilities on the EPFL campus in Lausanne, Switzerland, Hutton has been steadily building towards a documentary feature set for release in 2020. With excerpts already featured in Scientific American and VICE, the film will also track several other major endeavors to understand the brain, including President Obama's BRAIN Initiative and the Allen Institute in Seattle.

Isabella

Ross Hogg Duncan Cowles

At the age of ninety-two, Isabella struggles to remember... As she becomes ever fragile and her short-term memory begins to falter, her past is explored, questioned and brought to life. How much of your life do you need to remember to remain yourself?

Reconsolidation

Liron Unreich

"Reconsolidation" begins with a clinical look into a neurological experiment as neuroscientist Dr. Daniela Schiller, labors to discover the key to rewriting fearful memories — reconsolidation. From Daniela's research laboratory in New York she begins her personal search and returns to her native Israel to compel her elderly father to reveal his Holocaust remembrance for the first time. What follows is a haunting exploration into the nature of memory, its power, its vulnerability, its promise and its generational effect.
The film depicts the science of memory. It shows how research on the biology of memory reveals the dynamic nature and fragility of emotional memories.
Reconsolidation is the third episode in The Ripple Project series ONE.

Extrapolate

Johan Rijpma

A straight ahead animation beyond observation. In this hand drawn animation a line is being extrapolated through a grid. When the line surpasses the boundaries of the grid, the process spreads to and reflects on its surroundings. Beyond each boundary the extrapolation of movement is causing deformation in a systematic but speculative way.
This film reflects on the process of extending (scientific) knowledge into unknown area's. The discrepancy between calculated predictions and actual situations. And the limits of what we can rationally understand
This work was created with support from ''Animation Artist in Residence Tokyo 2016'' Part of the Agency of Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan (Bunka-cho) ''Project to invite overseas creators of media arts 2016''. And the Mondriaan fund.

See Memory

Viviane Silvera

See Memory is a powerful exploration of how traumatic memories are experienced. The film is made of 30,000 hand painted stills that accompany narration woven together from interviews with leading neuroscientists and psychiatrists. See Memory gives voice to the experience of deciphering disrupted or fragmented memories through a unifying lens of art and science. The film follows a lonely young woman through the liminal space between past and present. After allowing another to witness her trauma the woman finds herself transformed, no longer living with those memories alone. Walking through the same landscape, she finds herself moving towards a previously unimaginable future.
The Science Behind See Memory follows the original film with new insights from the experts whose work inspired See Memory. Viewers are invited into Silvera's studio to learn about her creative process, groundbreaking discoveries in memory research, and how science shines a light on the dark corners of our minds. The Science Behind See Memory features ambitious new work from Silvera, who was inspired to paint over 10,000 new stills that help visualize new revelations about how our brains process traumatic memory. Equal parts behind-the-scenes and an update to the original film, The Science Behind See Memory celebrates the inextricable bond between art and science and the importance of having them inform one another.

A Brief History of Hallucinations and the Supernatural with Oliver Sacks

Alex Pasternack

Oliver Sacks discusses hallucinations—including his own—and how they inform otherworldly beliefs.
"I awoke and saw a younger version of my face about two feet away."
The hallucinations that accompany sleep paralysis, for instance, can be very vivid and visceral, auditory, visual and tactile, with the sense of a malignant presence nearby, and a sense of abject terror—what one of Dr. Sacks' colleagues called the "ominous numinous." ("The 'mare' in 'nightmare' originally referred to a demonic woman who suffocated people by lying on their chests," Dr. Sacks wrote in Hallucinations.)
Read article in Motherboard VICE.

Sleepless

Ellie Land

Sleep. Do we get enough? The latest developments in circadian biology research are uncovering the detrimental effects that a lack of sleep can have to our well-being. Sleepless is the result of a two year conversation between artist Ellie Land and scientist Professor Peter Oliver about the links now being discovered between sleep and mental health. Its rhythm is inspired by the circadian cycle and displays visual icons rooted in the science of sleep, whilst featuring the voices of a group of mental health service users who share their experience of disrupted sleep/wake patterns.

