VSAC 2025 Film Program

<p>The title alone promises to reveal some inharmonious details within one&rsquo;s own personality or self-image. Already in Anna Vasof&rsquo;s work Amazon Woman (2021) she, as a performer, leaves the terrain of the conducting artist who demonstrates her ideas in animated sequences. The unpleasant loss of controllability of the body is mixed in with the pleasurable and imaginative transformation of everyday objects and processes in order to make tangible the illusion machine of cinema and our sluggish vision. Elements of the body horror genre subtly take hold. Machines take possession over the physical organism, and the figure of Anna Vasof...</p>

<p>A filmic meditation inviting consideration of perception in vegetal beings.</p> <p>Vision is somatic, of the body. In humans, vision is a dominant sense for most people and can feel indistinguishable from the mind when thoughts, judgements, and reactions are unconsciously triggered through visual experiences. Together, vision and mind can block deeper understandings of phenomena and lead to misinformed actions if intentionally looking beyond the illusory surface of things is not pursued. When we consciously imagine how plants might perceive in ways similar to and different than our own, humans extend beyond anthropocentric perception and behaviour to make space for empathetic relations with the aliveness of the vegetal world with whom we share life on the planet, and who, in turn, perceive humans via their own unique, botanically embodied ways of being.</p> <p>Perception and intelligence in plant life has been gaining scientific attention and recognition in recent decades. gestures toward Plant Vision offers a cinematic meditation on how plants might visually perceive their worlds and inspires viewers to consider other ways trees and plants, in all their varieties, might neurobiologically create images to see in stillness, motion, layers, form, colour, light, shadow, and/or time. The film&rsquo;s audio in turn invites consideration of how plants might be aware of and perceive sound in their environments, and includes contemplation on the hypothesis of plant vision by Dr. Paco Calvo, a leader in philosophy of plant neurobiology, behaviour and signalling, and Principle Investigator of the Minimal Intelligence Lab at the Universidad de Murcia, Spain. Once the human is finished speaking in the film, a quiet simplicity makes space for the plants and for inspirational contemplation on other ways plants might perceive visually and sonically.</p> <p>Imagery and sound for the film were collected and created at the Workshop on Art, Nature, and Technology 2016 led by plant scientist Dr. Stefano Mancuso and held at the garden home of Daniel Spoerri in Tuscany, Italy.</p>

<p><strong>WINNER OF SYMBIOSIS 2024</strong></p> <p>Noumenon</p> <p>(noun) a &ldquo;thing-in-itself&rdquo; &mdash; an objective reality that will always be inaccessible to human perception.&rdquo;<br />&ndash; Immanuel Kant</p> <p>Noumenon is an experimental short film reflecting on the relation between reality and perception from a neuroscience perspective, and its parallels with the Hindu concept of maya, or cosmic illusion. Neuroscientist Anil K. Seth narrates his concept of controlled hallucination &ndash; how all perceptions are active constructions, brain-based best guesses at the nature of a world that is forever obscured behind a sensory veil. Through story and classical South Indian temple dance, known as Bharatanatyam, the film weaves in the Hindu philosophy of &lsquo;maya&rsquo; &ndash; the powerful force sustaining the cosmic illusion of the phenomenal world as real.</p> <p><br /><em>Directed by</em><br />Janna Kyll&auml;stinen &amp; Maya Theresia Laughton</p> <p><em>Neuroscience narration by</em><br />Anil K. Seth, D.Phil. <br />Professor | Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience | University of Sussex</p> <p><em>Krishna and the Sage | Hindu parable narration by</em><br />Maya Theresia Laughton</p> <p><em>Cinematography &amp; editing by</em><br />Janna Kyll&auml;stinen</p> <p><em>Scientists at NYU Lab</em><br />Nigel Dao<br />Maya Theresia Laughton</p> <p><em>Original choreography by</em><br />Bharathi Penneswaran | Aalokam Dance Company</p> <p><em>Dance performances by</em><br />Bharathi Penneswaran | Shwetha Ravishankar | Shreyaa Suresh</p> <p><em>Original music by</em><br />Sarah Fazendin | Violin <br />Noah Golub | Keys <br />Christopher Madison | Guitar <br />Anand Sookbir | Percussions</p> <p><em>Sound mix by</em><br />Dhruv Shiva Rao</p> <p><em>This film was made as part of the 2024&nbsp;Symbiosis initiative presented at the Science New Wave Festival XVII&nbsp;&nbsp;and&nbsp;supported by the Simons Foundation.</em></p>

