Reviews

There are very strong moments of intensity in Vitor Medeiros’s "Psychic Spies from China". The sound, in particular, is used to excellent effect to create tension, suspense, and a tactile yet dreamlike quality.

Home is a gentle piece that explores a complicated and sensitive issue of suicide. Seeing this work once again reassured me that my choice to watch films prior to reading descriptions pays off. My..

Debra Fear’s inquisitive approach allows her to notice and capture the most underestimated moments in life translating them into captivating video works often with a degree of dark humour...

Metropol Drift Reaction by David Anthony Sant is a visual essay somewhat akin to the works of British filmmaker John Smith. By dissecting the city’s urban elements into categories, such as neon..

The sound in this piece is its backbone and hops from languid to crisp to anguished to incidental. Are the cafegoers greedy consumers or lost and hungry animals? The jangle of different sounds, the tension between sounds and images, and the lack of human onscreen presence all evoke the mood during the riots successfully, as well as opening up thoughts on the cause of these riots and how they reflect society.

The video work in this piece has been captured through a plastic bag. This was the artists intention not knowing exactly what the outcome would be, I feel a sense of risk that has been taken. A question surfaces, are we taking risks simply by seeing things differently?

This piece is hypnotic, I can’t put it any other way. It is also long. I have been put into a trance, and I can’t leave the video. I feel as though I may have passed away, and my life is flashing before my eyes. The technique and style is consistent through out the whole video, this works really well design wise. It keeps me focused as well.

Thanks to a bag covering a camera, here we assist to a metaphor of our lives. The author seems to share the impossible fly of a butterfly in the rain with us.

Symphonic aphony plays empty cold spaces and empty hot sounds. I feel the sounds and the cold atmosphere of empty spaces.. One of the most interesting investigation about musical and cinematic..

Nowadays you don’t see often on your tvscreen the color bars together with that an horrible sound, indicating no signal.

The music gives a total different feeling of the video, a nice contradiction with the black and white images, where you see the cruelty of nature. Which seems to be a metaphor for our society, the big difference is animals have a reason to kill, humans not. However this bird could have a little bit mercy with his victim, hunger or no hunger.

The dualism between calm and storm is an usual condition in human life. Here instead there’s a sort of "freezing" yin and yang so that the two elements never melt. It’s unexpected to..

What happens when our ultimate anxiety and anger are inherited by our equipment?....

A most interesting investigation of the way we usually communicate and show ourselves off thanks to video networks that enable us to mix real and fictional events.

An experimental film playing on oniric vision. An infinite escape through reality and dreams. Psychic Spies From China is an interesting short film that properly shoots the initial negative and..

There’s a good balance between the rhythmic and involving music and the crude and rather disturbing images, which makes up for a symbolic representation of our times

Polar opposites create a dualistic balanced composition. One half breathes while the other does not, one half is cold, and the other is warm. One half moves while the other does not.

I really love the song that smoothly flows through this video. The bass line takes you, and with out any effort, seduces you. As the video plays you feel a tension between the the warm high of the music, and a cold low as natures cruel reminder kicks in.

The secret behind successful profile documentaries is most usually the unique qualities of the featured person themselves. This is certainly the case for Mulugeta Gebrekidan’s short The Triumph..

Life in a big city is chaotic, busy and full of noises. David Anthony Sant brought it back to beautiful scene of balanced, ordered images, overlaid geometric forms and more or less one sound. A..

Who doesn’t know the Mona Lisa? You have seen it in the Louvre or maybe saw the interpretations by other famous artists. Or even you read all the explanations about who, what and how of the..

I enjoyed Elizabeth Riley’s experimental video work. Dragons of Iceland is a fun, colorful tension building work. Juxtapozed by transitioning images that are based on artistic process we feel the repetition of movement, a strong principle of design.

I enjoyed "To the beach"! This short black and white film has a wonderful deceiving quality that has your perceptions and assumptions tricked! Mizin has carefully captured your attention from the films beginning.

