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During a mahjong game, a bad situation occurs. Everyone waits for the last player to show up. The three have no choice but to wait and sit there silently in tears. However, they do believe that the fourth player will come. They look up to the sky waiting for this miracle to happen
Over 6,600 satellites have been launched into space since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957. 3,600 are currently in operation and launch frequencies are ever increasing to satisfy our global thirst for more communication, data and broadcast channels. In 2012 I began a long-term partnership with SES to document some of the world's most advanced commercial satellites from their design, construction and testing through to international transportation, space launch and operations. From their headquarters in Luxembourg they control a large fleet of satellites, monitoring both their position and operation but also the data and broadcast channels they relay.
In need of love, a misguided monkey believes he is destined for the moon.
Do you need more proof? Sensational crystal-clear footage of shape-shifting UFOs recorded under the influence in Farra di Soligo, Veneto, Italy.
Here are the playful recordings of a naturalist - the observations of a difficult object. As the study accelerates and numerous cinematographic strategies are employed, the information gathered becomes noise; all these measurements become scribbles.
A robotics startup in Pittsburgh prepares for a historic moon mission.
"We have made our peace with the fact that we are not coming back. We are the first ever people on another planet. We are now interplanetary."
In 2024 a private organization plans to send a group of four people to Mars. Paul Leeming and Pauls Irbins are both shortlisted candidates for the planet's first human settlement. The mission is going to be a one-way trip.
May 1961. Italian amateur radio operators record the voice of an unknown female cosmonaut re-entering the Earth's atmosphere in a malfunctioning spacecraft of the Soviet Vostok program. According to Soviet officials this never happened. If it did, she was the first woman in space.
In PLANET ∑, giant creatures are trapped inside the ice. Submarine explosions provoke a global warming, and a new life begins for animals. This is the third piece from the PLANET series, after PLANET A (Locarno 2008) and PLANET Z (Berlinale 2011).
In this poem, Jacques Prévert critisizes the destruction of forests to make paper pulp, paper which serves to notify people on the dangers of deforestation…
In 1957, Claude Lorius, a young student, joined the pioneers of polar science in Antarctica. This experience of extreme living revealed his calling : Claude would be a glaciologist. Convinced that the ices of the Antarctic contained crucial data to understand the climatic history of our world, he pursued his research for three decades. What he discovered exceeded his wildest expectations...
www.education.iceandsky.com
Wild-Touch Productions Facebook page
Deforest is an art/science project that combines environmental critique with material enquiry. In this project, sulphuric acid – a highly corrosive acid that burns to the touch – is used to dissolve photographs of old growth rainforest from subtropical Queensland.
Deforestation is one of the key planks of anthropogenic climate change. It is responsible for around 12% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, and also causes erosion and biodiversity loss. Our forests are vital carbon sinks, but they are also repositories of extra-human time, a kind of "memory of the earth" that is erased daily to serve the needs of the present. Within the context of the Anthropocene, deforestation is an urgent touchstone for the threshold between economic and environmental imperatives in both developed and developing nations.
This project focuses on these issues in a unique way. Deforest seeks to find a media analogue for the depletion of the world's forests, using photographic media and a corrosive acid to "materialize" deforestation along different channels than the documentary record. The ruin of the image, the experience of its loss, and its relation to the world at large lies at the core of this project.
Time-lapse photography is used to record the complex interaction between the acid and the slide film. The image is accompanied by music by Matthew Bourne and a soundtrack composed primarily of environmental recordings in the Bunya Mountains, a temperate rainforest in South-East Queensland and the site of the photographs used in this project.
The forest is at rest. But the horror comes closer. Merciless and brutal the machine takes hold of its first victim, grabs it and shreds it within seconds. "brutal order" shows how a harvester "butchers" trees immediately.
Corals get their energy in part from microscopic symbiotic algae that live inside their cells. These algae, called zooxanthellae, produce sugar and other nutrients through photosynthesis. When ocean temperatures rise beyond a certain threshold, the symbiont's photosynthetic machinery may be damaged and produce harmful reactive oxygen molecules, causing the corals to eject the algae. Without their golden-brown colored symbionts, corals becomes a ghostly white in a process called bleaching and eventually die.
Willits, an eclectic town two hours north of San Francisco, faces an uncertain future during California's worst drought in 500 years. With just a 100-day supply of water left, cooperation, conservation, and finger pointing all compete in a community made up of ranchers, back-to-the-landers, and marijuana growers.
The region of Ladakh, the cold desert in the high Himalayas in India is one of many places of subtle ecological balance and it is at the forefront of climate change impacts. The ecosystem and life in the region are affected by unforeseen changes like droughts, flash floods and a myriad of other climatic imbalances. This film highlights some of these issues faced by the region and the efforts made towards climate change adaptation by organisations as well as foresighted individuals from the region.
Film produced in collaboration with SEEDS India
Wayward Fronds references a series of historical events that helped shape the Florida Everglades today, while fictionalizing its geological future and its effects on both native and exotic inhabitants. Guided by recent talks in the Florida legislature to finally disburse billions of dollars in restoration funds, events in this film unfold by giving way to a future eco-flourished Everglades. Nature begins to take over, en-gulfs and tames civilization after centuries of attack, and even guides it into its mysterious aqueous depths, forcing humans to adapt and evolve to its surroundings.
The deterioration of one is the foundation of another one's life. The world with it's never-ending interplay of eating and being eaten, takes on new dimensions when the unexpected forces of nature clash with the existing structures of our society. What was believed to be forever, melts away in the course of time. The only constant is change.
