Animation of the Analogue Era - Cel, Cut Out, Stop Motion, Puppet, Pixilation, Cameraless, Sand, Pinscreen... Plus Experimental Films + TV, plus Assorted Visual Weirdness.
Worth watching for the quaint-yet-eerie morphing and other early-digital FX. And the information about the human face through history and across cultures, the physiology of facial expressions, how we interpret them and judge people by them, the pseudo-science of physiognomy (cf phrenology), etc is really interesting. Presented by Laurie Anderson Directed by Nichola Bruce and Michael Coulson…
Visual Music - a talk at the Tate Modern, July 27 2018 Presented by 4:3 as part of the Uniqlo Tate Late series There is a subset of experimental animation that is abstract and that practitioners and scholars call “visual music” I'm not an expert or scholar, I'm an enthusiast – and it's a relatively recent enthusiasm. I'm going to talk first about how I got into it this whole area of experimental…
At Hollow Earth, Matthew Ingram has a lovely recollection of favorite British animation from his childhood. This is prefaced by a run-through of some of his own work as animator (most of which I was completely unaware of, with the major exception of his Vitamin C film - an early symptom of the interest in nutrition and health that led to his book The Garden and blog Sick Veg ). Of the things that…
Would dearly like to see the whole of this film, based on Pamela Bone's amazing photographs Now did not know this Arena docu-drama existed - they do a good job telling Delia Derbyshire’s story in an elliptical and oneiric way that suits the music and the crazily mixed-up era she passed through. But I can imagine that if you didn't know anything about her story, you might struggle. The cult of…
A video and music synthesis piece made with borrowed video synthesis equipment (Fairlight CVI and EMS Spectre) and my sound synthesizers at home. It was used as an interlude in a larger political performance piece "Diversity." The abstract slowly moving graphics and microtonal electronic soundtrack establish the idea of the title - movement, above and beyond any comments our language might attach…
Featuring the voiceover of Dorothy Moskowitz of United States of America fame. Interview with Moskowitz at at Bob Fischer 's The Haunted Generation : Then, by the mid-1970s, she was working as a voiceover artist on Sesame Street , providing half-sung narration for a jazz-fuelled piece of animation that has since become the subject of much online consternation. ‘Cracks’ tells the story of a young…
Gene Youngblood Tapes on YouTube
"Six Men Getting Sick" was Lynch's first exploration into film, made during his second year of study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in Philadelphia. Lynch describes it as "Fifty-seven seconds of growth and fire, and three seconds of vomit."1 The transition into film came from a desire to make his paintings move. "I was painting very dark paintings. And I saw some little part of this…
"Sabin Bălașa was a contemporary Romanian painter, writer and director of animation films. His works are described by himself as belonging to Cosmic Romanticism. "Among Bălaşa’s most notable works are several large-scale fresco paintings, such as those decorating the inside of the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania. These 19 murals depict the history and mythology of the Romanian…
One of my interests is the weird electronic (or otherly avant or just nuttily absurdist) music on animations and experimental short films, sometimes done by a composer or someone the animator-director knows who has institutional access to synths and such, but quite often made by the animator-director. Prime example: Norman McLaren of Canada's NFB. I have made compilations of soundtracks and scores…
"Imagine an early Eighties Eastern European space-prog album high on sugary breakfast cereal, “Heavy Metal” magazine, Hanna-Barbera cartoons and 8-bit arcade games like Galaxian and Asteroids, and you have some idea of the otherworldly weirdness of the Romanian animated sci-fi film DELTA SPACE MISSION. In the year 3084, a Modigliani-esque alien journalist with blue-green skin, Alma, boards a…
"Resident artist and consultant at Bell Laboratories (New Jersey).... during the 70s and 80s Schwartz developed a catalogue of visionary techniques for the use of the computer system by artists. Her formal explorations in abstract animation involved the marriage of film, computers and music in collaboration with such luminaries as computer musicians Jean-Claude Risset, Max Mathews, Vladimir…
Muzyka: Eugeniusz Rudnik Józef Robakowski "An integral part of Robakowski's work are his statements and self-commentaries, as well as numerous programming texts and manifestoes, e.g. Calling Once Again for 'Pure Film' (1971), Video Art - a Chance to Approach Reality (1976), or Manipulating! (1988). "Robakowski made his first experimental film in 1962, 6,000,000, a compilation of fragments of…
"If you want to see the West as you’ve never seen it before, go to Japan. Since the end of the Second World War, there have been few big Western phenomena in which Japanese creators have not taken an interest, then turned around and made their own. One of the most powerful imaginations among those creators belongs to Keiichi Tanaami, who came of age surrounded by the likes of Mickey Mouse and…
"An experimental animation created by Osamu Tezuka to explore the possibilities of expression. An animation that expresses the uncertainty of memories by combining photos and using pictures that emphasize deformation" - unknown. (Turns out I have posted this before, and forgotten - a wry inadvertent comment on the fragile unreliability of memory in itself) "An extremely witty and imaginative boy,…
Animation appears to be the work of Brainfoodmedia
"... while still remembered as a Bauhaus designer, painter and teacher, Oskar Schlemmer ’s contribution to dance gets little more than a passing reference. With one exception. His designs for his Triadic Ballet, which premiered at the Wurtemburgische Landestheater in Stuttgart on September 30, 1922 remain among the most striking and unusual ever conceived.... "The costumes or figurines as…
An animation created by Jules Evens , one of my students at California Institute of the Arts (with sounds contributed by another student, Zhu Dongchen). Evens explains: " It's all hand drawn/painted, each frame on a single piece of printer paper. I used different mediums for different frames: colored pencil, marker, pen, pastel, acrylic paint, and water color. After I scanned the frames in, I…
(via Andrew Parker) "Animated Putty" (1911) "Walter Booth made a number of films that began to explore the potential of stop-motion to bring cut-outs, string, and here clay to life. Many of these scenes are also filmed backwards adding to the uncanny effect, with the devilish, gargoyle faces towards the end of the film being particularly delightful." - BFI "W.R. Booth was born 12 July 1869, son of…
Music by Toru Takemitsu ".... Freud would have had a field day with the animated shorts of the grandfather / bad boy of Japanese alternative animation Yōji Kuri (久里洋二, b. 1928). His black, and often bawdy, sense of humour pervades the mood of most of his films. In his 1963 film Love (愛, 1963), a big woman with prominent breasts breathily gasps the word “Ai” (Love) repeatedly as she chases a man…
via Peter Stanfield Watch The Looking Cure - a mini-doc about John Hofsess's Palace of Pleasure - made by Stephen Broomer . “ See it and you’ll see a window on the future: a Joyce-Burroughs assemblage of bold, poetic surreal visions of physical love in every conceivable form. " - Gene Youngblood As Broomer writes in CineAction (the full essay reproduced here ): Hamilton's McMaster University of…
A student in my Experimental Pop class turned me onto this postpunk-influenced, highly political and persecuted-by-authority Russian duo , IC3PEAK - I was particularly struck by this animated video for "Сказка", or "Fairy Tale". Created by "Ukrainian wierdcore" animator Jakov Burov , from a concept jointly conceived with the IC3PEAK, the promo draws on the Slavic folkoric figure Baba Yaga, " an…