<p>Making the invisible, visible!&nbsp;</p> <p style="margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px">Images of butterfly wings at the microscopic scale are stunning, and at the nanoscopic scale they become otherworldly.&nbsp;</p> <p style="margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px">The colorful images in the animated short Nanoscapes were taken&nbsp;with light and electron microscopes at magnifications up to 50,000x. From iridescent blues to vivid greens, butterflies produce colors by modulating how light is reflected from their wings.&nbsp;</p> <p style="margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px">In other words, pigments are not the whole color story. Some color comes from intricate nano structures, and different organisms have evolved unique approaches to this phenomenon, called structural coloration. So a blue butterfly wing is not blue, but appears blue when tiny ridges bounce light in a way that adds together the amplitudes that make the wing appear blue.&nbsp;</p> <p style="margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px">What&rsquo;s more, the ultraviolet patterns on butterfly wings - invisible to the naked human eye - are among the most complex UV-reflecting structures in the animal kingdom.</p> <p style="margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px">The elaborate nanoscopic topography of butterfly wings has produced a wealth of data on how structural coloration works, and Nanoscapes is an artistic reimagining of exciting new research focused on how butterflies actually build these remarkable, infinitesimal landscapes.&nbsp;</p> <p style="margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px">Shot at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and the Martin Lab at George Washington University, a team of microscopists generated thousands of images over three years to create the animated shorts Nanoscapes and Biopixels. The score was created in advance of the animation, inspired by the material and conceptual layers of the project.</p>

<p>A short animated documentary about what it means to be conscious in a world that is becoming increasingly artificially intelligent.</p>

<p>Among other things Anna Vasof&acute;s working method was influenced by precinematic devices stemming from her fascination with the movement of photographic images. These only appear animated given our persistence of vision. Vasof cites the Zoetrope as an example of this phenomenon, a device that filled people of all ages with wonder at fairs of old.<br /> <br /> <strong>When Time Moves Faster</strong>&nbsp;demonstrates Anna Vasof&acute;s unbelievable pleasure in experimentation and simultaneously shares her delight in demonstrating the illusion enabled solely through the medium of cinema. She proceeds similarly in four vivid, separetly titled demonstrative procedures: First, an original action is presented through a performance - the introduction leads to an exciting state of suspense from the start. Vasof spares no effort in converting everyday objects into mechanical constructions necessary for the shooting of her film. We see the artist walking around in shoes to which a roll of paper mounted with photographs is attached; plates painted with images of gear wheels and layered on top of one another in wooden frames are individually smashed to pieces by a hammer; people standing in a circle embody the various phases of walking. My favorite piece is entitled &quot;Travel to the Window&quot;. It shows a figure in various phases of swinging printed on curtains swaying back and forth, resulting in a charming animation flooded with light! The viewer has an idea what might happen when the tempo of the sequences accelerates, but it always comes as a surprise how far more complex everything becomes. In the end, our view out the window becomes free and a car passes by: Reality is outside, the illusion is over.&nbsp;<em>(Brigitta Burger-Utzer)</em></p>

<p>A color explosion sparkles, bubbles and fractures in this hand-crafted 16mm film. Reeves utilized an array of mediums and direct-on-film techniques to create this boisterous, psychedelic morsel of cinema as material. Reeves&#39; soundtrack mixes samples from rusty, dusty old machines, records and electric waves to suggest an aural passage through technological progress.</p>

<p>I don&#39;t know if you&#39;ve ever heard a goat eating carrots? It&#39;s almost too much, it&#39;s so lovely&#39; An Eyeful of Sound conjures up the fascinating visually complex internal world of audio-visual syn-aesthesia, where senses make unique connections the rest of us don&#39;t experience. In this Wellcome Trust funded project award winning animated documentary maker Samantha Moore has worked with Dr Jamie Ward, leading researcher into synaesthesia and head of the UK Synaesthesia Research Group, and a group of people with synaesthesia to portray an accurate and insightful portrait of what it is like to experience the condition. Synaesthesia is discussed, argued over, dissected and celebrated in this beautifully sensitive animated documentary.</p>