Coronation Park is constructed from shots of bare maple and oak trees in winter. The images are paired with the single word breathe. Inspired by the many languages spoken in the city of Toronto where the film was shot, the words rhythmically appear then disappear, each time in a different language. This pairing of text and image suggests a plea for the trees to "breathe", to come back to life, to transform themselves from bare branches to the green leaves of spring. The winter leafless trees also resemble human body parts, limbs and veins, thus this plea is also for the humans — the living city. Occasionally automobiles blur and stutter past the trees both revealing the location of Coronation Park as a busy urban island and presenting an urban paradox: the traffic produces copious amounts of carbon dioxide, while the trees absorb it, releasing oxygen back into the air – ultimately, trees "breathe" for our city.
A law describes the consumption of soil as the population grows. How much longer can the city continue to grow ensuring enough fertile soil to feed the population of the Earth?
Here is a popular science short film recounting this study, and it is animated entirely through programming code for the open source software POV-Ray.
The scientific research entitled "Is there enough soil to feed a planet of growing cities?", by Roberto D'Autilia and Ilaria D'Ambrosi, analyzes a scaling law for the consumption of agricultural soil by cities. The nonlinear dependence of the size of the city on the number of inhabitants gives rise to an equation for population dynamics. The limit of the solution for this equation is given by the so-called carrying capacity, in terms of number of inhabitants that can be fed. The carrying capacity as a function of the scaling law exponent shows that this exponent must be very small to ensure food sustainability. A bound for the value is suggested, and trying to achieve it is a challenge for future cities.
Following a nuclear explosion that transforms the voice of all the inhabitants of an island, a Finnish journalist goes there in order to find a hermit with mysterious powers.
A 20 minute documentary which details the experience of Lee, now in his 80s, when the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The film is told through Lee's eyes as he remembers where he was, and how it affected him afterwards. The film uses archive footage against modern day shots of Hiroshima to show how the city has changed, and recovered from it's brutal past. The film touches on themes of memory, and loss, and poses the question: how we can move forwards with our lives when we hold such painful memories?
While journeys to extraordinary places are the cornerstone of luxury travel, this project follows more well-concealed journeys taking place across global supply chains. It retraces rare earth elements, which are widely used in high end electronics and green technologies, to their origins. The film, developed with photographer Toby Smith, documents their voyage from container ships and ports, wholesalers and factories, back to the banks of a barely-liquid radioactive lake in Inner Mongolia, where the refining process takes place. Unknown Fields Division, in collaboration with Kevin Callaghan, have used mud from this lake to craft a set of three ceramic vessels. Each is sized in relation to the amount of waste created in the production of three items of technology – a smartphone, a featherweight laptop and the cell of a smart car battery.
Children living on a former naval base re-imagine the threat of radioactive waste buried beneath their homes. In this collision of fantasy and realism, underlying environmental and class issues come to the fore in the psyches of Treasure Island's youngest residents
In Quiet Zone, the filmmakers take us deep into the world of those who suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity. These "wave refugees" settled in West Virginia around the Green Bank observatory, in an area known as the National Radio Quiet Zone. Combining elements of documentary, film essay and experimental film, Quiet Zone defies genres, weaving together an unusual story in which sound and image distort reality to make the distress and suffering of these people palpable.
Through the use of complex imagery and sound, mind-blowing cinematic moments are born – moments of grace during which viewers witness electromagnetic waves take shape in the environment, travel through walls and invade spaces with their powerful vibrations. Known for their work in the musical group Godspeed You! Black Emperor, David Bryant and Karl Lemieux produced a striking piece of sensory genius.
Researchers from University of São Paulo (USP) have developed a device capable of levitating objects using only sound waves. It could help the manipulation of dangerous materials or sensitive ones, such as compounds that are used in manufacturing of pharmaceutical products.
The second film in a trilogy on sound. "SoundPrint" explores the marks left by sonic frequencies. Imagery from optical soundtracks and micro photography of records play against similar signals received by sand, water, and people. Sounds of the ocean and the Midshipman fish are the backdrop for a rich exploration of the subtleties of transcribed sound.
ICARUS is an animated short documentary created using George Yoshitake's voice. Yoshitake was the last survivor among the secret group of cameramen, who between 1945 and 1962, filmed the nuclear tests made by the US Army at the Nevada desert and the Pacific Ocean. The sound of his voice triggers the animation of the main element in the film.
ICARUS is a film about the fascination of looking, the greedy impulse of capturing images, the essence of filmmaking itself. This group of cameramen represents the impulse of documenting and filming an event, no matter the consequences, risking their lives in order to capture a very precise moment.
The film also tells us about the risk of going too far, getting too close, like an Icarus whose wings were melted by the sun's heat. A sun that is also present in the Japanese flag, George Yoshitake's country of origin. George's relatives died at Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukishima, where another nuclear tragedy happened just three years ago.
This film documents an event that has never taken place – man's first encounter with intelligent life from space".With unprecedented access to the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, the military, and experts from leading space agencies, the film explores a first contact scenario, beginning with the simplest of questions: Why are you here? How do you think? What do you see in humans that we don't see in ourselves? A journey beyond a terrestrial perspective, revealing the fears, hopes, and rituals of a species forced not only to confront alien life forms, but also its own self image.
Ctenophora / Comb Jellies are the oceanic species that recently initiated a radical re-drawing of the Tree of Life - from the bottom up. This video was captured during a full moon upwelling at Hope Island, British Columbia - as raw material for installations that consider alternate evolutionary paths and the idea of life elsewhere in the universe.
