Missing one player - Lei Lei
Video | Color | 2015 | 4min 32s | Stereo | China

During a Majong game, a bad situation arises. Everyone is waiting for the last player.
The three have no choice but to wait, and they sit silently in tears. However, they believe that the fourth player will come. They look up to the sky and wait for this miracle to happen.

Lei Lei, born in 1985. His works are based on the organization and research of ready-made and found images, combined with digital shooting and parody, weaving together abandoned images, oral histories, fragmented online videos, official documentaries, commercial product catalogs, myths or legends, etc., to create visual poetry and prose. Lei Lei's art works include films, live music and drama. His video installation works have been exhibited in institutions such as the UCCA in Beijing, Shanghai OCAT Art Museum, Xi'an OCAT Art Museum, Shanghai MOCA Art Center, Tokyo TOP Museum, and Rencontres d'Arles International Photography Festival in France, and have been collected by important art institutions and art galleries. In addition, Lei Lei's film works have been selected and won awards at important international film festivals including the Berlinale Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, New York MoMA NFND, Melbourne Film Festival, and Hong Kong International Film Festival.

1976: Search for Life - Tess Martin
HD | Color | 2023 | 4min 00s | Stereo | Netherlands

A new father visits the hometown of his mother in 1976, accompanied by his wife and baby. At the same time, the NASA Viking lander is sending the first images back to Earth from the surface of another planet. Using the father’s travel journal as a guide, and re-contextualizing archival footage and photographs, this film explores our yearning to bridge the gap: the gap between parents and children, between points in space and between the present and the past.

Tess Martin is a film and visual artist based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She brings her perspective as someone who was raised between cultures to exploring themes of belonging, identity and connection. Her short films, videos and installations address our vulnerability: in relation to nature, the onslaught of time and the precariousness of memory. Tess has both a classical fine art and an animation background and these come together in her work: she pushes the conceptual potential of hand-made animation and the narrative potential of site-specific pieces.

Summer’s Last Moons - Kathy Rugh
16mm to HD | Color | 2018 | 3min 00s | Stereo | USA

As summer comes to an end, the moon reaches towards becoming full. Over three nights the moon is captured on film through in-camera editing and multiple exposures. The moons of different nights come together in the frame, to interact and play with one another, while official NASA sound recordings from space bring us closer.

Now based in Brooklyn, Kathy Rugh has garnered international recognition for her deeply inventive and visually striking films. Rugh’s films have received funding from the New York State Council on the Arts’ Electronic Media & Film Finishing Fund, and have been celebrated at festivals worldwide, including the Antimatter Film Festival in Victoria, BC, and the Images Festival in Toronto.and other prestigious festivals such as the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival and EXiS Experimental Film Festival in Seoul.

ESP - Laura Kraning
HD | Color | 2024 | 2mins 40s | Stereo | USA

A brutalist monument to the Empire State as manifested by a malfunctioning inkjet printer. Chroma and luminance are made audible as architectural and printed lines converge and dissolve into pattern and noise. Photographed in the Capitol City, Albany, N.Y.

Laura currently resides in New York, where she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study at University of Buffalo.
Laura Kraning’s moving image work navigates liminal spaces at the intersection of nature and machine and have been described as a form of “esoteric archeology,” delving into an experience of the subconscious of a landscape. In her most recent films, she deconstructs the material textures of landscape at 12 frames per second, mining the slips between stillness and motion.
Her work has screened widely at international film festivals and venues, such as MoMA's Doc Fortnight, the New York Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Visions du Réel, National Gallery of Art, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, REDCAT Theater, and Los Angeles Filmforum, among others. She is a recipient of the Princess Grace Foundation John H. Johnson Film Award, Jury Awards at the 2010, 2015 and 2016 Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award at the 2016 Athens International Film and Video Festival, the Jury Award for Short Film at the 2018 Rencontres Internationales Sciences et Cinémas, a 2019 NYSCA/Wave Farm Media Arts Grant, and a 2023 New York State Council for the Arts Support for Artists Grant.

