This delicious film was realised independently one year before he joined the NFB.

The soundtrack features an improvisation with friends, slightly reorganized using the same source material when the film was remastered for the 3·DVD set that NFB will soon release with the best of Hébert’s work.

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PIERRE HÉBERT
[Montreal·Canada 1944]

Pierre Hébert was studying anthropology when he began to draw and scratch home·made films directly on to celluloid.

He joined NFB in 1965, where he made Op Hop - Hop Op and Opus 3 among others.

The second, more political period of his career was inspired by years of activism and close study of the works of Marx and Brecht.

His third period is characterized by a multidisciplinary approach, collaborating with improvisational musicians which encouraged him to attempt scratching film live. In 1999 he left the NFB and continued to pursue his career exploring the new possibilities offered by computerization.
www.pierrehebert.com

Rutterford builds up this great work in six fragments to experiment with vertical lines shifting laterally on a backround grid as they vary in intensity and colour.

He's also designed the soundtrack.


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ALEXANDER RUTTERFORD
[UK]

Graduated from graphic design at Croydon School of Art in 1991, he first broke into the film industry designing graphics on sets for movies such as Judge Dredd and then moved on to become a cgi artist at production outfit Lost in Space.

He was a member of the video production company Black Dog, the promo division of RSA and works now independently as a director, creating music videos and short films.

His work includes music videos for Radiohead, Autechre and Amon Tobin, and the experimental film 3space sound engine.

A choreographed sequence of graphic events constructed from simple elements repeated and combined in a hierarchical structure.

The simplest element is a linear ribbon-like figure, that appears, follows a path across the screen and then disappears. The next level up in the hierarchy is an animating geometric form composed of multiple copies of the ribbon figure shifted in time and space.

At this level the copies are spread out into a two-dimensional symmetry pattern or shifted out of phase for a follow-the-leader type effect, or a combination of the two. The highest level is the sequential arrangement of these graphic events into a score that describes the composition from beginning to end.

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LARRY CUBA
[Atlanta·USA 1950]

Larry Cuba is one of the most important artists in the tradition known variously as abstract, absolute or concrete animation.

While still a graduate student at The California Institute of the Arts, he was convinced of the artistic potential of computer graphics, but this was years before art schools began teaching the subject. So Larry solicited access to the mainframe computers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and taught himself computer animation by producing his first film, First Fig. In 1975 John Whitney invited him to be the programmer on one of his films; the result of this collaboration was Arabesque.

Subsequently, Cuba produced three more computer·animated films: 3/78 [Objects and Transformations], Two Space, and Calculated Movements.

As Raphael Bassan wrote in a 1981 issue of La Revue du Cinema, "The computer animation establishes a parallel between visual perception and a structure of linguistic or mathematical order: it is concerned with establishing a new organizational field for the aesthetic material. …In the sphere of abstract cinema [lacking a better term], Larry Cuba's research is, in fact, at the origin of a new direction which does not yet have a name…"

Calculated Movements
Larry Cuba
1985 · 6’ 20'' · b&w · 16mm · U.S.A



Q&A featuring Larry Cuba at the Silent Movie Theater, Los Angeles, Dec. 2nd, 2008

Based on the sounds generated by painting on the soundtrack, this films belongs to a dot·line trilogy started in 1962 with Lines Horizontal and Lines Vertical.

After personally placing a small ball in the centre of the frame, McLaren produces spectacular fireworks of dots multiplying to create lines.

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NORMAN McLAREN
[Stirling·Scotland 1914 - Montreal·Canada 1987]

After finishing his art studies at Glasgow University in 1932, McLaren joined the Glasgow Film Society, where he discovered cinema through the works of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Fischinger.

He started quickly to innovate the medium through his direct·on·film animations, painting or scratching the cellulloid. In 1936 he worked as a cameraman during the Spanish civil war, a terrible experience for him. II World War being imminent, he decided to emigrate to Canada, where in 1941 he joined the National Film Board.

McLaren never ceased exploring new techniques to experiment with space and time, sound and image, light and colour. And he demonstrated that absolutely anything is susceptible of animation, including chairs or wooden fences.

Music always played an important roll in his work and in fact, he created many of his own soundtracks by scratching or painting on optic·sound film.

Next to Grant Munro he produced a series of five films called Animated Motion, which constitutes a true lecture on animation due to its deep analysis of Space and Time in film. In 1952 he was awarded the Oscar for Neighbours and Blinkity Blank was awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1955.

A precursor to Lazer Shows, Allures unfolds over time a journey of his spiritual quest for understanding the universe and the human condition within, a journey as deeply personal as it is profoundly universal.

It's a combination of molecular structures and astronomical events intermingled in a subjective and hipnotic milieu, where dots and lines push each other to the limit.