<p>Rumble of train rails;&nbsp;<br /> Crashing of ocean waves;&nbsp;<br /> Soft caress of distant wind.</p>

<p>A camera pan along the horizontal line of sight oriented on a singular object in the landscape:&nbsp;<strong>Tindaya</strong>&nbsp;contrasts the monolithic presence of a silent mountain range with the speed of a fleeting movement.&nbsp;<br /> Although this may seem to be a topographical measurement of a stretch of land, it turns out to be a self-reflexive arrangement as the filmmaker has fanned out the recordings in a threefold split screen. In doing so, Krems foregrounds the parameters that constitute the medium: in this case, the relationship of space and time reveals itself as unreliable and non-continuous. The fragmented course of the film image provokes an unstable vision, which allows only the mountain to remain as a constant element in the rhythmic beat of the dimmed and illuminated images. These images join together at random moments, while the perspective of the gaze constantly newly configures. The sharp contrast of the black-and-white images intensifies the oscillation between proximity and distance and also the play of light and shadow introduced in the speed of the spatial transitions.&nbsp;<br /> The mystical aura of the solid rock faces, primarily of the mountain Tindaya, which gives the film its name, and is considered holy by the indigenous population, captivates the gaze, and continues in the patina of the coarse-grained Super 8 image, while the fragmentation of the pictorial space implies the impossibility of ever entirely capturing this sacral site.&nbsp;<br /> <em>(Shilla Strelka)</em></p>

<p>Primary colored dots are expanding into tiny complex structures as a reaction to increasing pressure. When different colors overlap, new colors emerge that consist of two or more primary layers and therefore expand in different ways. The process continues to produce rich structures and compositions from small imperfections and the mixing of colors until the pressure gets too high.</p> <p>Commissioned by &#39;&#39;The One Minutes&#39;&#39;, theme: &#39;&#39;Color One Minutes&#39;&#39;.</p> <p>More info:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.johanrijpma.nl/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">johanrijpma.nl</a><br /> &gt;&gt;&nbsp;<a href="http://johanrijpma.blogspot.nl/2012/12/primary-expansion-notes.html" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">johanrijpma.blogspot.nl/2012/12/primary-expansion-notes.html</a></p> <p>Limited edition screen print:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.johanrijpma.nl/2015/11/primary-prints.html" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">johanrijpma.nl/2015/11/primary-prints.html</a></p>

<p>A personal study in vanishing and appearing, through Italian light and some birdwatching. Acts of recording, things fleetingly seen and felt, while inscribing the corpus-anima in sunlight through refracting glass and water, and multiple exposures. The work draws on Marsilio Ficino&#39;s 1494 book on sunlight, De Sole, in which he says &quot;light penetrates into the innermost parts of things, but it mixes with none of them... nothing is clearer, nor more obscure.&quot; I was also thinking of Jacques Derrida&#39;s assertion that all photographs are of the sun.</p>

<p>NYC RGB is part of a series of works in which Viktoria Schmid deals with historical color film processes. Using a special technique of color separation through RGB filters, the real temporal dimension can be concentrated on a cinematic triple exposure. The film strip was sent through the camera three times, exposing the material with a different color filter on each pass. First red, green, then blue. This method borrows from historical color film processes and corresponds to a separation of color by the photoreceptors in the eye. The temporally staggered recording of the color separations generates perceptual patterns in the condensation on a single film strip that go beyond a human experience of time and the perception of the human eye. What becomes visible in the color overlays, respectively in the repetitions and the resulting differences, celebrates the past moment in its uniqueness. Viktoria Schmid succeeds in demonstrating in the filmic reproduction that each moment has never been there before and will never return. With the triple exposure, real time is condensed and a new cinematic time level is generated.<br /> The film was shot over a period of several months from the 20th floor of an atelier apartment in New York City, where the artist lived in 2020 during the initial phase of the pandemic, and finally again in 2022. Schmid&#39;s work explores everyday perceptions and how they can be sharpened through her art. Musician Liew Niyomkarn composed a sound design from field recordings made on site and synthesizer triads that are the acoustic counterpart to the RGB colors of the film.</p>

<p>A cameraless video that uses shaders and feedback to push out against the edges of the screen.</p>