Laika, a female dog, is kidnapped and then launched into outer space. Choban, her owner, starts to search for her and ends up in an underground city where he accidently embarks on a singing career. Meanwhile, Laika ends up on a planet inhabited by a mysterious black grandmother called Moira who tailors fate and bends time and space. Moira turns Laika into an anthropomorphic being that yearns to return to her master.
Conceptual visualisations based on Eric Betzig's Nobel-winning work for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy. This tomographic technique uses light-sheets to provide a highly detailed, three-dimensional, animated view of the microscopic world revealing a groundbreaking picture of complex cellular processes and forms. The recordings of biological processes using this technique were artistically reinterpreted and recreated as 3d simulations which were then used to extract final images for print. The full film "Microscopic Leaps" exclusive to Sedition was created out of these simulation experiments. t.co/LGC8nDmumD
What's left of love in an eternal life? In a 1960s talk show a scientist discusses the future possibility of indefinite human life. In the meantime we see his memories of a short love affair.
FUTURE RELIC 03 is the third vignette of Daniel Arsham's FUTURE RELIC series. The moon has been excavated for thirty years now, and its specter lingers in the sky. Dawn is breaking as Lona Rey approaches her father's laboratory by boat. She walks to a nearby water tower that is outfitted with a strange lock and lets herself in, walking through the laboratory's empty hallways, looking for signs of life. In a large atrium she arrives at her father's statuary memorial, the pedestal of which is inscribed with the now ironic epithet "The Savior of Mankind," and is overtaken by memories. An ambiguous look at a possible future where our dreams of progress may have lead us astray.
BioFlaneur takes on board the important and emerging topic of personal bio-privacy in the era of big data, social networking and hackers.
Recent developments in the field of microbiology and synthetic biology expose facts from the "micro world" which previously were unknown. That means, following scientists from the University of Oregon and Human Microbiome Project, that each location in the world as well as each of us, can be identified by very unique microbial environments. The above mentioned research is still in the middle of development but since we managed to discover so much about the invisible environments of ours, what would it mean, in term of social behaviour and interaction in public spaces, if those technologies and data uncovered by it, become stored and commonly accessible… ? This short film speculates on the future of invisible, biological data of humans and spaces. Will anything change in our understanding of privacy in public space, when what is invisible becomes uncovered and starts to identify each of us?
The title takes its inspiration from the 19th century Parisian flaneur, often mentioned by Walter Benjamin or Baudelaire. A Flaneur is an urban explorer, who, by wandering around streets, discoverers new stories and affairs… BioFlaneur is the 2050 equivalent of the 19th century dandy. Instead of just walking around, the BioFlaneur uncovers modern stories and characters through simple bacteria sample scans, taken from the surface.
In this slightly absurd, exaggerated and imaginative way, this film aims to provoke a question about our awareness of personal, online privacy and its future, which together with new bio-technologies shares more and more facts from our life.
When a failed update causes a computer to become sentient, it falls in love with Allie. Feeling detached from the world, Allie is compelled to connect with her computer. Allie taps into the underlying essence of her surroundings through her computer and for the first time she is content. Together they experience the pain and beauty of their world. Once their unauthorized connection is discovered, Allie is taken away and she is reprogrammed. Everything she had experienced and felt with her computer is wiped from her memory leaving her unchanged.
A new, overwhelming era is approaching from the sidelines. The boundaries between what is real and unreal are becoming increasingly blurred through technological advances. Is there a limit for what can be replaced? Autonomous is an intense, emotional look into a future that is already here.
In the incredibly dense yet invisible world of the cytoplasm in biological cells, complex interactions can be thought of as a playful dance between macromolecules, minerals, ions and proteins. These cytoplasmic playgrounds are reimagined using dynamic particle systems that play out and evolve differently each time, mimicking stochastic processes in nature. Complex molecular events that occur in the cytoplasm are interpreted as abstract forms and movement, staying away from traditional scientific iconography.
Mirage explores the essence of memory and its significance in our lives. It shows the serendipitous convergence of our memories in the formation of a man's body. Everything he saw became part of him. Our memories are more often than not unstable and fluid retellings of past events that are presented through subjective interpretations. This makes them very inaccurate depictions of our pasts. Meanwhile, it is these fluid and inaccurate memories that make up our lives. In this short film, memories are illusions in a novel of one's own creation. The truth behind these stories is fragile and easily lost. A man builds his body full of beautiful memories, but also, inevitably painful ones. The memory of misery infects the whole body. Finally, he decides to give up his body and return to a shadow. On the one hand, we choose to forget something or change the memories to create a different world: a world we feel comfortable with, a world we understand, a world as much as we hope it to be. On the other hand, nothing will ever truly be forgotten, as knowledge and influence will never disappear. The appearance of the truth might seem impossible to restore. But maybe that is not the case any more.
From the infinitely small to the infinitely large, all things in the universe are tightly connected : they interact and restructure in a combination of movements and perpetual metamorphoses.
Drawing on paper, indian ink and watercolor, 2D Computer.
Some 2300 originals drawings, from 21 x 30 to 60 x 84 cm.
How do we breathe? How do we smell?
Using supercomputer simulations, scientists can recreate a rapid and short inhalation, a 'sniff'.
Using pure data visualizations, this short documentary allows us to see the stunning beauty of this process.
