In Blood & Cinnamon Mott’s creatures discuss existential crises as they flip and rotate and disappear from view.
--F News Magazine, December, 2010
Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.
This classical animation explores personal memory, associations and atmosphere.
"I remember from the other room I could hear you violently buttering bread. I secretly hoped that I could be your next victim."
"Barry Doupé's lusty A Boy on a Dock Blowing His Nose features vaguely articulated, quasi-human doodles and Spirographs animated within a bizarre netherworld of its own humid imagination."
--Images Festival, 2005 catalog
"The content of the rogue computer animation Boy/Analysis is perfectly illustrated by the integral title, namely, a drastic abbreviation of Melanie Klein's 1961 key study on child psychology. The initial 93 sessions the psychoanalyst booked with a ten-year-old boy, are reduced down to 16 by Reinke, and thoroughly illuminated. Tumbling around, appearing and disappearing against a black background, are text fragments. A score from Benjamin Britten orchestrates this semantic ballet in which the most arbitrary associations can be made.
Das KunstKabinett or the Cabinet of Curiosities is a 'microcosm' or theater of the world, a memory theater which provides solace and a retreat for contemplation.
If asked to say what this work is about in one word, the answer — which is woven into the electronic musique concrète soundtrack — would be a Joycean one: it’s a “collideorscape.” The imagery is a return to materials Rankus dealt with as a young man in the video Naked Doom (1983). He has recycled imagery such as cages, a toy robot, and brain convolutions; newer motifs include a winged ballerina, Victorian corsets, and alchemical vessels containing birds.
China Town traces copper mining and production from an open pit mine in Nevada to a smelter in China, where the semi-processed ore is sent to be smelted and refined. Considering what it actually means to "be wired" and in turn, to be connected, in today's global economic system, the video follows the detailed production process that transforms raw ore into copper wire--in this case, the literal digging of a hole to China--and the generation of waste and of power that grows in both countries as byproduct.
China, Beijing, I Love You! is an animated film about extraction of nickel and cobalt along China's Maritime Silk Road. The film focuses on the character of NICKEL DUST who is exiled from her home in Sulawesi Island due to nickel excavations there. On the other side of the world, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, cobalt is being extracted by artisanal miners. Both nickel and cobalt are the main components of batteries used in Electric Vehicle(EV) and mobile phones.
The Colors that Combine to Make White are Important explores the power structure within a failing Japanese glass factory. Two parallel story lines involving the investigation of a suspected employee and that of a stolen painting converge to reveal an exposition on gender and desire.
The small cruelties of a subliminal fog roll in. A pandemic thwarts intimacy. Perched from their little planets, this cast of wildly colorful creatures question their futures and navigate the longing for connection.
This is the fifth collaboration between Jessie Mott and Steve Reinke.
The small cruelties of a subliminal fog roll in. A pandemic thwarts intimacy. Perched from their little planets, this cast of wildly colorful creatures question their futures and navigate the longing for connection.
This is the fifth collaboration between Jessie Mott and Steve Reinke.
"A cast of computer-generated, quasi-human smears star in a Gothic Western about Oedipal anxiety--when they aren't careening through a hyper-modern metropolis and babbling in German."
--Images Festival, 2006 catalogue
Earthmoves is a continuation of Semiconductor's exploration into how unseen forces affect the fabric of our world. The limits of human perception are exposed, revealing a world which is unstable and in a constant state of animation as the forces of acoustic waves come into play on our surroundings.
The fourth collaboration between Jessie Mott and Steve Reinke continues its melancholic musings on desire and mourning, this time with more twerking. Hypnotic backgrounds and eccentric animals lend to its psychedelic children's cartoon vibe, and the signature Madonna and Stockhausen soundtrack enhances the desperation for paradise among those extra long tongues and snake-y bodies.
The fourth collaboration between Jessie Mott and Steve Reinke continues its melancholic musings on desire and mourning, this time with more twerking. Hypnotic backgrounds and eccentric animals lend to its psychedelic children's cartoon vibe, and the signature Madonna and Stockhausen soundtrack enhances the desperation for paradise among those extra long tongues and snake-y bodies.
Encoded Facial Gesture #1 is a frame-by-frame animation of two mouth gestures that have been encoded into ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchanges) to spell out a brief text by Sigmund Freud on paranoia.
This title is also available on Les LeVeque Videoworks: Volume 1.
Animals debate the sticky subject of body dysmorphia and the merits of reconstructive surgery in this short animation.
"Jessie Mott wrote the script for this, recorded the voices and made the drawings. I constructed the soundtrack and animated her drawings."
--Steve Reinke
Animals debate the sticky subject of body dysmorphia and the merits of reconstructive surgery in this short animation.
"Jessie Mott wrote the script for this, recorded the voices and made the drawings. I constructed the soundtrack and animated her drawings."
--Steve Reinke
Inspired by an unaccomplished personal project, in this animation, I’m exploring ideas of intention, extension, and failed romanticism. I used images and texts from mass-produced postcards, packaging, calendar booklets, books, posters, and pamphlets that were created and used as political propaganda devices for the invasion of Ethiopia by Fascist Italy during WWII. Some of these prints were on the front covers of school notebooks, some were games that taught the geography, history, and natural resources of Ethiopia.
The filmmaker accepts the challenge of the philosopher and changes not only a table but also chairs, shoes, jugs, teapots and almost everything else lying around his house.
"What prevents me from supposing that this table either vanishes or alters its shape when no one is observing it and then when someone looks at it again changes back? But one feels like saying – who is going to suppose such a thing?"
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969)
Stop action animation on a single canvas, exploring the idea of pluralism through autobiography.
This title is also availble on Ezra Wube Videoworks: Volume 1
A newsletter that turned into a film about hands (fast forwarding through slow times).
Second video in The Variations cycle.
"Starring an inflatable wig holder that I got at a car boot sale in Bremen, Germany, this film began as a demonstration of different film animation techniques, but evolved into a bizarre improvised narrative in which the head escapes from the violent clutches of a mixed-up model girl, is sent to Poland in a wicker basket, where it has a nice holiday (I took it on holiday to Poland with me and animated it in the countryside), and finally returns on the ferry."
-- Jennet Thomas
Super 8 film, cut-out animation, model and object animation.
"Here is Everything presents itself as a message from The Future, as narrated by a cat and a rabbit, spirit guides who explain that they've decided to speak to us via a contemporary art video because they understand this to be our highest form of communication. Their cheeky introduction, however, belies the complex set of ideas that fill the remainder of the film. Death, God, and attaining and maintaining a state of Grace are among the thematic strokes winding their way through the piece, rapturously illustrated with animation, still and video imagery."
"Here is Everything presents itself as a message from The Future, as narrated by a cat and a rabbit, spirit guides who explain that they've decided to speak to us via a contemporary art video because they understand this to be our highest form of communication. Their cheeky introduction, however, belies the complex set of ideas that fill the remainder of the film. Death, God, and attaining and maintaining a state of Grace are among the thematic strokes winding their way through the piece, rapturously illustrated with animation, still and video imagery."