"This is the question"
What is a room? A window? A fork? Basic concepts start to deteriorate in this exploration of late stage dementia rendered through liminal spaces and odd objects.
Social & External
Meen
Yeg
In an audiovisual collage of nostalgia and magnetism, “Prelude to a Flash” fuses images from early cinema with elements of contemporary animation. It explores the tension between past and present through the edges, the traces that emerge from the representation of bodies in a sensory and emotional journey.
With the aim of finding Desire, so-and-so performs a ritual to go down in the depths of himself.
In this short film, a young man, a girl and a dog attempt to fly with wings more symbolic than practical.
An experimental documentary/animation hybrid exploring likeness scanning, AI, and what that means for identity.
An experimental film created from 3 years worth of abstract pencil drawings with the goal of being a catalyst for unveiling a new mental landscape in viewers.
The sun’s energy circulates throughout the earth, feeding the cycle of life. Everything is connected in a natural loop, which repeats, like the circular discs of magical optical toys. This perfectly balanced rhythm is disrupted by human excess, throwing the cycle out of orbit and temporarily stopping the circulation of energy in nature.
For the multimedia exhibition Tangenten I (Tangents I), Dammbeck and co-organizer, sculptor and painter Frieder Heinze had planned to collaborate on a film that would combine non-camera animation with 35mm footage of a train ride between the two Dresden districts of Radebeul and Pieschen. When the exhibition was banned in 1978, Heinze turned to other projects, but Dammbeck continued working on the film by himself. Metamorphoses I—the first experimental film ever to be shown publicly in East Germany—marks the filmic beginning of Dammbeck’s long-term art project the Herakles-Konzept (Hercules Concept).
Short experimental animation by Jules Engel
An experimental, non-sensical comedy about bringing a stone age man back to our time, made with the app “Plotagon”.
An abstract computer-generated film. The image is of squares revolving in space around and through each other. Colors and forms multiply and divide against a beautiful symphonic score by George Kleinsinger.
Creating a universe between two small pieces of Cardboard. When Jack and Jill of Cardboard City are separated by Jill's torrid illness, Jack must think outside the box to assure they will be together again.
This is a didactic film in disguise. A progression of brilliant geometric shapes bombard the screen to the insistent beat of drums. The filmmaker programmed a computer to coordinate a highly complex operation involving an electronic beam of light, colour filters and a camera. This animation film, without words, is designed to expose the power of the cinematic medium, and to illustrate the abstract nature of time.
An abstract animated film inspired by the work of jazz musician Chico Hamilton.
Machinima-adaptation of Albert Camus book "L'étranger", done in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
In an alternate Manhattan, two researchers-Robert Lang and Jeff Hawthorne-are drawn into Project STARLING, a covert operation buried deep within the Titanpointe building. When Hawthorne breaks protocol and vanishes into a mysterious portal, the city reels from unexplained phenomena. Lang is forced to navigate a collapsing reality as STARLING agents turn ruthless and the boundaries between dimensions begin to rupture. As transformations unfold and the city descends into chaos, both men confront forces beyond comprehension-shifting identities, spectral adversaries, and a growing sense that something vast and irreversible is approaching.
16mm color work by Stan Vanderbeek that takes his work away from the cutups and the commentary and lands him in the psychedelic and abstract. Opticals, repetitions, camera moves and zooms are what make up the bulk of this exploration into fluids. The results bridge that realm between hangout art piece and intersteller stoner trip.
Dilution is an experimental short film that explores the transit between resistance and (di)ssolution, between holding and releasing and a path towards obsessive repetition. They are layers, exposed pores, matter that oscillates between remaining or disappearing. The sound is not a background, but a puncture: friction, tearing, water that drags what still persists. A sensorial testimony of what refuses to vanish completely.
It is said that if a man is fading away, he sees his life running quickly in front of his eyes. What does a hundred-year old film strip see before it gives way to digital vehicles? Does it see broken frames, scratched film stock or something else? This is a film about time and its ephemeral nature.
Across different eras, a poor family, an anxious developer and a fed-up landlady become tied to the same mysterious house in this animated dark comedy.
Short film to a song of love lost and rediscovered, a woman sees and undergoes surreal transformations. Her lover's face melts off, she dons a dress from the shadow of a bell and becomes a dandelion, ants crawl out of a hand and become Frenchmen riding bicycles. Not to mention the turtles with faces on their backs that collide to form a ballerina, or the bizarre baseball game.
To escape neglect and abuse from his parents, a young boy plants some strange seeds and they grow into a grandmother.
A little girl is taken on a mind-bending tour of her distant future.
A white dropout struggles to become a cartoonist and filmmaker, drawing inspiration from the harsh, gritty world around him. Still sharing his rundown apartment with his middle-aged parents, an oafish slob of an Italian father and a ditzy nutcase of a Jewish mother, he's ridiculed and looked down upon by his friends, hypocrites who run with violent gangs and the Italian Mafia, and a shallow Black girl who makes her living downtown with the pimps and pushers. The cartoonist gets a chance to pitch a film idea to a movie mogul, but the story proves too outrageous: a far-future Earth, depleted by war and pollution, where a mutant antihero challenges and kills God.
Bill struggles to put together his shattered psyche.
In 1998, Beavis and Butt-Head are sentenced to Space Camp by a “creative” judge. Their obsession with a docking simulator (huh huh) leads to a trip on the Space Shuttle, with predictably disastrous results. After going through a black hole, they re-emerge in our time, where they look for love, misuse iPhones, and are hunted by the Deep State. Spoiler: They don’t score.
A silent figure known as The Assassin travels through a nightmare underworld of tortured souls, ruined cities and wretched monstrosities forged from the primordial horrors of the unconscious mind of Phil Tippett, the world's preeminent stop-motion animator.
A grizzled, hard-of-hearing cowboy, Slim, and his two friends, Dusty and Pete, capture a mysterious, well-dressed Frenchman.
Waking Life is about a young man in a persistent lucid dream-like state. The film follows its protagonist as he initially observes and later participates in philosophical discussions that weave together issues like reality, free will, our relationships with others, and the meaning of life.
Mrs. Van Houten has shown signs of losing touch with reality, and her husband discusses possible treatment with Dr. Caligari, who says Mrs. Van Houten has a disease of the libido.
Exiled artist and poet Mustafa embarks on a journey home with his housekeeper and her daughter; together the trio must evade the authorities who fear that the truth in Mustafa's words will incite rebellion.
Begotten is the creation myth brought to life, the story of no less than the violent death of God and the (re)birth of nature on a barren earth.
A hilarious collection of animated television commercials that were rejected because of their creator's failing grip on sanity.
Two lost souls: she a con-artist in L.A.; he a puppeteer in San Antonio have the same dream linking each with the other. He travels to L.A. to find this woman he has become obsessed with. She resists, afraid of his kooky ideas until she travels with him to San Antonio and meets his wise grandmother. Story of two disparate people linked by "fate" gets increasingly interesting as it rolls along.
Nemo Nobody leads an ordinary existence with his wife and 3 children; one day, he wakes up as a mortal centenarian in the year 2092.
A celebration of the universe, displaying the whole of time, from its start to its final collapse. This film examines all that occurred to prepare the world that stands before us now: science and spirit, birth and death, the grand cosmos and the minute life systems of our planet.
A theater director struggles with his work, and the women in his life, as he attempts to create a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse as part of his new play.
An inspirational speaker becomes reinvigorated after meeting a lively woman who shakes up his mundane existence.
First-time father Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child.