exploding cinema - Sound Check

A window shuttered between a light-sensitive mechanism - 'camera' - and photo-synthetic aperture - 'blinds'. Light artist Luis Recoder continues his exploration of film as an apparatus which disperses, scatters, redistributes and re-resolves light.

1! closes the Pop Manifestos series with a presentation of titles of the 100 CDs Tony Cokes has valued most from 1997-2002. This discography of mostly German electronic recordings is juxtaposed with excerpts from music critic/philosopher Christoph Cox's essay on Gilles Deleuze, experimental electronica and the limits of rock music's forms and ideological premises.

Two dancers compete in a hot-wired arcade game.

The camera feels its way excruciatingly slowly through photos of buildings. Coming to terms with the impressions made on the maker during a stay in Palestine.

This film basically consists of some seventy scenes of just a few seconds of footage about the Arctic. Thanks to the extreme method of processing texture, time and colour/light, the material acquires the quality of a landscape painting. For the soundtrack, samples of natural sounds and fragments of a string quartet were processed as elaborately as the images.

A wide range of inventive and creative people, including important topical film makers and sound artists, react to the challenge of making a short pure sound work.

A composition of a man and his instrument. Rhythmic, mechanical equivalents are generated by means of editing. The musician in the picture is Rüdiger Klose. The film is made up of six movements that show the relationship between the drummer and his instrument. They work upon each other, like a clockwork in a puppet-show.

Linking two separate musical generations, Arcangel creates an unexpectedly cohesive mix.

A button ends up in an operatic adventure while looking for freedom.

Mix of documentary, fiction and local commercials shows the quest of six couples for a Disney-like Utopia.

There is hardly an image to be seen. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of water in some corner, but for the most part this film is black. The lines appearing on-screen in grey are derived from 'Ein brief Ulrike Meinhofs aus dem Toten Trakt', a letter written by the RAF member Ulrike Meinhof in 1972, when she had just been imprisoned.

Clocks offers the impression of the working life of the 37-year old composer and pianist Elena Kats-Chernin.

This film combines Lissajous patterns and images from a modified TV test generator, filmed off a monitor with Super8, along with hand-processed footage shot in London using various distortion lenses. The two reels of film are mixed together and accompanied with electronic sounds from homemade circuits.

Sokurov directed and filmed Mozart's Requiem for the Rossica Choir in the wonderful hall of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. Preceded by his student film, inspired by La Traviata.

The bed-ridden heroine listens to La Traviata. She gets a visit from a murderer.

Escape deals with seeking isolation to flee loneliness. Focusing on colour, texture and rhythm, the film expresses a period of turbulence.

The images Barbara Doser produces plunge into their own abyss. She makes videographies that have nothing to do with film. What we can see has been generated through feedback strategies of the equipment. The acoustic carpet fuses with the visual suggestions until we hear images and see sounds.

An experimental film and video combination, assembled from found 16mm footage cut into short sequences and spliced together to form an audio collage. The film soundtrack was then fed into a specially modified TV test pattern generator, to give a synchronised visual representation, in the form of blue horizontal bands of varying density.

The master investigates the vague boundaries of documentary practice. Five scenes, five lengthy registrations, no actors, no script. Light, airy meditation, with dogs, ducks, water and nature sounds.

For Fossilization D'Haeseleer used video as a kneading machine. Layers of images are moulded into a sticky mess that absorbs and attracts everything it touches. It's an apocalyptic endgame, starring several cars and some human remains and maybe even some wishful thinking on a moody, rainy day.

Classic meditative collage film created entirely without the use of a camera by pasting montane zone vegetation such as petals, grasses and leaves onto strips of clear film leader. As the title suggests, it is a homage to (but also an argument with) Hieronymous Bosch.

A play with a double voice over. The image, simple green foliage, hardly supplies us with any information. Grass A/B is an investigation into how stories are told, how meaning is constructed. We watch and listen, but only perceive raw materials, the materiality of colour and the voice. At the same time we experience how rhetoric functions though certain conventions.

A snow-covered landscape, quietness, the passing of the seasons, a permanently empty flat. Grey's theme deals with emotional distress caused by the death of a close person. This film expresses the time and situation in which a new life starts emerging.

Heatwork centres on discovery of sound in objects, structures and spaces. In this collaboration, both sources and sounds are raw materials in a process of sonic and optical inscription that utilises basic recording technology and a performative working process.

The video is part of a series of works on 'digital translations of reality'. The masculinity-charged raging of brachial heavy-metal music runs through the filter of another cultural form of expression: the opera and its melodramatic employment of voices, as well as the distant, cool, electronic creation of sound.

