Super Sauber

In order to buy a horse, a man wanders in the bazaars of Thessaly. His journey will take him further than he imagines, as old prophets, forgotten witches and vampire princes will find himself on his way.

A whirlwind of improvisation combines the images of animator Pierre Hébert with the avant-garde sound of techno whiz Bob Ostertag in this singular multimedia experience, a hybrid of live animation and performance art.

A typical experimental film, in which a variety of audiovisual techniques are used to create the sense of polymorphic eroticism as developed by European and Mediterranean cinematography of the 20th century. Combining the methods of “animation” and “live action”, this intricate work embodies the idea of an “ars combinatoria”. The structure is loose, with neither a central axis nor a point where everything converges, contributing greatly to the open-ended character of the film, where rhythm is the key element.

After concluding the now-legendary public access TV series, The Pain Factory, Michael Nine embarked on a new and more subversive public access endeavor: a collaboration with Scott Arford called Fuck TV. Whereas The Pain Factory predominantly revolved around experimental music performances, Fuck TV was a comprehensive and experiential audio-visual presentation. Aired to a passive and unsuspecting audience on San Francisco’s public access channel from 1997 to 1998, each episode of Fuck TV was dedicated to a specific topic, combining video collage and cut-up techniques set to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The resultant overload of processed imagery and visceral sound was unlike anything presented on television before or since. EPISODES: Yule Bible, Cults, Riots, Animals, Executions, Static, Media, Haterella (edited version), Self Annihilation Live, Electricity.

Paleo is a video clip shoot at the famous homonymous music festival in the French canton of Vaud in Switzerland, where many hippie-techno-pagans gather every summer since 1977. The editing style is a tribute to the reworking of psychedelic theories and the New Age proliferation within rave culture in the early 90s from the perspective of the late second decade of the new millennium. In the footage, the ritual ingestion of psychedelics is symbolically replaced by a liberating dance through a powerful fast montage that epitomizes the frenzy of intoxication achieved through psychedelic plants. A revival of a revival of a revival.

Bits and blocks are the home of the Super Vario Birds who are dancing to the 8bit symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven.

To fly a – way from/out of death, don’t hire a taxidermist but take a ride in this taxidrome! Series of 41 Moving Images - this analogy is possible being conservation at its core rescuing what really matters in the world, like nature, habitats, science and art. It is vital. Yet in a continuously changing environment, the flipside of conservation becomes and here it is where the vital feature of conservation becomes its lifelike trait, a fictive life, a fake life. The embalming process consists of 1) imparting a balmy essence to the dead body, as in the ancient world, 2) by filling its blood vessels with formaldehyde to prevent putrification, as in the modern world, although recently with more regard towards more natural treatments, as for instance in bio-art. To embalm also means to “preserve from oblivion”, and “to cause to remain unchanged”, “to prevent the development of something”.

Someone born in the 1990s, who never actually lived in 1990s Istanbul, can only long for what they’ve seen in old videos. But how do you yearn for moments you never experienced... or why do you? In this nostalgic Istanbul we don’t remember, a digital passage unfolds from the European side to the Asian side, told only through the footage recorded on the cameras of those who once lived it.

A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).

A memorial mourns as time passes

The innovative and influential British filmmaker Derek Jarman was invited to direct the Pet Shop Boys' 1989 tour. This film is a series of iconoclastic images he created for the background projections. Stunning, specially shot sequences (featuring actors, the Pet Shop Boys, and friends of Jarman) contrast with documentary montages of nature, all skillfully edited to music tracks.

Furio’s Furious Fragments & Friends - Furio Jesi (1941 Turin -1980 Genoa), enfant prodige moving between a plethora of disciplines – egyptology, history of religions, German philology, literary criticism - passed away prematurely, not without leaving bright fragments which throw light on mechanisms beneath many socio-cultural practices, for instance regarding cultural belonging, the functions of myth in modern society. He saw kind of “mythological machines” at work underneath our cultural production of meanings, historically determined, departing from a void, something that is still in culture but as residue, a missing link to an alleged authentic experience nowadays compromised up to the point to became just rhetoric, a byword, which is in no way neutral, but a tool, a macchina, for maintaining the status quo and serving the power apparatus. As in the case of holidays, celebrations and festivals.

The climbing of an immense staircase made up of the most varied stairs. Symbolic scenes occur on different levels where characters seem to be prisoners of their deeds and of their own folly. The steep staircase leads little by little towards the zones of great light where human beings and nonhuman beings meet.

In his book "1984", George Orwell saw the television of the future as a control instrument in the hands of Big Brother. Right at the start of the much-anticipated Orwellian year, Paik and Co. were keen to demonstrate satellite TV's ability to serve positive ends-- Namely, the intercontinental exchange of culture, combining both highbrow and entertainment elements. A live broadcast shared between WNET TV in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, linked up with broadcasters in Germany and South Korea, reached a worldwide audience of over 10 or even 25 million (including the later repeat transmissions).

IDFA and Canadian filmmaker Peter Wintonick had a close relationship for decades. He was a hard worker and often far from home, visiting festivals around the world. In 2013, he died after a short illness. His daughter Mira was left behind with a whole lot of questions, and a box full of videotapes that Wintonick shot for his Utopia project. She resolved to investigate what sort of film he envisaged, and to complete it for him.