"21-87" by Arthur Lipsett (1964)

Arthur Lipsett is one of the few filmmakers—alongside Alanis Obomsawin, Kathleen Shannon, Norman McLaren and Willie Dunn—who will forever reside in the pantheon of NFB artists. One of the most enigmatic yet celebrated directors who ever worked at the Board, Lipsett was born in Montreal on May 13, 1936, and died in the same city only 50 years later. He received a credit for animation, photography, sound recording/mixing, scriptwriting, producing, directing or editing on a total of 26 NFB titles. [...] His body of work can be divided into two streams: collage/found-footage films and academic research films.

-- NFB biography

"Mothlight" (1963) by Stan Brakhage

A "found foliage" film composed of insects, leaves, and other detritus sandwiched between two strips of perforated tape.

biography

You could say Brakhage puts the “anima” back into animation, reanimating the dead, painstakingly affixing the remains of dead insects, leaves and the like onto the film strip, and feeding it through the projector back to life. Of course, the principle of film projection is the illusion of life through light, with the audience gathering to watch like moths attracted to a lamp: the beauty of Mothlight is the way Brakhage evokes the moth not through cartoon mimicry, but by the fragile sensation of its movement, batting against the screen, hurtling in descent. The effect is exhilarating and terrifying.

--  Darragh O’Donoghue in Senses of Cinema

"Blutrausch" (2000) by Thorsten Fleisch

an attempt to constitute a human / machine dialogue. it shows the filmmaker's blood as seen / heard by the eyes / ears of the machine which is a film projector with optical sound. he affixed his blood onto clear film leader by cutting into the flesh and then pressing the film leader onto the wound. additionally he had blood taken with a syringe and afterwards dripped it on the film leader. fresh and clotted blood was used for a maximum of variety.

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"Kaminarimon II" (2016) by Donna Cameron

This original avant-garde film was premiered for projection at the 80th anniversary tribute performance honoring Fredrick Kaufman, Founder of the School of Music at Florida International University, at FIU in June, 2016. It is inspired in part by the Japanese taiko drums, Flamenco dance-song-castanets and guitars in composer Fredrick Kaufman's music, heard here in soundtrack form, and explores contrasting counterpoints emphasized by the bonfire-like snapping and crackling of the flamenco dance and dancers' feet and hands. The multi genre visual media used in the composition of this film adds a rich visual voice which both harmonizes to and keys off the textures and layers provided by the dancers and the musicians. The filmmaker marks light and celluloid to perform rhythmically and visually in live concert with a rare recording of Kaminarimon II by the eminent American musician-composer Fredrick Kaufman. The moving image is a painting genre- direct animation- a medium that expands the already lush, multimedia dimension of the multimedia theater of Kaminarimon II, . Cameron's composition orchestrates music, dance , performance and painting and drawing into a unique idiom- that of cinematic paper emulsion projection, using her own patented imaging technique to breathe life into a transmedia film. 

Music by Fredrick Kaufman.

"Invierno" (1960) by Eugenio Granell

Cameraless film, direct paint on film by Galician surrealist painter Eugenio Granell.

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"Impresiones en la alta atmosfera" (1988-89) by José Antonio Sistiaga

In Euskal Herria, the painters Ramón de Vargas and José Antonio Sistiaga began, in the 60s, to apply paint directly on the celluloid, without the camera, recovering the tradition that was born from Retour à la raison, Len Lye or Harry Smith. The fellow Basque Rafael Ruiz-Balerdi paints directly on the film but in a more figurative style. Sistiaga follows the example of other painters (Duchamp, Eggeling, Léger...) who transferred their artistic concerns to cinema, turning celluloid into a canvas endowed with movement (with the temporal dimension incorporated).

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"Linear Dreams" (1997) by Richard Reeves

Richard R. Reeves was born in Weymouth, England and has been living in Canada since 1960. He attended Sault College of Applied Arts & Technology, majoring in printmaking. His early artwork explored painting, printmaking, photography, and music which led him to animate directly onto the filmstrip as a long and narrow canvas "sound painting." His début animation "Linear Dreams" was produced by drawing both the sound and picture directly onto the film.