Belson uses carefully-prepared interference patterns that create complex and sensitive effects. Once the construction of a sequence was over, he shot it in "real time".

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JORDAN BELSON
[Chicago·USA 1926]

Since his first film Transmutation in 1947, sacred art is the nature of Belson's work; in his compositions everything fits together in multiple perspectives, the micro and the macro.

Between 1957 and 1959, he collaborated with composer Henry Jacobs on the historic Vortex Concerts, which combined the latest electronic music with moving visual abstractions.

This work and the contemplative Lumia of Thomas Wilfred inspired Belson to abandon traditional painting and animation to create visual phenomena by live manipulation of pure light in something like “real-time”. That's the technological basis for his more than 20 films.

Playing with abstract live·action footage and animations, [dot·lines mostly], D-Fuse created over 100 video streams for the limited edition of Beck’s Guero CD/DVD. This piece is one of them, and features dots created by real sparks or moving lightbeams, and thin colored lines, which evolve and grow in complexity to the rythm of a 70’s style song.

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D·FUSE

London-based collective exploring the wide variety of media communication.

Working with transdisciplinary methods and top-of-the-art technology, D-Fuse invites his audience to reflect upon the process of experimenting art in multidimensional and multisensory ways.
D-fuse explores live visuals, web and graphic design, fine arts and architecture, TV and cinema, and have collaborated with musicians such as Scanner, Beck, composer Steve Reich and the Italian ensemble Alter Ego.

While in hospital after breaking his ankle during the shooting of Fritz Lang's Woman in the Moon, Fischinger designed a new technique: he drew with charcoal on white paper, then filmed it and used the positive as negative.

Thanks to his engineering skills he synchronised the drawings to phonograph records released by Electrola, scratching an “X” on the disc and calculating the resulting clicks with a slide-rule.

That's how his incredible Studies were born. By 1930 optical sound-on-film process took over and he shifted to this technique while working on his Study nº 6. His Study nº 9 is based on Brahm's sixth Hungarian Dance.

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OSKAR FISCHINGER
[Geinhausen·Germany 1900 - L.A·USA 1967]

Inspired by Walter Ruttmann's work, Fischinger began experimenting with coluored liquids and three·dimensional modeling materials such as wax and clay.

In 1924 he was hired by Louis Seel to produce satirical cartoons that tended toward mature audiences. He also made abstract films and tests of his own, trying new and different techniques including the use of multiple projectors.

After the Nazi coup d'etat in 1933 abstract art was declared “degenerate”, so Fischinger had to find himself some tricks to keep on working on his non·figurative works. He made several films secretly [as his Composition in blue] and have been imprisoned on several occasions. He moved to Hollywood in 1936 with his wife and son where, despite suffering integration and financial problems, he continued to create abstract and comercial films as well as several oil paintings.

In 1940 he designed the film based on Bach's Fugue for Walt Disney's Fantasia, and by the early 1950's he started experimenting also with 3-D stereo film.


According to William Moritz, he held a dual fascination with ancient spiritual cosmology and new scientific discoveries of atoms and cosmic space phenomena. This duality was somehow always present in his imagery.

Playing with straight vertical and horizontal lines generated by his own computer software, Lukasz creates a noisy chromatic work that transports us with ease through different psychic states: from stiff and tight verticality to soft open landscapes on the horizon.

A terrific piece with perfect synchronization between image and sound.

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LUKASZ LYSAKOWSKI
[Gdansk·Poland 1974]

As an artist and a designer, Lukasz explores the cybernetic relationship of the human and the machine through the shared interface of the mediated screen.

Utilizing his own custom software that draws upon imagery created by himself and his partner Lael Gerhart, Lukasz developed real-time improvisational and generative audio visual performances.

In 2000 he started the video-impro-trio 242.pilots together with Kurt Ralske and HC Gilje, which realized the performance “Live in Bruxelles” in 2002. In this context Lukasz created his piece “Solo”.

As Standish Ladwer commented, this piece's emphasis is on objectively analyzed movement rather than expressiveness on the lines with clearly defined movements, controlled by a mechanical, almost metronomic tempo. Being the original version silent, Raúl Santos [a.k.a. Supercinexcene] has composed the soundtrack especially for this retrospective screening.


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VIKING EGGELING
[Lund·Sweden 1880 - Berlin·Germany 1925]

Viking Eggeling emigrated to Germany at the age of 17, where he became a bookkeeper and studied art history as well as painting. From 1911 to 1915 he lived in Paris an then moved to Zurich, where he became associated with the Dada movement.

By the end of the Great War he moved to Germany with Hans Richter; together they explored the depiction of movement, first in scroll drawings and then on film.

In 1922 Eggeling bought a motion picture camera and, working without Richter, sought to create a new kind of cinema. That is how he came up with his classic Symphonie Diagonale in 1923.