Paramusical Ensemble

Tim Grabham

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 generated in real-time from the electrical activity of four performers wearing a Brain-Computer Music Interfacing system, consisting of a brain cap furnished with electrodes, which reads electrical information from the brain. This electrical information is used to control a generative music system.
Activating Memory, a piece for a string quartet, designed by Eduardo Reck Miranda. Brain-Computer Music Interfacing system built by Joel Eaton In collaboration with - Dr Julian O'Kelly and Dr Sophie Duport at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability, London
A BCMI system consists of a brain cap furnished with electrodes, which read electrical information from the brain. This electrical information is used to control a generative music system. In this performance, four severely motor-impaired patients at RHN use groundbreaking BCMI technology developed at Plymouth University's ICCMR to generate musical scores in real-time for the string quartet to play on the fly."

Pan

Charlotte Arene Nevil Bernard

An experimental animation film about the ancient Greek god Pan; god of nature, liveliness, and breath.

Nature's Switch

Caroline Ward Erinma Ochu

A poem searching for the everyday moments in the life of plants triggered by light. From dusk to dawn across a city, an allotment, a field, a plant laboratory, an LED farm exploring the boundaries between nature and industry and questioning our influence.

Popped Secret: The Mysterious Origin of Corn

Nathan Dappen Neil Losin

Ten thousand years ago, corn didn't exist anywhere in the world, and until recently scientists argued vehemently about its origins. Today the crop is consumed voraciously by us, by our livestock, and as a major part of processed foods. So where did it come from? Popped Secret: The Mysterious Origin of Corn tells the story of the genetic changes involved in the transformation of a wild grass called teosinte into corn. Evidence from genetics supports archaeological findings pinpointing corn's origins to a very particular time and place in Mexico. Produced for Day's Edge Productions & Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Biointeractive

The Protein Folding Revolution

Nguyen Khoi Nguyen

Big leaps in our understanding of protein folding can open doors to new protein-based medicines and materials--designed from the ground up.
www.sciencemag.org

Optogenetics - Light Gets on Your Nerves

Oliver Päßler

Nerve cells, which can be switched on and off with light - this is possible through optogenetics. Ernst Bamberg at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt is working on improving this technology further to ensure that neuroscientists can learn more about our brain.

The Signal and the Noise

Charlie Tweed

The film is voiced by an anonymous group of 'hybrid' machines, from some point in the near future, who look at humans and animals as inefficient machines and consider ways of editing and improving their code. Whilst the work appears to be a piece of science fiction all of the technologies and ideas discussed are based on actual advances and research and real visions of how things might materialise in the future including the concepts of DNA and biological computing and the recent technology for gene editing known as CRISPR.
A film by Charlie Tweed, in collaboration with Dr Darren Logan. Commissioned by Animate Projects and supported by the Wellcome Trust.
silentsignal.org/Collaborations/the-signal-and-the-noise

The Ray Cat Solution (La Solution Radiochat, subtitled in French)

Benjamin Huguet

In the 1980s, a curious project was proposed by two scientists seeking to send a long-lasting warning to the future: to create a breed of cats that would change colors when they are near a source of dangerous radiation?

Illustration Compostage

Élise Auffray

Composting helps the Earth to grow, it helps life to grow. This docu-animation film explores, via 3 month of photos taken once every two hours, how the passing of time turns a dying world into a new one, a current one, and a fertile one.