Ghost Protists - Sasha Waters
Digital | Color | 2024 | 4min 30s | Stereo | USA

A protist is an organism that is neither animal, vegetable, nor fungi. Plant-like protists are called algae – such as those “flowers of the sea” cyanotypes created by Anna Atkins and published in a landmark book in 1843. In a mesmerizing frenzy of images and text, Ghost Protists transforms her images into a protest of the historical erasure of the colonial violence that enabled their creation.

Sasha’s experimental films, usually shot in 16mm on a wind-up Bolex, embrace a personal, artisanal approach to craft. Since 2022, she has completed three new short essay films that turn an anti-colonial and feminist lens onto the history of photography and cinema – cyanotypes in Ghost Protists, magic lantern glass slides in Fragile, and popular romance in Ashes of Roses. Sasha has received support from the Catapult Film Fund, Field of Vision, the Denver Film Society, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Jerome Foundation, and more.
She has had solo shows and retrospectives at Fisura Festival of Experimental Film, CDMX; the Library of Congress; Microscope Gallery in NYC, and ADA Gallery in Richmond, and screened at Kassel Dokfest, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; Anthology Film Archives; Pacific Film Archive; the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of the Moving Image; Union Docs; the Speed Art Museum and the Gene Siskel Film Center, among other international venues. Selected festivals include IMAGES in Toronto, the Telluride Film Festival, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Rotterdam, Tribeca, Ann Arbor, Woodstock, Chicago Underground, Big Sky Documentary, Vancouver International, Traverse Vidéo, and Palm Springs Film Festivals.

I Would’ve Been Happy - Jordan Wong
Digital | Color | 2023 | 8min 41s | Stereo | USA

“I Would’ve Been Happy” attempts to map a fraught relationship through the use of intricately coded pictographs and schematic abstractions applied onto glazed ceramic tiles and quilted cyanotype fabric. The aesthetics of architectural language are used to reconstruct memories of my family’s domestic spaces in the hope to uncover logic or reason to a broken home.

Jordan Wong A collector of souvenir state spoons and overpriced Uni Alpha Gel lead pencils, Jordan Wong is a Chinese-American experimental animator and nonfiction filmmaker driven by emotional honesty and analog processes. He received a BFA in Film/Animation/Video at Rhode Island School of Design, an MFA in Experimental Animation at California Institute of the Arts, and was most recently a participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2022. His films have screened internationally, including DOK Leipzig, NewFest, Animafest Zagreb, Japan Media Arts Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where he was awarded the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker for the film Mom’s Clothes.

Slideshow - Janie Geiser
Digital | Color | 2024 | 8min 15s | Stereo | USA

Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price
SLIDESHOW reveals moments in time in the lives of strangers. Strangers to me, but maybe not to each other. Found in a Berlin flea market in the 1990's, these slides originated in the DDR (East Germany):an embossed DDR decorates the top of many of the vivid plastic slide frames. The slides' photographic images were made of ephemeral materials; the color of the images has shifted over time. However; the slides' vibrant plastic frames have retained their color. As objects, they have a certain graphic power, especially when illuminated on a light table. They frame their content: families at home, friends sharing meals, outdoor gatherings, travel—familiar photographic subjects. Scattered among the boxed-up slides were also a few educational slides highlighting working sites, like foundries, hospitals, schools. Additionally, there seem to be a few commercially produced images of soldiers, the border---these were in cardboard slide frames and may have been produced by West German companies.

Time and place are suggested---sometime before 1989, when the wall came down. Working with the slides, I became so familiar with the people who emerged across the slides, I almost felt that I knew them. But I can't really know them....I can only sense their traces.

