In Spite of Wishing and Wanting

FUCK TV

August 2019 •English

After concluding the now-legendary public access TV series, The Pain Factory, Michael Nine embarked on a new and more subversive public access endeavor: a collaboration with Scott Arford called Fuck TV. Whereas The Pain Factory predominantly revolved around experimental music performances, Fuck TV was a comprehensive and experiential audio-visual presentation. Aired to a passive and unsuspecting audience on San Francisco’s public access channel from 1997 to 1998, each episode of Fuck TV was dedicated to a specific topic, combining video collage and cut-up techniques set to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The resultant overload of processed imagery and visceral sound was unlike anything presented on television before or since. EPISODES: Yule Bible, Cults, Riots, Animals, Executions, Static, Media, Haterella (edited version), Self Annihilation Live, Electricity.

Occurrences of Questionable Significance

April 2020 •German

When forest animals invade our cities, the world is in disarray. Office vixen Fiona struggles with her banana phone addiction. Will she succumb to it? Temperamental bunny Barbara only gives her stag sugar daddy Nestor his special massage, after he dines her and plays the big spender. This obscure short film pinpoints postmodern tropes of consumerism, eroticism, and art with an homage to the theater stage and references to literature. This work uses a fantasy language and needs no subtitles.

Time Piece

May 1965 •English

Dislocation in time, time signatures, time as a philosophical concept, and slavery to time are some of the themes touched upon in this 9-minute experimental film, which was written, directed, and produced by Jim Henson. Screened for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in May of 1965, "Time Piece" enjoyed an eighteen-month run at one Manhattan movie theater and was nominated for an Academy Award for Outstanding Short Subject.

Hedgehog in Love

January 2015 •Ukrainian

Experimental cartoon which unites various techniques: puppets, sand & water (ebru) animations. About friendship, love and necessity to pay attention not only to the visual appeal.

EGGspression

August 2023 •

Egglantine loves salt on her eggs. Eggbert prefers pepper. Who blinks first in this playful Easter ritual?

Wind

January 2019 •

A commissioned music video for Emmit Fenn’s instrumental track, Wind.

Dickson Experimental Sound Film

August 1894 •English

William K.L. Dickson plays the violin while two men dance. This is the oldest surviving sound film where sound is recorded on the phonograph.

The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight

June 2009 •English

A gang of leather-clad, powerful women take over a traditionally male domain, and hairspray, eyeliner, and bare flesh are on full display in Beth B’s music video for the Arthur Baker–produced club hit from synthpop band Dominatrix. Banned at the time of release, it was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art.

I Am Kevin

July 2023 •English

A young boy creates a make believe world to escape his truth, a world where, at the water's edge, beneath the shade of an ancient tree, a mother forms a perimeter to protect herself and her child from an unspeakable darkness.

Submit to Me Now

January 1987 •English

Oddballs dancing, leering at camera, guy shaving a nontraditional part of his body and man ripping his own throat out, woman stabbing herself to death.

Sublapse Video Mag 1

January 1986 •English

Video Fanzine featuring: Half Japanese, Redd Kross with Sky Saxon as Purple Electricity, R Kern, Sonic Youth, White Flag, Psycho Daisies, Charlie Pickett, Nick Zedd, Morbid Opera More R&R, Film, Prose. Pencil numbering indicates there was a run of 600 tapes.

Saints of the Night

September 2023 •English

Living in forests untouched by man, these gracious and mysterious fairies use their magical powers to send blessings upon Earth. Do not take their kindness for granted. Especially on the night when the sky opens.

The Very Eye of Night

May 1958 •English

Dancers, shown in photographic negative, perform a series of ballet moves, solos, pas de deux, larger groupings. The dancers glide and rotate untroubled by gravity against a slowly changing starfield background. Their movements are accompanied by music scored for a small ensemble of woodwind and percussion.

Hypnosis Display

September 2014 •English

Exploring impressionistic, emotional and sensory environments found within the vast natural and urban landscapes of America. Neither image nor sound takes precedence: the two interact and combine preserving a raw sense of the discovery that field recordings and in-camera edited film rushes often yield.

Scenes from an Island

June 2022 •English

Hand-edited Lomokino 35mm footage captures scenes from an island, blending shifting textures with guitars and watery drones. A visual and sonic meditation on place and transience.

NEO-VIBE

March 2024 •English

An experience through neon visuals, things you've seen before in ways you haven't seen it. Neon distorted imagery through visuals consisting of gaming, clubs, film, cities, nature, and unidentifiable moving imagery.

REYNIVELLIR

November 2023 •Spanish

Reynivellir is a representation of the transit that is generated when approaching the art work, described with visual games that can well be evoked by the same brain when witnessing the impossible figures of Jose María Yturralde. Reynivellir is also a beach in a country that is a musical sonnet, and this is so because the mental image does not always connect the articulated parts of a sensation, it is systematic, but aleatory, and it is from these notions of the field of observation, that it approaches and moves away from understanding, linking and unlinking forms, movements, sounds, sensations and knowledge.

Perfector: Every Day Is The Same

Invalid date •French

Usmanbaş: Modernist

Invalid date •Turkish

Türkiye’s modernization adventure is an intermittent one that carries the pains of transition from empire to republic and of geographical liminality in every aspect of culture. At the center of this arduous modernist attitude in art is İlhan Usmanbaş, who was born in 1921 in the Ottoman Empire, whose atonal music of the 1950s influenced not only the field of music but also literature. As an essay film, Modernist: Usmanbaş both traces the composer's insistence on playing 20th century music in his compositions and visual notation and follows him in the private nursing home where he lived from the age of 100 to 103. While the film records Usmanbaş's curiosity in natural history and the intellectual structure he built between music, science and mathematics with the testimonies of the last years of his life, it also makes references to modernist art in formal terms as a meta attitude.

They witness time in longer intervalls

February 2022 •English

During a 6-hour performance and in a additional Film, REA and Yannick Mosimann dedicate themselves to the stretching of time and space based on observations of different trees. The tree, the mammoth of floral time, seems to be a gnarled, proud and place-bound existence, nevertheless in low-frequency, flowing movement. Breathing is here a symbol of time and rhythm, carrier of tonal frequencies of our vocal cords.