This amazing piece transports us through a nocturnal landscape where figuration is suggested by the playfull moonlight and its reflections in a pool of water. Scratched into black emulsion so that little edges of green and gold remain, one of the miracles of Moonlight [as in all Neubauer's abstract films] is that she does not use any editing.

All of the effects, the layerings and the precision movements, are rendered directly onto the same filmstrip frame by frame, with no chance for mistakes.

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BÄRBEL NEUBAUER
[Klagenfurt·Austria 1959]

This abstract animator and musical composer based in Munich, has created over 35 experimental films since 1980. Heiress of Oskar Fischinger's visual music and Len Lye's rhythmical scratch, her works during the 90's in various formats [35mm, 70mm IMAX film, quicktime movies for the internet and live performances] have rendered her one of the main figures in abstract animation.

Since 2000 she's been working with digital tools to create episodically Flockenspiel, a complex project based on several short·films inspired on fractal structures.
www.spiralsmorphs.de

The imagery in this piece consists of white dots against a black field.

Patterns resembling the tiles of Islamic temples are generated by performing a set of symmetry operations (translations, rotations, reflections, etc.) upon a basic figure or "tile."

Twelve such patterns constructed from nine different animating figures are choreographed to produce illusions of figure-ground reversal and afterimages of color.

This is set against 200 year old Javanese gamelan music.

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LARRY CUBA
[Atlanta·USA 1950]

Larry Cuba is one of the most important artists in the tradition known variously as abstract, absolute or concrete animation.

While still a graduate student at The California Institute of the Arts, he was convinced of the artistic potential of computer graphics, but this was years before art schools began teaching the subject. So Larry solicited access to the mainframe computers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and taught himself computer animation by producing his first film, First Fig. In 1975 John Whitney invited him to be the programmer on one of his films; the result of this collaboration was Arabesque.

Subsequently, Cuba produced three more computer·animated films: 3/78 [Objects and Transformations], Two Space, and Calculated Movements.

As Raphael Bassan wrote in a 1981 issue of La Revue du Cinema, "The computer animation establishes a parallel between visual perception and a structure of linguistic or mathematical order: it is concerned with establishing a new organizational field for the aesthetic material. …In the sphere of abstract cinema [lacking a better term], Larry Cuba's research is, in fact, at the origin of a new direction which does not yet have a name…"

This work is included in her collection muX, this title derived from the digital processing term “multiplexing”: fusing audio and visual data into one. 1/3 is an audiovisual ensemble with lo-fi and minimalist aesthetics.

Based on one-bit technology, Chiaki creates an overwhelming dot·line piece to the rhythm of a soundtrack designed by Tristan Perich and Silvia Mincewicz.

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CHIAKI WATANABE

Also known as c.h.i.a.k.i., this New York-based talented media artist with minimalist and abstract aesthetics, explores multiple formats including video, motion graphics, installation and live video performance.

Her primary sources of creative inspiration are sound, form, colour and movement.

She draws on ideas of neuroscience and psychology to integrate audiovisual media and cross sensory experiences and explore media boundaries.

As advertising films were not closely scrutinized by the Nazi party for style, Fischinger prepared his Circles using the new 3-color process Gasparcolor, in which the message “Advertising reaches all circles of society” was accepted as a suitable excuse for a dynamic flow of colorful circles.


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OSKAR FISCHINGER
[Geinhausen·Germany 1900 - L.A·USA 1967]


Inspired by Walter Ruttmann's work, Fischinger began experimenting with coluored liquids and three·dimensional modeling materials such as wax and clay.

In 1924 he was hired by Louis Seel to produce satirical cartoons that tended toward mature audiences. He also made abstract films and tests of his own, trying new and different techniques including the use of multiple projectors.

After the Nazi coup d'etat in 1933 abstract art was declared “degenerate”, so Fischinger had to find himself some tricks to keep on working on his non·figurative works. He made several films secretly [as his Composition in blue] and have been imprisoned on several occasions. He moved to Hollywood in 1936 with his wife and son where, despite suffering integration and financial problems, he continued to create abstract and comercial films as well as several oil paintings.

In 1940 he designed the film based on Bach's Fugue for Walt Disney's Fantasia, and by the early 1950's he started experimenting also with 3-D stereo film.

According to William Moritz, he held a dual fascination with ancient spiritual cosmology and new scientific discoveries of atoms and cosmic space phenomena. This duality was somehow always present in his imagery.

Lye put aside his interest in colour and concentrated on a stark, black and white use of the 'direct' method by scratching on black leader with dental implements and other sharp tools.

The scratched lines weave their way through various permutations as an elemental electrical line evoking creation in its most basic form; a slither of light reaching into and penetrating the unknown.

In this celebration of energy, Lye takes a line for a walk. Revised version of his 1958 original piece.


