Flesh Flows

“[T]he sense of moving forward [in space or time] alternates with a sense of expansion and contraction, as the finished cycle [of movement] returns to itself and rushes to catch up with its successor.” (Gadassik) Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with iotaCenter and National Film Preservation Foundation in 2007.

Kitsch in Synch

An abstract animation. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive, in partnership with the iotaCenter, in 2007.

ACT III

Abstract video art set to the music of Philip Glass.

A Day In LC

A person living in Liberty City goes to work, have some food & gets back home.

Metamorphoses I

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).

Plaga Alada

undressed

A Love Letter to Cinema

An experimental sampled film which shows the pleasurable art of movies about movies through scenes inside of theaters.

Orbit

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.

Metamorphous: Mountains and Streams

Man often yearns of a past more innocent and pure. This film disregards that sentimentality and depicts a constant, permanent transformation of the landscape of mountains and rivers. A beautiful and intense image poem made from thousands of pencil drawings.

Squares

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.

Rhythm

A comfortable rhythm composed of light and shadow. Director Ogino-style absolute movie which freely manipulates geometric figures.

On the Road to Kandahar

One of Rimmer's early 2000s video works which he made by hand-painting 35mm film, running it on a flatbed viewer, and shooting it off the screen with a video camera to then subject it to further manipulation.

Ozymandias

Ozymandias recites Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem of the same name. Selected AI-generated images and text-to-speech narration - with their vutlure-like generative methods, and already rapidly-dating aesthetics - are placed in parallel to the poem's explorations of legacy, decay, futility, and the future.

Gemini

Sarah and her two cats go about their separate lives. The cats have strange dreams about their desires, and Sarah develops an unshakable paranoia that something is wrong with them. Sarah's paranoia bleeds into her social life, and her two cats have their dreams come true.

Rectangle & Rectangles

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.

Dantes Traum von der Hölle

An attempt to bring texts from Dante's "Divine Comedy" to life. Nine episodes from the Inferno with a concluding episode from the Purgatorio.

The Dream of the Little Dancing Men

Film is about communication. Kobrin pays homage to Vasili Nalimov, to his work and life. Nalimov was a mathematician and philosopher, but was also an eccentric anarchist with mystic tendencies who spent eighteen years in a concentration camp. Nalimov’s philosophy relies on probabilistic methods in the natural and social sciences and applies them to the study of language and consciousness.

Study No. 8

An experimental short from Oskar Fischinger

Corner

The corner of a street is matched and mixed with the chant of a bird recorded on that same street. A symbiotic relationship is triggered: the rapid and successively repetitive montage cuts between the image of the street and the corners of the video frame itself produce new textures and shapes in our brain, whilst the sound follows the same rhythmic movements by emphasizing different “corners” (frequencies) from the bird’s singing. The energetic potency stemming from the junction of these elements creates a new image that is almost tactitle, maleable and rippling. The result is a somewhat humorous operation of the portuguese word "corner" throughout the different stages of making the piece, finally unveiling a piercing physical and kinetic experience for all the corners of our eyes and ears.