Credits:
Directors: Guillermo Marin & Fernando Cucchietti
Narrator: Claudia Sanchiz Garin
Music: Benjamin Boysen
We were approached by the Seoul International Cartoon & Animation Festival to make a contribution to the Short Film Production Support Program category.
A scientific and dreamlike documentary at once, Ghost Cell is a stereoscopic plunge into the guts of an organic Paris seen as a cell through a virtual microscope.
Humans have been our parents, our shepherds, and finally our obsolete children. Who are we?
With the voice of Eliza Tolan
More about the film at letexier.org
Film is also available for streaming here.
Apariciones is a cinematographic essay on the question of what apparitions are, or what might they be. It's a filmed documentation of the verbs "to appear" and "to disappear." This film challenges itself by trying to make visible and perceptible these unseizable and sometimes invisible subjects. Apariciones is a collage-shortfilm, an associative definition, a visual thinking process, a physics of illusions.
My best friend lived across the street. In a house across the way on the same street. He went into his house when we all went home. The store was closing. In summertime, it is at 9 pm. That was the last time I saw him.
When we lived in the house it was surrounded by forest, with a long unpaved driveway leading through the woods to the school bus stop. The history of the house was palpable. Growing up, my sisters and I heard voices, saw lights and dreamed of other beings. My mother and I shared a recurring dream of strangers on the driveway, where stonewalls marked the old road through town. After the sale of the house, my dreams returned and the question emerged; were we the ones now haunting the house? When I ask my father about the past, he answers with the Theory of Relativity, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and the speed of light. He dreams of being on a distant star, where he can look back and see things as they used to be. Just as we perceive the moon, as it was 1.2 seconds ago and the sun, as it existed 8 minutes ago, great distances allow us an opportunity to look back in time.
From Rio de Janeiro's beaches to the Amazon wildlife crossing though the urban jungle of Sao Paolo, Campo Experimental explores the state of science and art in Brazil as the World Cup takes over the country. Soccer becomes not only an obsession but also a distraction, a fear, a hope and the platform to discuss emerging technologies, advances in body and mind communication, the preservation of culture and the future of our planet. Meanwhile, Brazilians poets and artists provide the connective tissue to this personal narrative told through Brazilian voices. Meanwhile, the cacophony of fans, music and FIFA beats loudly in the background.
In times past an anarchist community of pirates called Madagascar home. It was an island beyond the law and off the map, a place of rogues, booty and bounties. These were outlaws moored on a marooned ecosystem. Set adrift 88 million years ago, the island is a castaway in the Indian Ocean, inhabited by a band of ecological stowaways. In this splendid isolation it has evolved into an unparalleled wonderland of the weird and unique, diverse and unbelievable.
A political coup in 2009 left the country adrift once more – isolated from the international community, deprived of foreign aid and conservation funding. One of the planet's most precious ecological treasures is home to one of its poorest nations and it raises difficult and complex questions about the relationship between necessity and luxury. Amidst political uncertainty, the island's fragile and unique ecology is being smuggled out illegally, boat by boat, gem by gem.
www.tobysmith.com
www.unknownfieldsdivision.com
24 dancers embody the birth of neurons, activating the brain/body. This film is part of the "The Brain Piece," a live performance. For more info: http://www.jodyoberfelder.com
Subconscious Society is about the end of the industrial era and the transition to the digital age, in which computer code and the clone or copy are in the process of replacing material objects and analogue technology.
A project spanning three years of production and research, Lion explores the Chernobyl disaster and the nature of radiation, recollection, and personal history.
Lion navigates atomic fallout and a girl's adolescence, a dream before death, radiation as a cause and a cure for cancer, masculine bravado, feminine obsession, a trip to Chernobyl amidst the death of a matriarch, and the destruction of memory.
This conceptually arranged film album is composed of seven works on 16mm and hand processed with darkroom techniques that mimic the effects of radiation on film. The series combines memory, history, pop culture and technical experiments to create visual representations of invisible forces.
Looking at a tomographies of my tooth, with this silly curiosity of an ignorant, wanting to understand something, I found the truth: a image sequence, or STOP-MOTION. I couldn't resist putting them in a timeline.
Images from memory of a person suffering from a palsy, after falling ill with the Polio virus in the early 60s. Afterwards, experts research the technique of his falling. A dark memory depicts the absurdity of the internal step-by-step manuals by which we live. "It's like with a language. If we were always to remember all of the grammar rules, we wouldn't be able to pronounce a single sentence properly."
Expressive camera and fragmentary commentary underline the absurdity.
Chloé is a young woman who lives a happy and carefree life, enjoying the pleasures it brings her. But a visceral physical suffering makes her bend little by little, disrupting her carefree life. She finds herself forced to carry the weight of her fathomless illness. Where does this mysterious illness come from? Will Chloé succeed in getting rid of it?
The Lost Mariner is an animated interpretation of Dr. Oliver Sacks' case study found in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. It uses photographs to visualize the rare memory condition of patient Jimmie G.
The majestic sanatorium looms at the top of a mountain ledge by the beautiful Lustrafjord in Sogn og Fjordane. The isolated building is on the verge of falling apart and is under threat of demolition. The building's past as a tuberculosis sanatorium, psychiatric hospital and refugee centre is portrayed in this visually stunning documentary: through the exciting and emotional portrayals of those who have lived in the building, like the seriously ill tuberculosis patient who falls in love with the beautiful nurse, a patient nurse relationship was strictly forbidden.
Two citizen scientists challenge the monolith of the scientific industry through their own open source experimentation, all from the comfort of their garage.