JANIE GEISER is an internationally recognized experimental filmmaker and visual/theater artist, whose work is known for its investigation of the emotional power of inanimate objects, its sense of mystery, and its strength of design. ”… Geiser gives voice to the reaches of the unconscious, pointing to the abandoned splendor that exists prior to the rules of society and language.” (Holly Willis, Res, 2004)
In addition to her film practice, Geiser has made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary performance with her innovative, hypnotic live performances that integrate performing objects and projection.
Geiser began making films in 1990, first as an element of her performance work, and then as a separate form. In 1994, she made her first film that was intended exist outside of live performance, The Red Book. An instant classic, The Red Book was screened as part of the 1996 New Directors/New Films series at The Museum of Modern Art and was later selected for inclusion in the Smithsonian's National Film Registry.
Geiser’s films have been screened at the Museum of the Moving Image, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Berkley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archives, the Centre Pompidou, the Salzberg Museum, San Francisco MOMA, LACMA, Redcat, The Getty, The Academy Museum, Filmforum Los Angeles, and at numerous festivals, including the New York Film Festivals, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Toronto Film Festival, the London International Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, Oberhausen, and the Hong Kong International Film Festival.

Shocking Dreams in the Circus - Sun Xun
Digital | Color | 2024 | 10min 19s | Stereo | China

The short film "The Shock Dream in Circus" tells an absurd dialogue between a letter from a different time and space and various animals in the circus. In the film's setting, there is no real dialogue process, and the animals in the film seem to possess human behavior and thinking abilities, while the scenes and actions of the people in the frame become absurd and strange. The two seem to interchange or become equal, losing boundaries…

Sun Xun was born in 1980 in Fuxin in Liaoning province, China. He graduated in 2005 from the Print-making Department of the China Academy of Art. In 2006 he established π Animation Studio. He currently lives and works in Beijing.
As an artist, Sun Xun’s works were collected by many art institutions, including White Rabbit Contemporary Chinese Art Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, M+ Museum, etc. While participating in art exhibitions extensively, Sun Xun has performed special screenings at Hong Kong International Film Festival, Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Holland Animation Film Festival, etc. He was also nominated for Venice International Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival respectively in 2010 and 2011.

Moving or Being Moved - Sabine Gruffat
Digital | Color | 2020 | 11min 00s | Stereo | USA

Post-modern dance theory by Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer is put to work while a woman cleans the house in a motion capture suit. The everyday performance of domestic labor is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers. In this gaming/ special effects world, movement has become a data set removed from the human body.

Sabine Gruffat is a French-American artist born in Bangkok, Thailand. She works with experimental video and animation, media-enhanced performance, participatory public art, and immersive installation. In this work, machines, interfaces, and systems constitute the language by which she codes the world. The creation of new ideas means inventing new ways of using existing tools, crossing signals, or repurposing old hardware. By actively disrupting both current and outmoded technology, Gruffat questions the standardized and mediatized world around us. She has produced digital media works for public spaces as well as interactive installations that have been shown at the Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Art In General, Devotion Gallery, PS1 Contemporary Art Museum, and Hudson Franklin in New York.
She is also a filmmaker with a special interest in the social and political implications of media and technology. Her experimental and essay films explore how technology, globalization, urbanism, and capitalism affect human beings and the environment. These films seek to empower people, encourage social participation, and inspire political engagement. Sabine's films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide including the Image Forum Festival in Japan, The Ann Arbor Film Festival in Michigan, and Migrating Forms in New York, the Viennale, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, 25FPS in Croatia, Transmediale in Berlin, and The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. Her recent video works are distributed by the Video Data Bank in Chicago, IL.

The Lost Season - Kelly Sears
Digital | Color | 2023 | 6min 09s | Stereo | USA

As the world experiences its final winter, desperate measures to hold onto the season awaken a radical labor consciousness.

