Days and Nights is a comedy-drama that takes place in New England in the 1980s. The story revolves around a famous actress who gathers her family and friends for a weekend in her country estate. As the weekend unfolds, old wounds resurface, relationships are tested, and chaos ensues. The film explores themes of love, rejection, recklessness, and the complexities of family dynamics.
Cremaster 3 is a surreal and abstract art film set in New York City. It delves into themes of freemasonry, undead, and torture. The movie showcases the Cremaster Cycle, with references to the Guggenheim Foundation and contemporary art. A hidden gem known for its unique aesthetic and video installations.
Terror Nullius is a remix collage film that takes snippets of Australian film and television history to create a political and cultural critique. It explores themes of colonialism, politics, and nostalgia, while also incorporating elements of mythology and eco-horror.
As a young man, Dorian Gray's beguiling innocence captured the eye of famed artist Basil Hallward. As the two enter into a close friendship, Basil crafts a remarkable piece of art that seems to capture Dorian's essence as much as it does the artist's obsession. Stricken by the remarkable beauty of the piece and lamenting his own inevitable loss of youth, the troubled Dorian makes a wish that the artistic rendering of him bear the weathers of time while he remains forever youthful. Later, as Dorian strikes up a friendship with Lord Henry, wealthy entitlement, decadence, and obsessive pleasure lead the handsome young noble down a dark path of drugs and dangerous friendships. When Basil attempts to help his old friend, the artist's nobility ends up costing him his life. Through it all, Dorian remains as hypnotically handsome as ever.
An exploration of how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war. In Immersion, Farocki presents footage of a role-playing exercise in which military psychologists demonstrate how to use the PTSD program on their colleagues, who describe traumatic wartime experiences. On a second channel, their descriptions play out as virtual renderings.
An experimental media installation of three windows exploring fragments of liminality. Three unique re-constructions of experiential instances volumising the cataclysms of thresholds. Experience the absence of definition, the absence of boundaries set and the absence of rationale. A myth is not to be understood, a myth is passed on, like a game of Chinese whispers, it takes its course and ages with time, suiting the demography and tale, it warps and distorts
An inventor looking for backing for his television invention gets involved with a crooked businessman and gangsters who try to steal his invention.
An exploration of how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war. In A Sun With No Shadow, Farocki calls attention to the subtle differences between the simulations for combat training and PTSD. With the former, the sun can be programmed to cast shadows in the virtual combat zones, while the latter, less expensive technology does not offer this feature.
Each pixel is separated like an exploded screen, set in a chaotic way into the space. The video has a whole movement in the room, as one three dimensional image. The experience resembles the brain, working with electromagnetic waves and low voltage information.
The Other Side is a double-screen video installation commissioned as part of Breakwell’s residency at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex during the summer and autumn of 2000. The film was shot on the Pavilion’s upper landing, the camera positioned looking out through the curved windows of the stairwell across the exterior balcony to a view of the sea and the horizon. It comprises two alternating sequences projected onto either side of a free standing wall. Footage of elderly couples ballroom dancing on the balcony outside has been slowed down to the rhythm of the accompanying soundtrack, an extract from Franz Schubert’s Nocturne in E-flat Major (Op.148) overlaid by the sounds of breaking waves and seagulls. In the alternating scene, played to the same sound, panoramic vistas of the view out of the building towards the sea and horizon beyond are empty of human presence.
In the midst of the frenzy night a man finds himself lost in the crevasse of time. It was not the grotesque beings nor the monsters, but it was he who “was here, but wasn't here”. He was the phantom. Buried under memories full of inhibition and promises that never kept – words washed up on the shore – time keeps him at a distance from the “place”. And he hears poems coming on the waves from the other side rhyming and lapping against the shore. A 360° scope video Installation commissioned by Nagano Art Museum.
In this video work Bruce Nauman explores violence, gender and behaviour. Set around a simple middle class dining table, the scene quickly escalates into a slapstick fight between a man and a woman. Their actions become increasingly more erratic and aggressive yet also ridiculous and cartoon-like as the video progresses. Nauman explores the ways in which anger can be provoked by others and questions the way we can react to them. Much like many of his other artworks, he employs the use of humour and exaggeration to explore serious and even dangerous topics - he produced this work as a result of his frustration with futile acts of violence in ordinary life. He explains, “The viewer is presented with a hypnotic repetition of pointlessly cruel and destructive violence which is both seductive and alienating.”
"365 days, also known as a Year" is a collage calendar of different film frames for each date. Day by day, 365 days in a row.
A short film essay on Blue Velvet (1986) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). The fact that Blue Velvet was almost shot in black and white is explored in comparison with the original scenes, as the choices of different directors (within a ten-year interval) when choosing Roy Orbison's music for their films.
Black Sea Files is a territorial research on the Caspian oil geography: the world’s oldest oil extraction zone. A giant new subterranean pipeline traversing the Caucasus will soon pump Caspian Crude to the West. The line connecting the resource fringe with the terminal of the global high-tech oil circulation system, runs through the video like a central thread. However, the trajectory followed by the narrative is by no means a linear one. Circumventing the main players in the region, the video sheds light on a multitude of secondary sceneries. Oil workers, farmers, refugees and prostitutes who live along the pipeline come into profile and contribute to a wider human geography that displaces the singular and powerful signifying practices of oil corporations and oil politicians.
"Three Women, is an ambitious work designed to be shown on multiple screens in a movie theater. Moving a step forward from the use of multiple screens as an expansion of cinema as exemplified by Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927), it presents what is literally a conceptual expansion of cinema in the form of a filmic work experienced in a theater in which the 15-channel, surround-sound audio constructed by Araki Masamitsu and Ito’s visuals organically intertwine."
Comprised entirely of hundreds of pirated film samples, Hello Dankness is a bent suburban musical that bears witness to the psychotropic cultural spectacle of the period 2016 to 2021. Set in the American suburbs, the film follows a neighbourhood through these years as consensus reality disintegrates into conspiracies and other political contagions. Part political satire, zombie stoner film, and Greek tragedy, the work is also informed by the encrypted memetics of contemporary internet culture.
Videoinstallation with methacrylate / no sound / 2018. Underwater Images recorded in Baja California Sur (México)
superposition is a project about the way we understand the reality of nature on an atomic scale and is inspired by the mathematical notions of quantum mechanics. Performers will appear in Ikeda’s work for the first time, performing as operator/conductor/observer/examiners. All the components on stage will be in a state of superposition; sound, visuals, physical phenomena, mathematical concepts, human behaviour and randomness – these will be constantly orchestrated and de-orchestrated simultaneously in a single performance piece.
The title may evoke images of gleeful, destructive anarchism, but "smashing" here signals a relationship between people and official city statues that is friendly, jovial, even a little melancholic.