<p>Marcel Duchamp once described the relationship between the possible and what is actually occurring as &quot;inframince&quot;, or razor-thin. The dimension of Gregor Eldarb&#39;s experimental arrangement is equally minimal, namely &quot;thinner than two ten-thousandths of a millimetre&quot; &ndash; as indicated by the title of his film. Soap suds, various framing devices and reflections off a computer screen constitute the raw material from which a highly fragile cosmos of the &quot;infra-thin&quot; unfolds, one step at a time. Whereby the process of the image being generated is perpetually in flux and quickly pass&eacute; as it unfolds across the entire suspended apparatus. Electronic images on the monitor are not directly viewed: The scenes involving brief experiments and filmic manipulations are instead seen in the form of reflections on an oily layer of soap. Whether the imagistic rasterization is composed of individual, combined, or artfully spatial layers, it follows a geometry and temporality separate from the perceiving subject. The machine itself is independent of an observer as it creates sense-data. The musical pulse derives in part from the sound of water droplets temporarily flowing into compressed torrents and it intensifies the non-anthropomorphic character of the visible. The resulting fragility is not steered by an individual, it is removed from all subjectivity and proceeds even further: Projection monitors are suspended by wires, partly themselves in motion, ever on the brink of bursting and congenially presenting the perpetual threshold between briefly glimpsed virtual imagery and the once again no longer actually seen. Instability meets with a higher order of the ephemeral. Black and white original imagery radiates the most vibrant rainbow colors. The infra-thin world of sudden possibility flares up for brief luminous moments. (Christian H&ouml;ller)</p>

<p dir="ltr">We all have a biological identity - a genetic hardware that can not be easily changed. About half of Drosophila&#39;s brain is dedicated to vision. What they can see, is who they are. What about us?</p> <p dir="ltr"><em>a film by</em></p> <p dir="ltr">Janne Pulkkinen</p> <p dir="ltr">Hannes Vartiainen</p> <p dir="ltr">Pekka Veikkolainen</p> <p dir="ltr">Huayi Wei</p> <p dir="ltr"><em>with</em></p> <p dir="ltr">Nefertiti Matos Olivares</p> <p dir="ltr"><em>music</em></p> <p dir="ltr">Joonatan Portaankorva</p> <p><em>produced by</em></p> <p dir="ltr">Labocine</p> <p dir="ltr">Leading Note Pictures</p>

<p>Color Test Program is a purist, analog short film that takes a humorous look at Austrian television history.
 An ORF (Austrian national public broadcaster) interview recorded in 1969 about the ongoing switch to color television was ironically filmed on black and white film. Through hand coloring, the colors slowly appear in the background, react to what is said and finally develop a life of their own.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>Celluloid film is reconfigured into a graphic musical score, with obscure narratives emerging as the film is reanimated.</p> <p>35mm, 16mm, std 8mm, super 8mm and 9.5mm gauge films are hand edited, glued, taped and scraped together into one continuous 6 meter collage, before digital stop motion brings the material back to life in its new incarnation.</p> <p>&#39;Cinegraffic Score&#39; continues an ongoing interest in reconfiguring abandoned, decaying and orphaned celluloid material into complex collages with ambiguous fragmentary narratives.&nbsp;</p> <p>This project also expands on previous experiments in designing graphic scores - where the representation of music is achieved through the use of visual symbols as oppose to traditional music notation.</p>

<p>A consciousness reflects on the collected memories of the sentient cosmic explorers it has harvested experiences from. An otherworldly vision of the power of light and the weight of planets.</p>

<p>Ommatidia is an experimental tutorial on genetically manipulating the retina of fruit flies to alter signals from the eye to the brain. This hybrid documentary depicts the perspective of the neuroscientist and the fly as they meet eye to eye.</p> <p>Credits</p> <p>Created by Jaime Sunwoo and Sromana Mukherjee</p> <p>Original Score by Gideon Broshy</p> <p>Filmed and Animated by Jaime Sunwoo</p> <p>Research by Sromana Mukherjee</p> <p>Special thanks to Desplan Lab - Department of Biology - NYU and Sriivatsan G. Rajan This film was made possible by Imagine Science Films, Simons Foundation, Science New Wave, and Labocine.</p> <p><em>This film was made as part of the 2024 Symbiosis initiative presented at the Science New Wave Festival XVII and&nbsp;supported by the Simons Foundation</em></p> <p>Produced by Free Rein Projects</p>