Kelly Sears is more than an animator; she is a visionary who employs animation as a critical practice. Through cutting, collaging, and merging animated photographic and film documents with speculative storytelling, Sears creates films that challenge and expand our understanding of cultural narratives. Her work becomes a canvas where history converges with myth, resulting in uncanny and fantastical tales.
Sears' award-winning films have graced esteemed festivals worldwide, including Sundance, South by Southwest, and the American Film Institute. Her shorts have been showcased at renowned institutions such as the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Awards from festivals like Ann Arbor, Black Maria, Chicago Underground, and Oak Cliff underscore the impact of Sears' unique cinematic vision.
A graduate of Hampshire College and the University of California, San Diego, Kelly Sears has left an indelible mark on experimental animation. Her journey includes teaching at esteemed institutions such as Pitzer College, Scripps College, Rice University, and the University of Houston. Currently serving as the Associate Faculty Director for Undergraduate Studio Arts in Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts at the University of Colorado, Sears continues to inspire and shape the next generation of filmmakers.

THERE IS FIRE - Simon LECLERCQ & Thibault LECLERCQ
HD | Color | 2023 | 7mins 17s | Stereo | France

While a building catches fire, only one resident tries to alert his neighbors of the situation.
Brothers and artistic accomplices born in the north countryside in France, cinema was our escape, expanding our dreams beyond the village. Since childhood, we have created offbeat universes with humor, observing the absurdity of a modern society, where small conveniences often mask the essential.

The Stage of Flesh - Alessandro Amaducci
AI & HD | Color | 2023 | 7mins 30s | Stereo | Italy [Mature]

“Long ago sexuality, eroticism and pleasure were declared illegal. A resistance movement was created that clandestinely made digital films to recover the memory of lost senses. They were created with the first text-to-video generation algorithms, struggling with linguistic censorship that limited their operation. They circulated in secret form: most were discovered and destroyed, and their authors eliminated. A small archive survived in the form of partially restored fragments. These digital films represent the survival of the concept of eroticism and humanity, and direct testimony to a very dark period in our history. The following show contains scenes of nudity that some viewers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.”

Alessandro Amaducci Born in Torino (Italy) in 1967. He worked with the Archimedes Centre of Visual Arts (a cultural centre of a District in Torino), were he held workshops on video, with the National Film Archives of Resistence (Torino), where he realized documentaries about the Second World War, the Resistance, about workers struggle and other subjects relevant to the activity of the Archive, and with Theater Juvarra in Torino in the realization of multimedia shows and videoperformances. He is also professor of video language and practice in DAMS, University of Torino. He wrote several books about videoart; video technics and aesthetics of electronic arts. Since 1989 he produces experimental videos, music videos, videoinstallations, multimedia shows, videoscenographies for dance performances and digital photographies.

[Mature]

Letter From A Madman - Runfeng Qiu
HD | Color | 2024 | 6mins 46s | Stereo | China

A digital translation of Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman (1918), exploring the power dynamics of language (text—sound—image) and sound (noise—language—music).

Runfeng Qiu
Animator/filmmaker. His work tries to explore the psychological effects of information overload and the fragmented correlation between history, imagination, and perception. He received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design.

Every face is a shape that looks at us - Agustín Telo
HD | Color | 2023 | 7mins 12s | Stereo | Argentina

"Every face is a shape that looks at us" starts from a systematic intervention and analogical-digital manipulation on my National Identity Card. Taking this card as a plastic materiality, I begin an endless journey through my own face, looking to find some form or stain that speaks of what I apparently am or think I am. From this identity exercise, conceived as a struggle against the immutable and the established, I find at least one answer: after all, transforming myself into a dark, diffuse and vibrant stain, with countless eyes dissolved among them, deeply reassures me.

Agustin Telo is graduate of Image and Sound Design, in the Buenos Aires University (UBA), with courses and seminars of photography, cinema and visual arts. His work goes through diverse techniques (motion images projections, animation and digital video) and different supports and materials (objects, textil, ice or thrush installations). In recent years he makes various video installations: "El armario" / “El Lumenario” / “Dilusión”. In the last years he worked in experimental short films participating in various national and international film festivals.

