Norm
Max HattlerIn this film, various lens and monitor test charts were animated across seven chapters to create visual hallucinations and graphical sound. All sound is generated by directly reading the film's image as an optical soundtrack.
Playlist
In this film, various lens and monitor test charts were animated across seven chapters to create visual hallucinations and graphical sound. All sound is generated by directly reading the film's image as an optical soundtrack.
River Nocturne is a study of the concept of noise intended not only as an unpleasant sound but also as a visual artifact. The so-called high sensitivity in digital cameras allows us to see in the dark by adding an artificial grain to the video, sacrificing its quality. In these night shots, noise is not avoided but rather enhanced, thus creating abstract, hypnotic images that pulsate slowly.
A cinematic text. An anti-immersive experience, an inner odyssey. A world without sound, a collective experiential event unique to each viewer.
Inspired by Jean Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment, this experimental film features discursive dialogue between two AI models and explores the ideas of the death of art and communication in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
The Dream Portal is an experimental self-portrait exploring fetishism, body image, and identity through raw, analog visuals. Using vintage tech and no digital effects, the film evokes the nebulous intimacy of memory and dreams—where shame and desire blur into something hauntingly honest.
A broken camera and three rolls of film, two daylight and one tungsten, capture days with my grandmother. The version of the woman on celluloid is more foreign to her than to me, and the version of herself speaking these languages is more foreign to me than to her, but both are not fully in our grasp and slip away and decay. They do not belong to either of us but to time—much like how languages are imperfect and adapt to the needs of those who speak them. Time causes disintegration, wherein different variations and versions emerge. Because of physical separation, my grandmother slowly forgets her native tongue and the languages she spoke as a child, mirroring the movement and transformation of living languages. The act of remembering brings back these decomposing versions of past selves, selves that never were or briefly were, then hidden away but not discarded. The film intentionally chooses to leave all sequences unsubtitled.
Fām II is a visual music piece that explores the aesthetics of algorithmic processes. Generated from a A single block of logic-based code, it simultaneously produces and manipulates both audio and visual streams, forming a perceptual field of pulsation and uncertainty. Through computation and recursion, the system creates an improvisational sensory phenomenon, detached from symbolic systems of conceptualization and control. The first iteration of the piece was presented at Orbit Festival in Utrecht and MAPP_MTL in Montreal.
An imperfect archive of a videogame on 16mm film. The multitelic digital experience woven into the analogue format, to prevent digital degradation.
Dizzying, otherworldly, and truly experimental, toward a fundamental theory of physics deploys a reconstruction of the Time-Slice camera, a circular rig invented by cinematographer Tim MacMillan, that uses 293 lenses shooting simultaneously to capture different points of view in 16mm. Recalling Eadweard Muybridge's protocinematic experiments in capturing movement, as well as the abstract lichtspiel of intermedia artists such as László Moholy-Nagy, Thomas Wilfred, and Jim Davis, Victor Van Rossem's 3D film captures three-dimensional light-objects that are at once spectral and tangibly present, a ballet of abstract radiance and undulant color.
Bikers from across the United States descend upon Galveston, an island off the coast of Texas, for one of the largest motorcycle rallies in the nation.
A silent evocation of perception and memory; an attempt to touch the flotsam of elliptical impressions, earthly phenomena and dreamed images that linger and interpenetrate on the surface of thought.
This is a series of two short experimental films. They can be screened together, or apart. It reimagines mid-century 16mm educational films through a practice of deep listening and material intervention. Drawn from archival films once shown in American classrooms—many focused on Native American history and U.S. civics—the works are edited blind: the video image is physically obscured, and the structure assembled entirely through sound. Guided solely by listening, each film is built through cuts of the audio tracks only, without post-production manipulation or audio treatment—resulting in a sonic collage where meaning emerges from rhythm, tone, and interruption. Only after the edit is complete is the image revealed—becoming a kind of accidental score.
eyes set down lots love for a locked door the silhouettes are the same but the faces have changed you know I can't go home this way came here to say the same
In 19th-century Paris at the Salpêtrière Hospital, patients were hypnotized onstage to reproduce the symptoms of hysteria for public audiences. Over a century later, high school cheerleaders are fainting en masse.
A woman hides her face against a wall. Fireworks cover the night sky. A voice speaks to a friend who is not there.