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LEN LYE
[Christchurch·Nueva Zealand 1901 - Rhode Island·USA 1980]

Lye began making his incredible experimental films like Tusalava in London in 1926, as well as commissioned works for the British General Post Office.

He continuously experimented with the possibilities of the direct·on·film technique and in various works he used a range of dyes, stencils, air-brushes, felt tip pens, stamps, combs and surgical instruments to create images and textures on celluloid.

In all Breer's work there's a pervasive feeling of randomness colliding with order; structures and relationships appear and recede slyly, subverting expectation.

Challenging the cinematic mandate for narrative continuity, Breer creates a cinema of discontinuous angularity, formal yet brimming with personal reference and wit.

This short·film composed of squiggly ink lines cavorting in constant transformation on a white field, is dedicated to his young daughter.


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ROBERT BREER
[Detroit·USA 1926]

As an undergraduate art major at Stanford Breer was attacked for painting like Mondrian, instead of following the social realism of his teachers. In 1949 he went to Paris and immersed himself in the hard-edged abstraction of neo·plasticism. There he began a series of film experiments and in 1955 made Image Par Images, the first fine art edition flipbook.

Upon relocating to New York in 1959, Breer broadened his work to include kinetic sculpture. He developed a line technique related to the free form work of swiss painter Paul Klee and started using in his films the dynamics of drawing and line to capture the feeling of humour and motion, relying on the simple technique of pencils on 4" x 6" cards.

“Consisting entirely of hundreds of constantly moving points of light, Lapis performs such marvelous transformations of positive and negative space, projected color and after-image, similarity and difference, that the viewer cannot help but contemplate the relationships of the unit to the whole, the individual consciousness to the cosmos, of space to time. It's not a dry, forced meditation, but a supremely sensual, purely visual dialogue. “Lapis”, the Latin for "stone," suggests the alchemical philosopher's stone, but no knowledge of hermetic doctrine is necessary to appreciate the wondrous display; the transmutation occurs directly in the viewer's mind”.
– William Moritz.


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JAMES WHITNEY
[California·USA 1921 - L.A·USA 1982]

At 18 James began collaborating with his older brother John on non-objective films in 8mm. As he studied Eastern philosophies, he realized that certain cosmic principles did not yield easily to verbal explanations, but could be seen and "discussed" through the abstract shapes in his films.

For six years after the famous Film Exercises, James tried to codify an ideographic vocabulary or alphabet for the expression of visual ideas.

Finally, he was aesthetically and spiritually satisfied only by the reduction of all building components to their simplest form: the dot or point.

"This piece was spawned out of our long-time desire to play animation as if it were music. Animation is such a drawn out process; the difference in speed between its creation time and its viewed timeframe is gigantic.

Music on the other hand can just pour out in real-time. There is something magical in that instantaneous turnover that we really wanted to apply through motion to graphics.

So while there was still a lot of prep work using more conventional animation techniques, the final recording was performed in real-time in direct reaction to the song".
- InsertSilence

The soundtrack features Big Lazy's Just playing scared.


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AMIT PITARU & JAMES PATERSON
[Jerusalem·Israel 1974] & [London·UK 1980]

Founded in 2001, Insertsilence is a common identity/brand that Pitaru and Paterson share when working together.

Paterson is a visual artist who also works as an illustrator, broadcast & web designer.

Pitaru is a jazz drummer who started writing software to facilitate his work and research in the fields of audiovisual art, music, print and interactive design. They have done commissioned work for the likes of Björk, Playstation2, Nike, Diesel and Mick Jagger.

Insertsilence.com
http://pitaru.com
http://presstube.com

This word play describes the most perfect synchronicity between image and sound.

McLaren employed novel optical techniques to compose the piano rhythms of the sound track. These he then moved, in multicolour, onto the picture area of the screen to create this piece of exquisite genious.


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NORMAN McLAREN
[Stirling·Scotland 1914 - Montreal·Canada 1987]

After finishing his art studies at Glasgow University in 1932, McLaren joined the Glasgow Film Society, where he discovered cinema through the works of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Fischinger.

He started quickly to innovate the medium through his direct·on·film animations, painting or scratching the cellulloid. In 1936 he worked as a cameraman during the Spanish civil war, a terrible experience for him. II World War being imminent, he decided to emigrate to Canada, where in 1941 he joined the National Film Board.

McLaren never ceased exploring new techniques to experiment with space and time, sound and image, light and colour. And he demonstrated that absolutely anything is susceptible of animation, including chairs or wooden fences.

Music always played an important roll in his work and in fact, he created many of his own soundtracks by scratching or painting on optic·sound film.

Next to Grant Munro he produced a series of five films called Animated Motion, which constitutes a true lecture on animation due to its deep analysis of Space and Time in film. In 1952 he was awarded the Oscar for Neighbours and Blinkity Blank was awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1955.