In this video, one travels through the images. It is a journey without physical displacement. Instead of pushing the 'record' button, new compositions, colours, stories, spaces and times are being shaped, and then one presses 'play'. It is a reflection on the impossibility to capture a place and a moment with a camera. Also inspired by a fragment by the writer Michel Houellebecq.

A short meditation inspired by the track Interlude by the British band Manyfingers, a Chris Cole project. The film shows a group of ‘Lookdown Fish' (Selene Vomer) swimming through chemical layers of high-contrast black-and-white film stock. Winner of Tiger Short Award at IFFR 2005.

This video is a letter to a missing person. The spectator has the choice of either following the narration and/or observing the abstract pattern of lines. The superimposition of the same image with a delay can also evoke the 'phase music' of Steve Reich. What matters is precisely the choreography between these two interpretations.

Kandinsky's Violet was originally a commissioned work for a performance with live music, based on Kandinsky's script from 1914.

Kernwasser Wunderland opens up a biotope subject to specific laws and its own ecology, filled according to the intuitive logic of the unconscious and the imaginary. The brooding emptiness inspires reflection on nature and technology, in a fusion of sensual sound and image of both digital and natural worlds.

A remote, barren, almost unfriendly landscape: Kilvo in Lapland was the inspiration for Radian's music, and even the accompanying visuals by Michaela Grill play with the bare countryside's resistance to its depiction. A fourfold split screen shows views of this place in a kaleidoscope of animated digital postcards.

In the limelight of an empty stage stands a woman, transfixed, offering herself in refusal like a comic-book character. 'No, I will not sing a song for you!' But then this melody is crawling out of her throat. For the right toe does not know what the left corner of the mouth is doing. The registration of a performance.

Line Fill 2 is a kinetic immersion in an immaterial world. The video is made by shooting lines from a close distance that are printed on a paper. The music is composed using rising and falling test signals of a varied length.

Selection of art films and videos that make you think about the deed and the implications of listening. Compiled by Kathleen Forde, with work by Gary Hill, Christian Marclay, Stephen Vitiello and Thom Kubli, among others.

A unique anti-fairytale. A little girl is angered by her father's contradictory nature. He yearns to fly, yet continually kills flies.

Video piece based on the novel by Marguerite Duras L'amant de la Chine de nord. The artist collected quotes from the book and developed a new audiovisual collage. Together with the video a book was created in the tradition of a photo-novel.

A single white cross on a blank black surface. The slow movements of this cross seem to delineate some figure. But it is the off-screen voice that has the most suggestive effect on the viewer's imagination. A self-portrait in motion graphics with sound design by Anton Aeki. The text is written and whispered by Anouk de Clercq.

A video as an exploration, a journey through three abstract worlds: subterranean, terrestrial and atmospheric. Made with paint, ink and paper on 16mm and 35mm film strips, digitally manipulated. Inspired by Roland Barthes' Image-Music-Text and by the work of Stan Brakhage.

Medicine Box takes as its starting point the interior of a medicine cabinet. Pills of different shapes and sizes are arranged in Morse Code fashion, providing cryptic clues to 'cure-alls'. The intention of the work is to make the viewer question the necessity of medication, and to respect the influence that a small pill can have on one's health.

This video is like a quartet, consisting of the following instruments: the choreography, the camera, the editing and the music. The video obeys the musical principal of the counterpoint and can be seen many times. The synchronisation between sound and image is dependent from the viewer, who thus becomes part of the creative act.

The image of a young child. The suggestion of a repeated sense of loss. This video is inspired by the game of the spool as mentioned by Freud in his theory of the fort-da. Kurtag: 'I wanted to evoke memory, because emotions help to consolidate memories...'

A suggestive description of urban Helsinki, experienced by a blind woman. The high tech part of town, Ruoholahti, and the huge Kamppi building site, are explored by the main character. The film is written in cooperation with the blind lead actress and is based on interviews with visually disabled people.

Bob Moog has been inventing electronic instruments for fifty years. This documentary shows his cooperation with musicians over the years. It looks at his ideas about creativity, design, interactivity and spirituality.