In a dark room. A flickering light. Your fingerprints marry to your hands. You look out a window. Mind spinning on the floorboards. A fire place hotter than a 1000 watt light bulb warms you. For weeks you wait for the sun to appear and it does. It always does.
'I'm Here Live, I'm Not a Human' is a video exploring the modes of nonhuman embodiment and its emancipatory potentialities in the context of western anthropocentric humanist discourse.
"The Split" is a performative video documenting the action of splitting a phallic vibrator that tackles the psychoanalytical theories of "penis envy." This theory was developed by Sigmund Freud regarding female psychosexual development, and states that young girls experience anxiety upon realization that they do not have a penis. The video takes a playful twist on this idea, by splitting the phallic object with a reciprocating saw, and opening it up, only to reveal its multiple layers: at first it starts to resemble a vagina, but in the end hides another phallic shape inside. It thus serves as a reminder of the anatomy invested with fantasies, of the anatomy as a radical contingency and of our discomforting and ambiguous corporeality.
A childhood memory re-enacted through a mixture of publicly sourced photos, staged scenes, and stop motion animation, "The Man Cave" is a brief, bewildering journey inside two young girls' shared vision of manhood. It's an irreverent child's eye view of male sexuality, seen through a proto-feminist lens: the male "safe space" of the "man cave" invaded by girls, culminating in absurd, exuberant fantasy.
"Carta Monir BDSM Film Club" is an experimental video edited from footage shared with me by artist Carta Monir that I edited using analog synthesis tools during my residency at Signal Culture in November 2024. All effects and audio in this work were generated by means analog synthesis tools, whose input/output methodology I have argued is impertinently queer because of the reactivity of the medium. The work is concerned with queer/kink theory, leather culture, and is part of an ongoing series of conversations and works made between d'Andriole, Monir, and other trans people in Michigan on the role of sex and violence in trans becoming as minoritized victims of transphobia, transmisogyny, and other violence's within the American empire.
A Dolphin tells Sarah a secret of the Universe. Inspired by experiments and research of John C. Lilly.
Inspired by Phil Morton's classic 1976 video, "Colorful Colorado", as well as Panzarino's first artist's residency at Signal Culture's new studio space in Loveland, Colorado. Panzarino processes footage of a drive through Rocky Mountain National Park using Signal Culture's Wobbulator, Jones MVIP Eurorack module (an analog video synthesizer), and Maelstrom software app. This footage is then chromakeyed onto Panzarino's green screen-colored nails as she works with the tools in Signal Culture's studio. This video captures the transformative quality of Colorado's natural beauty and stunning landscapes while guiding viewers through a portal from analog to digital image processing.
Boiling the piss (2023/2024, 2' 40'') is my debut 16mm film made at the coast near Den Haag (NL) with artist Hedwich Rooks. Together, we collected our urine and shared it in one pot. We boiled it down and watched the water evaporate until the dark brown minerals started to accumulate at the bottom. Boiling the piss is a process film considering the values embedded in bodies through a shared metabolic conversion of waste. It follows my artistic investigation into researching urine as a photographic developer and/or possibly a fixer too.
A short portrait-film, in digital video and Super 8, starring Ian Lewandowski, with text by Maurice Blanchot, from his novel, "When the TImes Comes," translated by Lydia Davis.
In horsemanship a half halt is a pulse on the rein to say, hey I'm still here, holding you. It indicates something around the bend, a warning and a reassurance. Here, a series of interruptions are held together by those who catch me when I'm falling. Rosie reads their poem. Grace and I brave the dark. Camera breaks. Record skips. Lovers reunite through a viewfinder. We're all filming each other on horseback. A meditation on intimacy in times of offscreen emergency, both personal and political. Seizures as elevators. —Sofia Theodore-Pierce
"Leather Graves" is an experimental 16mm film that explores the permeable boundaries between queer exile and queer utopia. Cruising amongst gravestones engraved with references to queer culture and sexuality, queers defy death by devouring candy-coated blossoms.
Hole is the Bubble i Blew is a hybrid-documentary combining video, generative animation and composite imagery. It is a choral history of shared intimacy where days and nights loop as an apartment window emerges from a burning tunnel; from this window a small group of people share stories of platonic and erotic love through space and time that separate like oil on the surface of water. "Movements pulse into the void, actions become sentient, consequences wait for the morning that will never be."