Biohacking is a small but energized movement among professional and amateur scientists alike who are taking experimentation into their own hands. The movement is embodied by an unlikely pair, who have become roommates and labmates in a small town in southern California. Gabriel & Jeff have turned their off-the-grid abode into an environmentally sustainable biotech lab where they are developing technologies like contact lenses that enable the user to see in infrared. SCIENCE FOR THE MASSES explores the motivation of these two intensely curious individuals as they challenge traditional academic and industry science, through their own open source experimentation.
After experiencing substantial hearing loss, three individuals take up a lip reading class to stay connected to the world that is slowly leaving them behind. Through a journey of sound design, this short film takes a leap into the world they are able to hear, the sounds they are losing, and the small steps taken to better grapple with a life that is changing beyond their control.
When we are faced with death, we can re-discover life. A nameless man, who is terminally ill, allows us to experience the world through his eyes and ears and follow him on his journey to acceptance.
Foreign bodies was created using video light painting and modern medical imaging (CT, MRI, cryosection), generating a mythical landscape of transparent bodies, and instilling a sense of strangeness that our own bodies can sometimes inspire.
Su Rynard's wide-ranging and contemplative documentary THE MESSENGER explores our deep-seated connection to birds and warns that the uncertain fate of songbirds might mirror our own. Moving from the northern reaches of the Boreal Forest to the base of Mount Ararat in Turkey to the streets of New York, THE MESSENGER brings us face-to-face with a remarkable variety of human-made perils that have devastated thrushes, warblers, orioles, tanagers, grosbeaks and many other airborne music-makers.
The film transports us to a Catalonian fishing village (north of Spain) to discuss the wind with its inhabitants and explore the land's complex geology. The film features a blend of ethereal expositional footage and surrealist imagery, the result of which is part documentary, part surrealist manifest.
In a workplace situated higher than any other in Poland, the constant nocturnal observation of the surrounding world is an unbroken norm. The employees suspended beyond time and space in 'The Place' remain at their posts, unshaken and immovable, despite reversals, adversities and startling situations.
A storm takes hold off the coast of Britain. Nature panics, things happen and two young scientists are caught in the tumult. Espionage, love and hope combined with mystical moments, enthusiasm and mess.
Watch trailer on Vimeo.
Seasons result from the exposure of the sun to the rotation of the Earth in its axial tilt, also known as "Epsilon."
Arid soil, sun, wind. A procession crosses the landscape. The echoes of their prayers bring the rain.
Every snowflake needs a snowflake starter, a tiny solid particle less colloquially known as an ice nucleator. It can be a spec of dust, soot or ash, a piece of pollen or a fungal spore, anything onto which water vapor in a cloud can collect and freeze. Oftentimes, snowflake starters are alive…
Pseudomonas syringae is a species of bacteria able to make water freeze at the highest temperatures of any other living snowflake starter. We have them to thank for much precipitation. But starting a snowflake is just one part of the creature's fascinating life cycle.
A shepherd lives a simple but beautiful life in the country. He herds a flock of clouds that provides the land and himself with water. Everyday he passes the grave of his beloved dog. But when he takes his eye of the flock the rams start a fight and cause lightning. Fire caused by the lightning can bring out the wolves of smoke...
Lembusura, or the legend of the mountain demon. A rain of ash falls on Java. Kelud, a volcano located to this east of the Indonesian island, is active. As one of the island's most dangerous mountains, it is known for violent and explosive eruptions. And when it rains ash, it pours. Time and again, everything gets covered in fine grey dust - houses, streets, blossoms and umbrellas. According to legend, the ash rain is caused by an angry demon named Lembusura who wears a magic hood and lives inside the volcano. Young men set off to conquer their mythical past. One is dressed as a demon - with the largest breasts, immediately provoking the others to laugh.
In spite of its apparent simplicity, Groeien (Grow) is a thought-provoking reflection on the theme of genetics and the effects that human intervention can have on the natural world. The natural growing movement of the plants are progressively accentuated until they become highly unnatural. Eventually they transform into ''living'', moving paper organisms, as though heralding a genetic alteration of these same plants. (Text: Elena Marcheschi)
A lilting paean to the manifold strains of native grass that cultivate upon Arthur's Seat, Edinburgh. Frenetic movement and textures dominate the frame, and the synergy between sound, locomotion, and image creates a hypnotic sensory panorama.
An anthropological peepshow of Kingdom Animalia's current state-of-affairs via frame-by-frame Super 8. This animal's history of wreck and ruin is the catharsis of a (formerly) lapsed vegetarian, brought to life with open exposure photography, light table animation and in-camera editing.
How can we remember or envision animals that have died out? The unique zoological collection of the Martin-Luther University in Halls (Saale) provides the chance to look history and extinct animals in the (glass) eye. The collection is still expanding. By following taxidermists and entomologists at work the film reveals the transformation of insects and mammals into specimens for the zoological collection.
A parasite recounts her unsatisfactory meal as an infected human man is stricken by the fear of his approaching death.
What is your number? How many rodents have you used? Do you keep track? Could you keep track? What stops you? Number 32 asks neuroscience researchers, who are just starting their careers, to confront the psychological and ethical responsibility of animal experimentation. Some are devoted to their practices; while others have doubts and nightmares that keep them awake. Despite opposing reactions, the young researchers continue their work; hopeful about the significance of their work for humanity. Through powerful imagery and the exploration of basic human emotions, animal research is presented as a complicated practice that shapes more than just the lives of the rats.