Picture of Light

Peter Mettler

A documentary of an expedition to Churchill, Manitoba to film the Northern Lights.
We live in a time where things do not seem to exist if they are not captured as an image.
But if you look into darkness you may see the lights of your own retina -- not unlike the Northern Lights, not unlike the movements of thought. Like a shapeless accumulation of everything, we have ever seen.
Before science explained, the Northern Lights were interpreted as visions, prophecies, spirits -- a trigger for the imagination -- images provided by nature framed by no less than the universe itself.
...aurora borealis...the lights with no bodies, pouring colours from the sky...a film exploring the capture of images from nature, images more special than any special effect...

We Know We Are Just Pixels

Laure Prouvost

Attributing human characteristics to inanimate objects, this video work finds Laure Prouvost's images forming a conversation amongst themselves. Discussing their existence and vulnerabilities, in relation to the viewer looking at them, the images want to be more than just pixels; they want to explore and exist outside of the machine upon which they are being played.Comments and moving images are juxtaposed; they come and go in a dazzling rhythm. As often in Prouvost's films, the speed of images and text challenges the limits of perception, for it seems almost impossible for the human eye to catch every piece of visual information in the film. Eventually, the viewer becomes used to the rhythm and finally gives the images the attention they 'deserve'.

The Mess

Peter Burr

A journey to the threshold of a utopian labyrinth. We follow the perspective of Aria End, a custodian with cyborg guts, tasked with cleaning up this feral structure.

The Betrayal

Susan Young

A woman trusts her psychiatrist, but becomes enmeshed in his prescriptive web. Medical records interweave with pulsing pills to tell the story of their addictive, destructive relationship. At its dark heart, The Betrayal is a twisted, deadly love affair.
The Betrayal is an autobiographical film that addresses themes of trust, addiction, transference, countertransference and the abuse of power in a psychiatrist-patient relationship. Using rapid editing and repetition of fragmented images of medical records and hypnotic, pulsing pills, the film viscerally evokes the experience of enmeshment in a treatment regime of increasingly sadistic manipulation and powerful prescriptions.

Sigismond sans images

Albéric Aurtenèche

Sigismond Langlois is submitted to a psychiatric evaluation on account of his violent behavior. He just turned 18, and pretends he was born with no image. Throughout the questionnaire, he recounts the peculiar existence of a young man who never saw himself, neither in reflection nor on photo, to the point of sometimes doubting of his own existence. But today, Sigismond is determined to make himself heard.

Feedback

Heidi Stokes

'Feedback' : A series of short, sharp reactions to how the digital age is affecting the way we judge each other.
This film reflects on a world, that perhaps, increasingly represents who we are through virtual statistics. In an age that has undergone ground-breaking digital changes, it seems almost inevitable that our identities are also having to adapt and change to this new form of representation. 'FEEDBACK' plays with this idea, inventing unusual ways to evaluate our identities.

Recycled

Lei Lei

A surging montage of cultural memory sourced from trashed film retrieved near Beijing. The materiality of the photographic memory, psychogeography echoing across time, clever post-Takeshi.

Notes from the Interior (2015)

Ben Balcom

Wandering through the body puzzling out a system of symbols. The trouble is, affect resists signification outright. The inside and outside become muddled when you start to feel your body in relation to the image. This film is an exploration of the body, specifically the affective register of bodily experience. It seeks to muddle the phenomenological analogies between the viewer's body and the image on the screen. This film reminds us that at the molecular level, we are not so separate from what we consider to exist outside of us.

Towards the Colonies

Miryam Charles

When a young girl is found off the Venezuelan coast, a medical examiner will try to determine the cause of death before the body is repatriated.

Wolkenschatten (Cloud Shadow)

Anja Dornieden Juan David González Monroy

Hypnotising slideshow of weathered images presents itself as a relic of an imposing event. A village's inhabitants flee into the darkness of a cave to refresh themselves with projected images. Ultimately, they will pay a high price for their wonderment.

Deer Flower

Kangmin Kim

In the summer of 1992, Dujung, an elementary student, goes to a farm in the suburbs with his parents. While his parents believe the expensive and rare specialty from the farm will strengthen their son's body, Dujung suffers side effects.