Tears for Lost Frequencies explores our complex relationship with plastic. Our intention is to highlight plastic as a matter that cannot be separated from the "natural": a material everywhere and becoming our "nature" and our "uninvited" collaborator. We ask whether we carry microplastics in our most intimate moments relating to the world. In Tears for Lost Frequencies, the microplastics that were found in tears become companions to the experience of one's hearing loss and a speculative space for plastic healing and sensory expansion.
This small cinematic exchange offers a glimpse into a women's collective based in Agadez (Niger). The camera zooms in on womens working hands revealing the harsh conditions of their daily lives. While separating peanuts from their shells, the women talk to each other about the men passing by and the film maker being present.The short encounter questions how the camera could be used by both the women in front and behind the camera to find a way of getting in contact with each other while not sharing a common language.
Filmed over the course of several years in southern Colorado, Hemispheres is a quiet study in pattern and place, as observed through the window of my living room. Shot on Super 16mm film, the project layers multiple time-lapse exposures of cacti and seasonal light, capturing subtle shifts in color, atmosphere, and rhythm.
A condensation of a handful of sunsets with various visual moods. Red and blue as opposites that still find a way to cohere. Concrete silhouettes over an ever-changing, expanding canvas. The horizon is invisible, there's no dividing line. Every movement is collective, molecular. A chance to meditate on the "speed" of water and the sea and also for a more fluid kind of editing.
A hand-drawn animation composed of fragments rotoscoped from various films; began with replacing Frankenstein's monster with a person the filmmaker knows.
Using hundreds of transparent photographic stills animated on a lightbox and abstract Super-8 footage, the film meditates on the illusory nature of the passage of time.
A brief cinematographic exploration on Super8 that examines Taiwan's complex national identity through the prism of political utopia. Shot in emblematic locations such as the Legislative Yuan, Liberty Square, the National Human Rights Museum, 228 Memorial Park, and TSMC headquarters, the film juxtaposes these symbols of democracy and autonomy with monuments from the authoritarian past like the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and Cih-hu Memorial Statue Park. Through these evocative images, the film reflects on the historical, diplomatic, and geopolitical tensions that have defined Taiwan for many centuries and specially since 1949, when the Kuomintang established its government on the island following the Japanese surrender in 1945. This work explores the Taiwanese paradox: a nation functioning as a sovereign democracy while navigating a diplomatic limbo, pursuing a political utopia where its self-determination might be fully recognized.
Granite tors scattered over 20 square kilometers around Tooborac in central Victoria dance in energetic celebration of their own endurance.
The film drifts through nocturnal botanicals, fleeting infrastructure, and moments of transit—walking, driving, and listening to NPR. As the scale shifts from plant to human-animal to city, the images, dimly lit and elusive, conjure a psychic landscape of rootlessness and an event just out of reach.
A field guide: Flora evolving with environmental changes, and pollinators utilizing biomimicry. Natural objects are gathered, and sculptures of and from the landscape cast reflections of nature being infinite, self-knowing, and alive. Extinct species and stages of evolution are suggested, accompanied by field recordings capturing the underground soundscape of soil. Bird calls and wingbeats offer greetings and warnings. -A rock, a tree, a human—each dissolving into matter and transmuting into new forms.
A flickering diary of time, memory, and erosion, «Things Many Eyes Have Seen» unfolds over a month on an island. Hand-processed in salty seawater, its 16mm images dissolve and transform. The landscape flashes by in broken frames of light and shadow, as if the world itself was stuttering between memory and motion. A meditation on seeing and being seen, the film lingers like a fading dream, where observer and landscape blur into one.
ELLIPTIC is a filmwork that considers an image as reflecting light. It looks at how brightly a beam of light is deflected as it hits an edge and transforms the image as it enters a lens. A delicately slow focus shift carries this movement along the cone of the visual field into a certain depth, and back again.
"A Mixtape for Stom" is an intimate documentary portrait of Japanese experimental filmmaker Stom Sogo (1975–2012), whose frenetic Super-8mm works became emblematic of New York's underground cinema at the turn of the millennium. A close friend, filmmaker Adrian Goycoolea reflects on Sogo's life and legacy, framing the film as a reply to the final email he received from him.