"Song of the Firefly" (2002) by Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof

Song of the Firefly is a visual poem that employs the cameraless photogram technique, which I first explored in my 2001 film titled Light Magic. Song of the Firefly aims to engender the feeling of being transported to an open field on a warm summer night where the luminous dance of the fireflies can be experienced. The exuberant display of light created by the fireflies, which illuminates different portions of the field, also reveals fragments of the space in which we are contained, leaving us always waiting in anticipation to see more, just like in cinema. The appeal of the illuminated screen, onto which we project our most secret fantasies and desires, echoes the open field at night where the sexual energy is transformed into light by these tiny insects. The single discrete flashes and the continuous glow are a form of communication between the male and the female fireflies during the mating period where the female fireflies “respond preferentially to males that possess these ‘sexy’ signal components” (Branham and Greenfield 1996, Flashing males win mate success. Nature 381:745 746). The photogram images in this film were created using only plants, which I gathered in one of Toronto's many parks.

"sound of a million insects..." (2014) by Tomonari Nishikawa

I buried a 100-foot (about 30 meters) 35mm negative film under fallen leaves alongside a country road, which was about 25 km away from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, for about 6 hours, from the sunset of June 24, 2014, to the sunrise of the following day. The night was beautiful with a starry sky, and numerous summer insects were singing loud. The area was once an evacuation zone, but now people live there after the removal of the contaminated soil. This film was exposed to the possible remaining of the radioactive materials.

"4 Givings" (2014) by Colin Barton

Music: "The Sun" by the Naked and Famous.

Based on multiples of fours, "4 Givings" moves through the cycle of the day with the central theme of forgiveness, release, renewal, and acceptance. Following an alchemical motif, earth, wind, fire, and water recur and are represented by archetypes and abstractions. Animated on fours, this all 35mm direct on film animation was composited in After Effects.

"Dresden Dynamo" (1971-2) by Lis Rhodes

Liz Rhodes was one of the key figures to emerge from the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative in the 1970s, where she and her contemporaries helped advance a radically reflexive approach to film aesthetics, investigating the medium and its mechanics in fundamentally material terms. 

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This film is the result of experiments with the application of Letraset and Letratone onto clear film. It is essentially about how graphic images create their own sound by extending into that area of film which is 'read' by optical sound equipment. The final print has been achieved through three, seperate, consecutive printings from the original material, on a contact printer. Colour was added, with filters, on the final run. The film is not a sequential piece. It does not develop crescendos. It creates the illusion of spatial depth from essentially, flat, graphic, raw material.

-- Tim Bruce, London Filmmakers Co-op Catalogue 1993

Jon Behrens (1964-2022)

Jon Behrens (1964-2022) was a Seattle based filmmaker/composer. His films have been screened at film festivals, colleges and museums through out the world since the early 1980’s including screenings at Antimatter Film Festival Canada, Seattle International Film Festival, TIE Film Festival Colorado, London Underground Film Festival, Crossroads Film Festival San Francisco,

Festival International des Cinemas Differents et Experimentaux in Paris, Alternative Film and Video festival in Novi Beograd Serbia, Sydney Underground Film Festival, Festival des Cinémas Différents de Paris and many many others. His work ranges from personal film diary’s to abstract hand painted optically printed works. In addition to filmmaking Jon Behrens was also a composer and created sound designs for most of his own films starting about 10 years ago, as well as non film related compositions.

Jon Behrens was also the co-founder co-director of the Interbay Cinema Society which also produced the Engauge Experimental Film Festival.

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Excerpts from many of his films may be found on Vimeo.

Birdsong recordings (seminar supplement)

This post supplements a seminar that outlines my doctoral thesis work. The main theme is the research process itself, including setbacks encountered along the way. The secondary topic is the material itself, particularly bird song and our relationship to audio taken from nature.

The following are some useful media links.

Ludwig Koch made the first ever animal recording when still a child, a captured bird of species White-rumped Shama (1889). Listen.

Koch later released the compendium Songs of Wild Birds in 1936. Listen.

An early commercial release was Karl Reich's "Song of a Nightingale" (1910). Listen.