(green before "green") - Atticus Echeverria, Paul Echeverria
HD | Color | 2024 | 16mins 36s | Stereo | USA

(green before “green”) documents these contrasting stages of optical perception. Within Atticus' collection of stills and video, it is possible to observe an uninhibited exploration of movement and freedom. In comparison, my meager collection of Polaroids displays a visual awareness encapsulated within the margins of the frame. The photographs are interpreted via the limitations of storytelling and spoken language. (green before “green”) contemplates the complex intersections between family, parent, and child. Furthermore, the film attempts to authenticate the contrast between structured and unstructured points of view. Namely, does visual perception change through the acquisition of language?

Atticus Echeverria is a student at Bishop Elementary in Ypsilanti, MI. He enjoys exploring nature, riding his bike, and collecting Star Wars toys. (green before "green") is his first film. Paul Echeverria is a filmmaker, digital artist and educator. His research and creative practice examine the formative dynamics between childhood, parenthood and the family structure. In addition, he produces work that contemplates the inevitable collision between humans and technology. Echeverria works with multiple forms of media, including film, video, performance, augmented/virtual reality, social media, data manipulation, podcasting and e-literature.

monolithic tenderness - Kyle Joseph Petty
HD | B/W | 2025 | 7mins 18s | Stereo | USA

A tessellating flicker film that seeks to undo the cold, impersonal architecture of the city by dousing it in organic and domestic forms. Featuring a collaged soundtrack of spam phone calls, pulsing synth chords, bagpipe drones, and a lullaby sung to my daughter while in-utero.

FLICKER WARNING: This film contains stroboscopic imagery Kyle J. Petty is a visual artist working in film, video, photography, and collage. His film work has screened internationally at Visions du Réel, Barents Ecology Film Festival, and Antimatter Media + Art. Kyle grew up in the Merrimack Valley of New Hampshire, earned a BA from Chester College of New England, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He is a member of AgX Film Collective and teaches film production at Montserrat College of Art, Anna Maria College, and Tufts University. Kyle lives in Medford, Massachusetts.

Symphonic Distress - Marco Joubert
HD | Color | 2023 | 10mins 00s | Stereo | Canada

The music came first: a mixed contemporary piece by composer Yuliya Zakharava, in which instrumentalist Pamela Reimer plays a piano score, while also triggering prerecorded sequences and incorporating vocal and percussive elements. Asked to provide a visual component for the work, I was struck and conquered by its intensity and beauty from the very first listen. Although both the music and the film are in themselves apolitical and stateless, the wish to collaborate and the urgent impulse to express ourselves through art have been exacerbated by the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. The intention, therefore, while avoiding any direct reference to war, is to tacitly evoke certain universal emotions born out of its consequences: fear, suffering, outrage, vulnerability, abnegation, hope.

Marco Joubert is a self-taught Canadian filmmaker and video artist, with a background in architecture and visual arts. His audiovisual practice, characterized by its formal rigor, tends toward the development of a personal language, situated at the crossroads of cinema, video art, poetry and philosophy.

Flux - Youjin Moon
HD | Color | 2024 | 6mins 19s | Stereo | USA

'Flux' is an experimental film that takes viewers on a journey through fluid scenes, where undulating waves, floating ice, and swirling galaxies unfold. This visual poem, fusing the physical texture of cameraless film with digital elements, muses on all things water. Changing states, mutable forms, and flowing associations invite the viewer to relax their mind and let their spirits float along for the ride.

Youjin Moon is a South Korean artist and experimental filmmaker based in Boston. Moon has shown her works at national and international film festivals and exhibitions, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival, the deCordova New England Biennial, and the solo film program at Harvard Film Archive. She received the Korean EXiS Award at the 12th and 16th Seoul International Experimental Film and Video Festival. Moon’s works have been featured in the Boston Globe and Art New England, among other publications.