A short work by Stom Sogo (1975-2012) that combines super 8 film and mini-dv digital video
"It's all coming out of Mexico. Surreal gets so real. And invader from England, France or Spain found the taste of cactus cocktail. That makes this movie sweat, ha?" (Stom Sogo)
The first of an interlude series within the multiple potential interstitial states of string harmonics. Hand processing and 16mm-to-digital scanning are treated as points of intervention and compositional instruments. The second entry in an interlude series within the multiple potential interstitial states of string harmonics. Hand processing and 16mm-to-digital scanning are treated as points of intervention and compositional instruments.
The film revisits the stagecoach attack sequence, an archetypal Western scene. Using a Super 8 projector and re-filming on a dismantled LCD screen, the film appears vivid and floating in lantern light. The landscapes of the American mainland stretch out in time, and history repeats itself. Made from an 8mm reel of an excerpt from John Ford's 1939 film "Stagecoach."
A televisual stream of consciousness assembled from archival footage set in the Black media explosion of the 1980s. A frenetic remix of public access television, video diaries, commercial mass media, and citizen journalism sequenced as short vignettes featuring musical and poetic performance, documentation of state violence, political theater and expressions of Black love. —Alexis McCrimmon
Inspired by the tradition of visual music (in particular, the Fischinger-copped JS Bach sequence that opens 1942's Fantasia), Scantasia is a rhythmic composition performed on a network of analog synthesizers, where the same voltages trigger rhythmic, synaesthetic shifts in both image and sound. Neither sound nor image is cut to the other; both co-emerge in the flow of real time.
Minimalist frontiers proliferate from acquisition. Larping utopia, shedding skins, forging new luxury amidst shards of past lives. Embracing shadows, sculpting stagnant futures in the flicker of ancient flames.
"A Certain Light' is a journey through the different processes of capturing light through pinholes, accompanied by a cassette recorder during my residency at Nanolab (Daylesford, Australia). It's a step between indoors and outdoors, between moving forward and circling back. It's about the space I inhabit, walk through, and capture it.
The term Alignment Problem in artificial intelligence studies refers to the challenge of ensuring AI systems' goals and behaviors align with human values and intentions. In this experimental short film this concept serves as the through-line for an articulated dialogue between a male and a female entity: he, the creator, seeks to mold her, an embodiment of AI, to mirror his worldview and aims.
Created for the cinema, screen hug is a single-take feedback loop that holds the audience with fluctuations by each pass of a hand.
An excavational inquiry through photographs, touch, and looking at times and places far from here and now, animating and conjuring a link between past and present.
Periodic ruminations, reflections on photography, memory, aging, the woods and the homeland.
A woman washes her hair in the kitchen sink while telling her friend about a memory of sitting in a bathtub and watching her aunt get ready to go out. A narrative fragment, a very short story, a performance and exercise in the prosaic as mythologized through memory — the pressing of pubic hair against nylon, the pressing of fingers on fruit, the pressing of an image of womanhood, sexuality, pleasure on the young psyche of the character in the film. The pressing of light on photosensitive chemicals — minerals exposed — "light struck" is a phrase Barber thinks about: the bearable violence.
red bean observes fragments of everyday life in Beijing with a quiet, drifting gaze. Shaped by the filmmaker's personal ties and distance from their hometown, the film moves with a sense of estrangement that recalls the detached intimacy of Antonioni's Chung Kuo, Cina (1972).
The rolling stripes that this piece begins with suggest a sense of depth from the outset, and evoke a seascape. As the stripes begin to separate out, increasingly complex waveforms accrue. The image plane is not just a surface phenomenon: we are drawn to see through it.
Mysterious blue lights have spread across the city, depriving the living of sleep. They wander through the nightlessness like spectres. But some plants, the last sustenance of the wild and the dream, are developing curious abilities.
Experimental audiovisual work of art. First I used an individually prepared (manipulated) CRT (analog) television, then digital editing followed. This piece refers to the birth of video art when the images were modified with a magnet. The sound / noise was also generated by the magnet, so it is a real-time audiovisual improvisation / 'comprovisation'. Aesthetics of error and visual music where you can almost see what you can hear.
Palm Sunday drifts between presence and absence, in the corners, edges, and spaces behind our experience. Both haphazard and precise, its images layer upon each other like a tapestry winding and unwinding. Rhythms emerge through repetition, like a song finding its root note. In this way, the film echoes liturgical movement in gestures repeated, images revisited, a quiet ritual of seeing and remembering.