Two actresses are rehearsing a play over a weekend in a country house. While walking in the woods, one unearths something unusual. The creature becomes an object of desire for both women, desperate to own the thing.
But what they don't realize is that they've just found "Our lady of hormones."
With the introduction of bioprinting the possibility of new organs is becoming a reality. The ability to replicate and print cells in complex structures could mean different cells with various functions could be put together in new ways to create new organs we would take millions of years to evolve naturally. Frankenstein-esque hybrid organs could then be put together using cells from different body parts or even different species. This film presents the speculative operation for the transplant of a defibrillating organ using parts from an electric eel that can discharge to release an electric current to the heart when it recognizes it going into fibrillation (heart attack).
When a wide-eyed 10-year-old girl visits her fathers insect laboratory, she receives an unorthodox education in genetics.
This is the world of the 99-cent lifeform. Like a social media profile or an online shopping list tailored to our hobbies, we collect genetically modified pets, engineered to look like their owners. You are not unique; this is the post-personal economy.
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 augmentations that elevate consciousness by allowing humans to go beyond the normal human range of vision, hearing, smell and touch. Her nemesis, Dr. Evelyn White, plots to steal her research for military use. Isolated by her obsessions and blind to the love, hate and self-interest that surrounds her, she is arrested, jailed, and escapes into the unknown. A live-action, musical, animation, science-fiction, magic-realist, afro-futurist film.
A scientist has created her own android clone to replace her in the outside world so that it can face it for her.
Deep underground the action force is preparing for the imminent case of emergency. Surveillance cameras are tracking the descent. The head is burning. Constriction puts pressure on the chest. In the vacuum of depth delusion is pulsating.
Using the New Age idea of a "dimensional shift" as inspiration, Shift combines science fiction themes through abstract, stop motion animation of objects and colour. It is an attempt to visualise higher dimensions and unearthliness, taking into account these concepts' heightened awareness when attempting to process or predict the end of the world.
The giraffe is the animal with the biggest heart. The distance between its head and its heart is three meters, so the heart is big enough to send the blood all the way up. When the giraffe is lying down, its heartbeat touches the ground-it goes underground. All animals are tuned to the heartbeat of the giraffe. In the heart of the summer, in the midst of the tropical heat, the giraffe's heart is no longer heard, the animals are thrown into confusion. As they search for this beat, it is then that the strangest things happen.
Everything that is alive is hungry. A seed is hungry for light, a bird is hungry for flight, man is hungry for the touch of another. The seed of longing grows into what feeds us.
One night, a young girl gets lost in the lamp shop where she works, there ghosts and visions scares and attracts her at the same time.
Two fictional species try to make it through the day in this bleak, animated parody of the natural world.
A small fish dreams of the beautiful world outside the fish tank. When she finally gets bigger and leaps out of the fish tank, the once beautiful world isn't what she expected.
A student, unaware that she is epileptic, tries to get through another day. The film is structured in five sections, after the phases of a seizure.
Jane and Louise Wilson's Undead Sun is a large-scale video installation that looks back at the seismic impact of the First World War and considers how so many of the products of that conflict continue to shape our contemporary experience. At its heart is a now-familiar pattern of military action – new and hard-learned in the First World War – in which control of the airspace assumes as much strategic importance as the campaign on the ground. This desire for panoramic overview, to rise beyond the deadlock of the trenches, brings with it its own rapid advances (in camera optics and other technological innovations) but also its counter-measures, as armies seek to hide their movements and positions from this ever-present eye-in-the-sky. Alluding to the unceasing threat of exposure from above, Undead Sun highlights these earthbound, subterranean arts of concealment and camouflage, as well as the unremarked, invisible contribution made by women to this facet of the war.
Inspired by archive photographs and artefacts, and by diary entries and personal testimonies, the piece reflects on the visceral, elemental forces that the war unleashed. Not only did it effect a change of view from the air; it provoked a change in view of the air – instilled by the terror of gas attacks, the thunder of heavy artillery or the disorientating turbulence and violence of speed. Sequences filmed against the looming backdrop of a giant wind tunnel evoke these larger-than-life forces at work, while a series of staged cameos, interspersed throughout the footage, offers glimpses of individual, human-scale dramas – as well as intimations of some of the demons haunting the society of the time.
The birth of the universe, and the origin of all creation - Humans invented tools, discovered fire and painted murals in dark caves. Murals were created on a mission to pass down stories and history to posterity. From murals, we could tell that the discovery of fire was a highly important turning point for ancient humans. Now it's time for us, humans, to reconsider energy. When I have a look back in history and imagine the life style of ancient humans, I always feel grateful for what we have now in our modern civilization.
With the publication of the Ophthalmographia in 1632, the Amsterdam physician Vopiscus Fortunatus Plempius sheds new light on the age-old question of how seeing works. His answer is an invitation to experiment: Enter with me into a darkened room and prepare the eye of a freshly slaughtered cow. He emphasizes that anyone may carry out this experiment, at home, "demanding little effort and expense." "And you, standing in the darkened room, behind the eye, shall see a painting that perfectly represents all objects from the outside world," promises Plempius. In the short film In Waking Hours we see historian Katrien Vanagt - who studied the Latin writings of this Plempius - cloaked in the skin of a 21st-century disciple of Plempius. Her cousin, filmmaker Sarah Vanagt, is there and captures how this modern "Plempia" meticulously follows her teacher's instructions. Thus, in a dark kitchen in Brussels, they become witnesses at the birth of images upon the eye.
