Projects in categories: Artist Project and Video / Experimental

Synopsis

Robinson in Ruins is an account of a journey by a wandering, erratic scholar, through landscapes in the south of England. Its fictional narration begins: 'When a man called Robinson was released from Edgcott open prison, he made his way to the nearest city, and looked for somewhere to haunt'.

Robinson ‘believed he could communicate with a network of non-human intelligences determined to preserve the possibility of life’s survival on the planet’ and ‘was equipped with an ancient ciné camera, with which he made images of his everyday surroundings’. He surveyed the centre of the island on which he was shipwrecked: 'The location,' he wrote, 'of a Great Malady, that I shall dispel, in the manner of Turner, by making picturesque views, on journeys to sites of scientific and historic interest.'

The film consists of these views. The cinematography began in January 2008 and continued until November, just after the peak of that year’s global banking crisis. The film’s unplanned journey ‘rediscovers’ several locations associated with capitalism’s development since the 16th century and resistance to it. Vanessa Redgrave’s narration includes references to the deepening economic crisis, climate change and mass-extinction, but manages to reach an optimistic conclusion.

Synopsis

Slow Action is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film which exists somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction.

Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in the distant future, when the sea level has risen to absurd heights, forming new isolated archipelagos. Accounts from a great library of Utopias are read by two voices.

Synopsis

One morning. Two points of view. Will today be the day? Laura desperately hopes so. Otherwise it's just another morning dealing with Alice, her overbearing mother. A film that weaves oil-painted animation with live-action film, to peel back the layers of consciousness and reveal one family's dark history.

Synopsis

The Unnameable is an 11 minute artists’ film trading in popular culture, sci-fi, cinema and horror. The title is a reference to both HP Lovecraft and Samuel Beckett's "Unnameables"; stories that melt in and out of reality and psychosis. Their characters fear what they know and also what eludes them. The Unnameable was filmed in an abandoned nursery for disabled children in west London.

Synopsis

Expressed via abstraction and aggressive editing, 4 chapters of unspeakable portrays an instability in self-image and emotions alongside impulsive behaviour, via changes in appearance of the artist and the shape of the frame.

Synopsis

Alone and tangled in an ancient washing line, a decrepit Deirdre is forced to confront a lifetime of woe and regret. As the sun sets and a bitter cold sweeps in, she is assailed by fragments of a past peppered with indignant lovers, resentful friends, and a neglectful family.

Synopsis

Feeder - A short film that will make you feel sick.

We want it. We buy it. We eat it. We swallow it down whole. But what does our body see when we stick it in our mouth?

Filmed entirely from inside the mouth, Feeder tells a story, a simple story of excess over the course of a single day, without characters, locations or dialogue.

Synopsis

Future Document follows the dark journey of a girl, Christina.

Anomalous memories are re-traced in the pursuit of revealing their true intentions. Transmissions have punctuated the strange world, in which the girl has found herself to be the centre of transmissions, she remembers, that may have eradicated the frequency of human life as she knew it.

As her alter-human capabilities slowly unlock (as prophesied by those who are watching her), the truth of her place in the plans ahead is shown to her. The transmission has already begun - Christina, however, still has more to remember.

Directed by Jake & Daniel Astbury, Future Document is the brothers' own unique meditation on a piece of apocalyptic sci-fi. Inspired by the structure and style Japanese sci-fi manga, a powerful female, both violent and child-like, is overseen by an elusive, evil scientist.

Shot in B/W Anamorphic digital video and Super-8 film, Future Document is perhaps the only independent sci-fi with genuine, unexplained UFO footage, filmed whilst shooting a scene in Cambridgeshire. The UFO was only discovered on review of the rushes afterwards and was introduced into the story by way of a strange anomaly that may, or may not, have changed everything.

Synopsis

The film k.364 is a portrait of a piece of music. It traces the journey made by Avri Levitan and Roi Shiloach 'musicians of Polish Jewish origin' as they return to the lands their parents fled in 1939.
 
It is a journey through a landscape and a past that is still only vaguely resolved for the protagonists. We accompany the musicians as they leave Berlin, travel through the town of Poznan, where the former Synagogue is still used as a swimming pool. The journey takes them to the Warsaw concert hall to perform Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante in E Flat Major with the Polish National chamber orchestra.
 
The film begins with a collage of sounds and abstract images from the municipal swimming pool of Poznan which was, in fact, originally built as a synagogue in 1907. Then the introduction to the protagonists' Levitan, the violist and Shiloah, the violinist' as they take on the appearance of apparitions, shot in detail, through the reflection of the windows of the train as it travels over a desolate landscape which quickly becomes the canvas for another journey to take place - a journey of ideas, memories and music.

Synopsis

The film is part of 'CINE OPERA', a series over 50 videoworks and cinematographic records shot in various part of the world by Michael Nyman during the last fifteen years. In Moscow 11:19.31, the camera observes, somewhat objectively, from the view point of Michael Nyman, the interviewee and celebrity, the proceeding of an interview in a Moscow radio station. His answers, always triggered by some sort of hesitation, are replaced by his own music: 'La Debarcadère' from 'La Traversee de Paris' (1989).

Synopsis

Looking at shapes and forms of landscape in a timeless and cosmic context the film observes the relationship between human and nature. By using an atmospheric sound score and at times the camera as a character the film dramatises this relationship.

Synopsis

The inhabitants of a secluded utopia dedicate themselves to relaxation and artistic pursuits, overshadowed by an ominous melancholy.