The film is described as "regarding passage to the lighthouse (B‑theory of time) the great ecstasy of nothing‑much".
A shore walk with Else, Sigurður, and Jens Jakob includes many lómar (red-throated divers), among other birds, plants, and rocks. Primarily edited in-camera with a MiniDV camcorder on July 5, 2025.
In December 1986, the Russian filmmaker and poet Andrei Tarkovsky died of cancer at the age of 54, after having been exiled from the USSR. One summer afternoon in the 21st century, accompanied by a super 8mm camera, I traveled to visit his grave. This film is the journal of this journey.
Through the recounting of a dream—an image from the past that insists on reappearing—the film dissects and displays the very materials it's made of: still photography, moving image, narration, as if these cinematic elements were minerals and gems in a museum showcase. In doing so, it transforms them into an evocative exploration of what is preserved and what is lost. An archive of broken and silent images? A mausoleum of time?
Bolivian artist and filmmaker Luciana Decker Orozco delves into ancient and essential acts: eating, masticating and digesting. Her suggestive celluloid slips through mouths, intestines and entrails, as well as experiments in the catacombs of the human being and the Earth. Inspired by the avant-gardist and indigenist Peruvian writer Gamaliel Chumata, the surface and the underground, the real and the extraordinary, mysteriously merge together.
Tangled spirals, rapid encounters, a quiet war between the vertical and the horizontal: Simon Liu's Refuse Room captures Hong Kong's architectural densities and lurid fluorescence through shadows, graffiti, and detritus, surfacing the tense and dizzying atmospheres of a city in anxious slumber, caught between fragmentation and solidarity.
Naturae Recordatus is the dystopian evocation of endangered two ecosystems: the tropical and subtropical forests. In the case of the Americas, especially Colombia, these forests are characterized by having a high rate of endemism. This video art piece is a node of the transmedia project "Naturae Recordatus", also composed of an installation and a performance. Through images and sounds, Colombian endangered and endemic mammals and plants are evoked; their quality and clarity are affected by digital, analog, electrical and electromagnetic signals that lead to their total decomposition. It shows in a metaphorical and simple way that the manipulation of these ecosystems by humans is the cause of their extinction. It seeks to raise questions about the causes of the destruction of our ecosystems, "Naturae Recordatus" shows our fires, our deforestations, we don't talk about the geological and morpho-physiological changes of South American ecosystems, changes caused by their overexploitation. These lands, from the south, are still considered to be virgin and magical, many inhabitants disperse this exoticizing discourse that prevents them from seeing the immense daily environmental problems.
A portrait of the forest drawn by ripping off the faces of the forest one by one and reconstructing them abstractly
An arrangement of found image sources from the 16th Century onward, the film looks at the changing representations of the giant star at the center of the solar system. From celestial maps to telescopic photos, the film traces the sun as a natural constant, a mirror of human curiosity, and a radiant symbol of mystery.
A man searches for memories of his family's past, alternating between Geomeunyeo, Buseok Temple, and his grandmother's house, all of which are located along a straight line on the map. Geomeunyeo is a rock located in the reclaimed area of Buseok, Seosan, South Korea. It was originally a reef that was exposed above sea level, but is now above ground. The name of Buseok, which means floating rock, is said to be derived from Geomeunyeo. —Kyujae Park
Geomeunyeo evokes the sea where no water exists and reveals forms where there is no light. When one sense closes, another opens in an endless cycle. Through the filmmaker's intervention, Geomeunyeo repeatedly sinks and resurfaces. Shot on 16mm black-and-white film and hand-processed, Geomeunyeo highlights the physical nature of film and the subtle traces naturally produced during manual development. This repetition creates a poetic rhythm that moves between presence and absence, appearance and disappearance. Geomeunyeo is a rock formation originally located in the sea off the western coast of South Korea. Due to land reclamation, this once-submerged reef now rests on dry land. It now stands as a silent witness to the shifting boundaries between sea and shore.
Through means of rephotography and refracted projection, the movements and luminescent surfaces of Berlin's Alexanderplatz are transformed into vibrant fields of moving color.
Between ethnography and reverie, the film enters the in-between spaces of dreams to explore how human and nonhuman social cartographies arise through dreaming alongside a Mapuche family in the south of Chile.