Rotterdam 2004 Film Maker in Focus returns with digital versions of his so far unique and rare live events for the first time. Nisi Jacobs videotaped the performances. The titles are also new works, and are not suitable for people prone to epileptic seizures! In Mountaineer Spinning, we seem to be seeing a rustic landscape, perhaps. Everything here seems to be a `perhaps', including allusions to Beauty and The Beast and whether we are seeing in 3D or not. As in real life, everything is in constant motion. Rick Reed does the Mendelssohn and here too, lines are blurred between life-recording and astral electrons at play. The second digital Magic Lantern performance sounds very different. These are selections from four live performances by musician John Zorn, assisted by Ikue Mori (improvising on laptops) in May and October of 2004 at Anthology Film Archives in New York. The viewer of Nervous Magic Lantern phenomena plunges, hovers, sinks and rises into illusionist deep space. The question of what we are looking at, tantalizingly suggestive as appearances might be, becomes of less urgency than from where in space we are viewing, and where and of what consistency and shape and size is the mass confronting us at any one moment, and when and how did it become what a moment ago it was not. It might be best to think of what you and others see as a group hallucination. In between those longer pieces is a short film, New York Street-Trolleys (11 min.), in which the Nervous System Performance is explained. (KJ)

A fragment from Autodafé by Elias Canetti is read out without sound, only a mouth, filmed in close-up, appears on-screen. The sequence is repeated several times, re-editing the paragraph at each time to make up other sentences, and then it is scrambled again in silence, so that nothing remains of the original fragment.

See 'Up and Out'.

Köner's project Nuuk shows in four time portraits, snippets and takes from landscapes and settlements of Greenland (observed via webcams). Nuuk is, in many ways, a crystalline example of Köners ambient music. Geological shifts, with their unceasing yet patient modulations, form the crux of Köner's musical analogies.

'Tape my head and mike my brain.' A tribute to three writers and their relationship with sound recording devices: Rilke and the phonograph, William S. Burroughs and the tape recorder, Thomas Pynchon and the mind-reading machine. Inspired by media-theorist Friedrich Kittler_

In a Christian context, palms are a symbol of victory, a foreshadowing of rebirth. Sandra Gibson's use of palm fronds as a purely visual subject, as textures, is linked to both interpretations. This also marks her return from animated films to direct observational work.

A study on light that cannot be seen. The video camera shoots the monitor that shows the image from the camera in real time. The aperture is adjusted until the light seems to be present as a being. The moving image, in other words the light, materializes through the blinking, and produces creatures.

Play is a montage of archive footage of audiences in which the on-screen action can only be seen reflected in the facial expressions and gestures of the audience. Individual behaviour condenses into collective behaviour. The event is transferred from the stage to the hall; audience members become the actors in an unpredictable drama.

'Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.' (Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939) Memories can be so fragile, so elusive and so unreliable. Using cameras and other recording devices, we try in vain to capture life as it slips by, but somehow it's never the same. Perhaps the act of recording blurs the line between reality and memory - we're no longer sure which is the 'truth'. Shot in a wintry, overcast, ghostly Vienna, REPLAY explores this unsettling phenomenon. Heavy with melancholy and nostalgia, the film grieves with a sense of 'loss' - lost love, lost friendship, lost memory. The film maker seems to be yearning to put the clock back, to rewind, to replay.

Restored Weekend is fictitious discovery based on Walter Ruttmann's audio play 'Weekend' from 1930 - the first-ever abstract sound collage.

Installation of remains of scientific processes with sound from the exhibition itself and which mixes itself during the show.

Inspired by Memory Lane by David Shea, SEEM is a film that combines seemingly clear and recognizable elements so that their meaning, but also the thoughts that they would usually evoke, become relative. The film is built up on three characters (a man, a girl and a woman), whose roles, actions and relations evolve throughout the film. This film seeks to offer an audiovisual experience that is open to interpretation.

The tone of the work is reminiscent of early video art: raw expression. The louder they shout, the more they are in the picture; the quieter, the more they are withdrawn. The piece works both as a metaphor for current political dialogue as well as stripping down language to its basic component: vocal noise.

A spatial exercise, between a window and a painting: an actor trying to locate himself in a space with the aid of the sound and the image of a video camera.

Smoked Sprat... is a surreal and comic opera about a man who lives unhappily under the sea. A fish grants him three wishes. The man asks for a woman, a big penis and a minister's portfolio.

Five visual interpretations, based on one and the same specially composed soundtrack by sample maestro David Shea.

Pioneer of minimalist music Terry Riley presents a new composition, inspired by images from the New York film maker Jem Cohen. They express their anger and despair about today's US policy both serenely and insistently.

Live film and music project with uncompromising, radical mentality, that combines the music of Thomas Köner with live sound from other film auditoria. Reble's images comprise minimal scratches on black film.

Tony Conrad is best known for his violin playing with the Theatre of Eternal Music. Hypnotic phenomena and trance situations continue to characterise his film and music work. Solo live and his own shadow.

Visitors are invited to investigate an environment of light and hence to generate sound.