Walter Tilgner has made thousands of field recordings, and was noted for his early compact disk releases in very high quality. Listen to "Woodland Stream" from Waldkonzert (1985)

We have shaped birdsong through extreme environmental changes. Those birds who remain in the city have altered their calls to be heard through traffic and other noises. This piece models this process. "Caged Birds (Augmentation)" was created in 2013 for the John Cage centenary, hence the punning title. Listen.

My installation "In that place, the air was very different" was documented in 2017 for the video that heads this post.

“The Carthaginians” by Jacknife Lee for Telefís (2022)

Telefís was the final musical project of songwriter and vocalist Cathal Coughlan, in partnership with producer Jacknife Lee. Lee also created a series of music videos, all of which use found footage from Irish television... as the group's name implies.

“The Carthaginians” is a catchy song which has a strange premise. Near as I can make out, Irish bands are being associated with Carthage, the nation state that lost the Punic Wars. I guess that makes England the Rome Empire. 

There’s also a game you can play. Try to name as many bands as you can. Here’s a hint: U2 show up twice.

"Vera Molnár" (1991, dir. Emmanuel Riche)

Though in French, this short documentary on the work of Vera Molnár is useful for demonstrating some of the methods and technologies employed by early computer artists. In particular, output was largely limited to what could be produced by a plotter, a type of line printer optimised for architectural drawings. 

Visual Coding 2021 student showreel

Visual Coding is a module offered in Music, Media and Performance Technology BSc., offered at the University of Limerick. For this project, students used the Processing development environment to create animations, using algorithmic methods. 

Includes works by:
Brian Collins
Sorcha Hassett
Louise Durkan
Cailean Finn
Davide Simonetti
Ian Walsh
Amy Higgins
Cliona Smith

"Cubic Limit" (1974) by Manfred Mohr

During my one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 1971, I met the CEO of C.G.M (La Companie Generale de Micromatique), a data storage and preservation company, which specialized in micro films. He invited me to experiment on their brand new machine DATAGRAPHIX 4460 to make computer animations. I gladly accepted and during the next 4 years I made several short computer films. It was a very painful experience since the process was very slow and the turnover dragged out over many months.
Article citing Manfred Mohr's use of the Datagraphix machine, 1973

For the film, each frame was drawn with a light beam on a small high resolution screen with an attached camera which automatically photographed each frame onto celluloid film. This film was then transfered through a contact copy onto 16mm film to create the animations.

Artist website.

Artificiata I (1969) by Manfred Mohr

Artificiata I was my first artist book. The drawings for the book made in 1968/1969 were my last drawings before I started using the computer in my work in 1969. I called the book Artificiata I because I saw it as an artificial visual sonata and felt I would make a second book Artificiata II when I started using the computer. I actually didn't make this second book Artificiata II until I returned to some of these ideas in 2012.

Published by Agentzia, Paris with a preface by composer Pierre Barbaud.

artist website

Generated Space (2020-21) by Kjetil Golid

Kjetil Golid is a generative artist and system developer from Norway, with a keen interest in algorithms and data structures.

It was this interest that kickstarted his endeavours within generative art, originally using visualization as a tool for understanding various algorithms. These visualization exercises gradually shifted their focus from being pure, "correct" implementations of well-known algorithms, into a more esoteric realm where the underlying structures mostly serve the purpose of making intricate and aesthetic visuals.

Today, Kjetil's projects are often initiated by the question "What would it look like if ..."; an unfinished idea of a home-grown algorithm together with a visual translation, where it is unclear how the end result will look.

Generated Space is the result of a year-long endeavour to make computers do unexpected things. It presents a wide range of different generative algorithms; from organic flow fields and particle systems to rigid fractals and grammar-based shapes. Some more serious than others.

website

Matrix Cam (2018) by Emily Xie

Hello from inside the Matrix.

This project livestreams from your webcam to put you in the Matrix, mapping each raining katakana character to a corresponding pixel brightness / color value.

This builds on top of a previous project I'd done, which was a simple reproduction of the digital rain animation in 2D.

Made with p5.js. Emily Xie is a generative artist, engineer, and educator living in NYC. 

Project page.