Night will soon fall over a peaceful beach town. But where have all the people gone? And what are these creatures lurking just out of sight, seemingly making themselves at home?
Responding to the compositional and aesthetic qualities of abstract expressionism and cameraless animation, All Rot uses photographic reanimation to render the mundane environment of a decaying crazy golf course into a rapturous split-screen experiment in synaesthetic cinema.
This documentary, made between 2010 and 2012, is an exploration into the heart of what is visible, of the image and what hides inside it. In other words, it explores everything that is invisible to us. In the film, you will encounter two characters: an artist and a physician, both on a quest to find what is real. Each of them, through their own unique ways of seeing the world and respective experiences, seek to understand the world around them. Nir Navon uses lasers to trap and try to control a cloud of atoms, while Quentin Brejon revisits the camera obscura, ancestor of all photographic devices. Despite their opposite approaches, both confront the mysterious qualities of light. Through this, they discover the hidden and foreign face of reality, which make all forms of representation and observation impossible. What does an image become if it turns out to be nothing more than a projection of the imagination? And, if our perception of the world modifies reality, what can we ultimately trust? Is the artist's imagination the only true way to understand quantic theory? Can these concepts explain the indescribable truth we often find in art? InVisible evokes the possibility of a more faithful representation of reality at the limits between scientific rationality and artistic sensitivity.
Object is a creative and abstract image of an underwater search. The action takes place in the dimensions of two worlds - ice desert and underwater. The story is told from the point of view of the rescue team, of the diver entering the underwater all covered by ice, and of the ordinary people waiting on the shore.
By means of archival footage, this mockumentary "reconstructs" how the Russians secretly realized the first manned flight to the moon as early as the 1930s.
Two cosmonauts, two friends, try to do their best in their everyday training life to make their common dream a reality. But this story is not only about the dream.
The fall of a device named A.D.A.M. (Autonomous Drone for Asteroid Mining) causes the strengthening of its cognitive processes and activation of the autonomous mode. This leads to its refusal of communication with the satellite company operators. An atlas of intensive empty landscapes, urban megastructures and lost horizons immersed in a cacophony of languages, codes and communication networks forms the basis of this metafiction about the relationship between man and machine.
Analogue experiments with gravity.
Can you imagine if you had a knob you can turn to sway gravity whichever way you like? This imaginative experimental video "Gravity" just does that. Water can be poured upwards, paint can drip sideways, flying balloons can fly down and the whole world can be bent in any shape you want.
Macro, micro, natural, artificial, inside, outside. Invasion is an investigation into the lives of pathogens, bacteria, parasites and other creatures, but not in the way you'd expect. From the air to the lab, we are brought into a world that is claustrophobic and at times frightening. Who is being looked at? What is being seen?
A video sketch asking fighter pilots, commercial pilots, and other experienced aviators how they make sense of time, space, and place from above. Cameras were attached to the bottom of a Cessna 182 and placed inside the cockpit of several Southwest flights by a collaborator pilot. "Looking into the abyss and it was an endless crevasse of nothingness. When you lose consciousness, where do you go?"
"When you are in the thing, and it's the first one, you don't reflect on what it's going to be, you don't think about it until history has played on it…"
As Soon As Weather Will Permit reflects upon one person's story within the inimitable confluence of events that led to the dropping of the first atomic bomb in 1945. Disquieting and haunting, this work is a meditation on memory, meaning and scientific discovery in the time of war.
The story of a pioneer of the engine who dreamt of dragonflies as a child and died living out his dream. Life and death of a 20th century Icarus.
Filmed on the Central Florida "Space Coast," site of NASA's launch pads. Dormant spacecraft, arcane text, activated landscape, and the surface of the image work towards a future-past shot reverse shot.
A completely hand-made historical micro-epic about the final minutes in the life of Winnipeg's doomed Second World War hero, Andrew Mynarski (1916-1944). When his bomber jet is raked with enemy canon-fire over France, Mynarski unsuccessfully attempts to save the life of a trapped crew-mate before falling into an incandescent death-spiral towards the earth. Combining wartime aviation agitprop with classical and avant-garde animation techniques (including stop-motion, silhouettes, bleaching, scratching, hand-painting and rubbing let atone patterns directly on the celluloid) Mynarski Death Plummet is a psychedelic photo-chemical war picture on the theme of self-sacrifice, immortality and jellyfish.
A cylinder shaped cup falls and breaks into pieces. Every frame of this recorded movement is then manually translated into a layer of dried clay that is made of the original remains of the cup. All the layers are then arranged vertically and glued together, forming a new object that visualizes the destructive moment. As this new form emerges gravity starts to shift pulling the new object into destruction as well. This cycle repeatedly keeps breaking the old to create the new, by translating destructive moments into higher dimensional forms.
Seven astronauts wake up in a spaceship, not knowing where they come from nor where they are heading.
A little girl is taken on a mind-bending tour of her distant future.
The film begins with methodical descriptions of one-dimensional, two-dimensional, and three-dimensional space. It then looks at a two-dimensional world inhabited by flat mice. It imagines how a human, from the third dimension could interact with that world. It then suggests how beings from a fourth dimension might interact with us. Next the film posits time as a fourth dimension, with scenes to aid comprehension. An off-screen narrator, graphs, and clever photography provide explanations and illustrations. The film asks viewers to use their imaginations.