During a sound check, musicians eliminate feedback frequencies and humming cable sounds. Microphones are set in the ideal position. Billy Roisz has made both audio and visual recordings of eight musicians' sound checks - eight times an exploration of the border between sound and noise.

Performance of the famous Led Zeppelin anthem Stairway to Heaven, sung backwards - after months of rehearsal and development by the artist - and consequently played backwards. It is reminiscent of such unintelligible seventies art performances or a Dadaistic reading of a Kurt Schwitters poem, leaving audiences baffled.

Thoughts and memories flow through our heads like water. You concentrate on one thing, while you are conscious of a periphery of possibilities. Just like in music, where it is possible to hear things on several layers at once and yet to focus your attention on one layer or one detail. In film, things quickly become unclear once several layers are on top of one another. Inspired by the art of Paul Klee, in this film, Scheffer pursues his quest for the filmic possibilities that can bring him closer to the freedom of music.

Goldt demonstrates how the complexity of an image can be greatly increased by a simple act of reduction or abstraction. The point of departure is a digital photograph of flowers. The metaphoric package of the rose is replaced by a kind of a post-metaphoric bar code. A continuous drone with microstructural rhythms is heard.

Ten new music videos by the world's most famous unknown band.

Because the films of Stan Brakhage were originally intended to be watched in silence, the IFFR also offers an opportunity to experience the film selection made by the band Text of Light, 'pure'. Being screened are Star Garden (1974), Creation (1979), The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981), Jane (1985) and "..." [known as "Ellipsis"] --- Reel 4 (1998).

Luis Buñuel once said: 'There is no narrative, there is only light'. Shot in Warsaw, There Is Only Light was filmed using a faulty S8 camera to explore diverse sources of illumination. The fantastic music is from the theatre group Orkiestra Antyczna that interprets Byzantine manuscripts.

Sound diary of 51 fragments, recorded at different moments. From sounds of the funeral of Andy Warhol up to 11 September. Only audio!

The story of Evelyn Glennie, prominent musician and percussionist. She has no equal as a solost. In addition, she is deaf. With a guest performance by Fred Frith.

Bridging the gap between past and present, a series of thought pictures transcribe moments of cautionary pleasure submerged in undulating illusions of liquefied light and shadow.

Visual artist Christian Marclay combines the soundtrack and images of different films into one new work. Preceded by the first short film by Jim O'Rourke: 'not yet'.

Looking at paintings with a text by the poet Joachim Gasquet on the soundtrack. He evokes commentaries that were once formulated by the painter Cézanne.

When does the actual birth of images take place? Hundreds of photographs were used in making this film. The slow process of making these images appear includes the use of a video system that focuses on the development of light. The birth of these images recalls the birth of a story, the desire of fiction to be seen.

A woman sits on rocks by the waterside; she is seen from the back, smoking a cigarette. Like a holiday picture. Below, words appear on-screen taken from intimate correspondence between the Irish writer James Joyce and his fiancé Nora. The fragmentary text is pronounced by a computer-generated male voice.

The text that word by word fills the right side of the image is derived from chapter 10 'Wandering Rocks' of James Joyce's Ulysses. The 3500 words are classified and pronounced according to a random system - based on 'orphism', a style developed by the French surrealist poet Apollinaire - by 19 computer-generated voices, after the 19 protagonists in the book.

A photo and video collage in black and white computer animation. A desolate desert landscape is slowly transforming into a futuristic industrialized world. Indefinable machines are branching off into more complex mechanisms, which are producing an industrial soundtrack while moving rhythmically.

An elliptical idyll enriched by memories on the air and the water, radio static, and cargo holds, to the music of carefully edited compositions. Like an ant at a picnic, Isaac Mathes's camera insinuates itself into the stolen rhythms of an afternoon's passing that fleetingly recalls the passing of so many others.

The idea of this video is to use the central idea of the drama where the characters struggle to hear the sound of a rescue ship. In this way, the re-editing becomes a device asking the audience to concentrate and listen extra hard to the soundtrack of the piece. Just what is it made of? What are the bare fundamentals here? What exactly is it we are listening for?

In The Witch a little boy abandons an apartment and, as soon as he has gone, the plants begin to communicate with each other by energetically shaking their leaves. When the boy comes back, it's as if nothing has changed.

An adaptation of a film script by Jan Brzekowski (1903-1983), poet and member of a Polish avant-garde group. In 1930, while living in Paris, Brzekowski published a short film script titled 'A Woman and Circles' in the French magazine Cercle et Carrée. But Brzekowski himself never realised the film.