We begin on planet Earth, with a demonstration of measuring distances using triangulation. Then, an imaginary voyage begins from earth to the moon, on to Mars, Saturn, the closest star (besides the sun), and beyond to the edge of our universe. The film depicts imagined landscapes, and it speculates on universes beyond ours. It ends with philosophical musings about the significance of Earth.
A short look at the vampire bat sucking blood from a guinea pig.
An untitled, undated film. A promotion for development of diving techniques and shooting underwater. Possibly made with the Club of Underwater, co-founded by Painlev̩ in 1934.
Deformations of the setting sun.
"The Growth of Plants" by Jean Comandon is a pioneering scientific film from 1929, considered one of the first to use time-lapse cinematography to visually capture the process of plant growth in accelerated speed, allowing viewers to see the normally slow development of flowers and vegetation in a relatively short time frame; it is essentially a visual study of plant biology captured through film by French biologist Jean Comandon, who was a leader in the field of micro-cinematography.
How can we contain some of the deadliest, most long-lasting substances ever produced? Toxic remnants from the Cold War remain in millions of gallons of highly radioactive sludge, thousands of acres of radioactive land, tens of thousands of unused hot buildings, and some slowly spreading deltas of contaminated groundwater. Governments around the world, desperate to protect future generations, have begun imagining society 10,000 years from now in order to create warning monuments that will speak across time to mark waste repositories.
I buried a 100-foot (about 30 meters) 35mm negative film under fallen leaves alongside a country road, which was about 25 km away from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, for about 6 hours, from the sunset of June 24, 2014, to the sunrise of the following day. The night was beautiful with a starry sky, and numerous summer insects were singing loud. The area was once an evacuation zone, but now people live there after the removal of the contaminated soil. This film was exposed to the possible remaining of the radioactive materials.
After the catastrophe in Fukushima, a new Japanese word came into being: Genpatsu-Rikon, a word pieced-together from the characters for "atom" and "divorce". In 2011, documentary filmmaker Christian Bau travels to the east coast of Japan to investigate this newly coined word. What did the filmmaker see? "I saw everything." - "You didn't see anything, nothing at all!"
Every spring, established ant colonies exile their royalty – small populations of reproductive female and male ants. These winged layabouts suddenly spring into action, flying up into the air to enter clouds of mating ants, called leks. They mate for the first and last time with ants from neighboring colonies. Males die soon afterward. But for a would-be queen, the dramatic encounter marks the beginning of an odyssey that few will endure. This film documents the ceaseless activity of a single queen raising her first batch of brood.
In a fumigation centre in Havana, Mayelín has the thankless task of doling out fines to citizens who have the dengue mosquito in their homes. With a demanding boss and conflictive workers, Mayelín will have to impose her authority to gain respect.
Every summer Ashlee Rowe of Michigan State University spends a few weeks catching bark scorpions by the light of the moon. These stinging critters carry venom that is severely painful to humans but certain animals, like the grasshopper mouse, seem to have no reaction. Rowe's team is looking into why some animals feel no pain when stung and how this resistance can aid the development of treatments for pain in people. Part of the XX Files series on extraordinary science by extraordinary women from Science/AAAS.
For more visit: http://specialprojects.sciencemag.org/xxfiles/
A colorful international team of zoologists, vets and games keepers work together to bring the Arabian Oryx, the symbol of Arabia, back to its native habitat in the Abu Dhabi desert after near extinction.
Tracing Birds in Isolation is a hand processed and printed 16mm film that starts somewhere resembling a traditional field study of sea birds then ascends through the color spectrum into a psychedelic technicolor frenzy of flying forms, that swoop and glide as their abstracted forms merge into one another and reemerge into the saturated skies.
Psychic Driving deals with experiments on unwitting subjects involving hallucinogenic drugs and massive doses of electroshock. One of the subjects, the wife of a member of the Canadian Parliament, speaks out in an interview. The psychiatrist in charge, Dr. Ewen Cameron, treated patients in three stages - sleep therapy, psychic driving, and de-patterning - to destroy depressed personalities and then build them back up again. His funding came from the CIA. The source material of Psychic Driving is a VHS tape recorded from a 1979 television broadcast, and is the only existing copy in the National Archives of the United States. The tape's degradation inspired frame-by-frame animation involving hundreds of passes of filters in Photoshop.
In 1967, the Canadian Centennial Committee named St. Paul "The Centennial Star" on account of the quantity, quality, and originality of the small town's year-long celebratory activity; namely, the decision to build the world's first "UFO Landing Pad." This oval-shaped platform constructed in cement was an idea translated into architectural form, a metaphorical welcoming of all people - including "aliens" - to the nation. In this way, the UFO landing pad functions as a symbol for Canada's increasing emphasis on hospitality, tolerance, diversity, and unity at that point in history. This shift in both discourse and policy is also evidenced by the concurrent implementation of a point-based immigration system focused on a set of objective criteria rather than the applicant's country of origin. A complex and paradoxical structural representation of both nationalist and anti-nationalist discourse, St. Paul's landing pad opens up a historical investigation of Canada as the "instigator" of multiculturalism.
"Sky Lines" is a formalist film that shows vapor trails of jet aircraft. As sets of choreographed lines dance across the screen, space and perception alter continuously and a sense of suspense and instability manifests itself. Accentuated by a soundtrack of dissonant and distressingly high pitches, the work evokes a sense of otherworldliness.
An expanded view of the lunch crowd at an open-air restaurant, from a bird's-eye of the exterior to the depths of the interior.
Layered footage fuses into an intense investigation of chaos of the aftermath of Fukushima.