In Long Live Egypt director Karim Shaaban gets us closer to the action than the news ever does. There are no hero journalists in flak jackets shouting into a microphone in front of a revolutionary..

Back to the good old days in the history of the movies with famous names and classicals remixed into a contemporary video-art piece.

It was for the description of the video and the title which made me curious to watch it. ’Schadenfreude’ means in English ’malicious joy’ and Daniel O’Reilly has catched..

Kristina Paustian - Bleach
Paustian creates a complex narrative exploring social phobia in this work. From the moment the protagonist in this animation short is delivered on screen you are aware that a story of life and death is about to evolve. Despite the playful rendering and cartoon like world that is presented, a much darker scene unfolds.

Andre Hoffmann - How I learned to love the past’s future
Hoffmann’s work evokes an eerily familiar sense of three dimensional space through the use of line and color. The viewer could be looking out a window or viewing a distant sunset. At times the moving image flattens out taking on the look and feel of a color field painting then shifts toward something familiar.

Sarah Janssen - Cinematic Shivers
Cinematic Shivers displays a masterful use of light and shadow to explore visual language as well as to sustain a narrative arc. The film has a strong stylistic look consisting of a patina of finely textured surfaces and shadows and the edited creates a strong and rhythmic sense of pace. I look forward to seeing more of Janssen’s work.

Darko Masnec - The Chest is a wonderfully crafted animation. The drawing style is sparse, skewed and expressionist, which bolsters the impact of the story. I’d like to see a shorter version, a tighter cut, because I think that would sharpen the overall effect of the video on an audience.

Melo Viana - Arancelesa
A slow black and white film with hints of color. The film walks us through the interior of several metaphors. I feel like I am the eye of the camera as It slowly moves. I make a circle in my seemingly linear sequence.

Annabel Dover - Jacqueline
I love this clever piece all in 32 seconds. We see the motion of the water and the boats swaying naturally to its rhythm, only to discover the sexually explicit image in the bottom left hand corner of the composition.

Leopold Fiala - Aesthetic of Movement.
This piece cleverly captured my attention. A Man mimics the movements of several kinds of animals, birds and sea life. Repeated in the same contrasting value of black and white, we clearly see and watch the man carefully perform each movement as the text informs us of its specific name.

Sarah Janssen - Cinematic Shivers
Cinematic is a sequence of repeated frames that slowly build suspense between the video and the viewer. The compositions are carefully crafted with only small fragments of information.

Kristina Paustian - Bleach
Paustian deals with issues of how one integrates oneself into society from birth through to adulthood. I thought the decision to use a hand drawn panoramic backdrop reinforced the idea of cycles, time passing, and continued attempts. I also thought the sound component in the video was well handled and added a very dark, mysterious level to the piece. My question for Paustian would be does one have to integrate into society?

Andre Hoffmann - How I learned to love the past’s future
This video hit a nerve for me because it encompasses a question that I often struggle with in my own studio practice.

Vulnerability, confusion, and perception - in "Blinded"
Whenary explores these very human conditions, in a poignant, and voyeuristic way. The scene is clearly a "clip" of a much larger event, the unfortunate repercussions evident in a body laying on the ground on the side of a country road.

What a beautiful, intimite, subtle and intense film. It reflects a truth we don’t know yet. Alzheimer, dementia. This is what it must be like. Mark Zuniga succeeds in picturing the life of a man who starts loosing his memory.

This film makes a mark for intuitive filmmaking. No script, no concept. And yet, there it is: a film like a dream, that makes sense all the same. The film is unlike anything you’ve ever seen, but because the filmmaker lures you step by step, shot by shot into this unknown world, all feels in a strange way familiar.

Sweet is a surreal multidisciplinary work. Using several variations of hand made fine art techniques the artist synthesizes the many fragments together. The work occurs to be a dream like narrative. The piece is also of a multi-sensory nature as sounds and diverse imagery activate several emotions. Over all the work has a darker undertone, the black and white camera work works really well.

This video is surreal and hypnotic with a creepiness reminiscent of very early David Lynch (think Erasurehead). The work makes you think of wanting to tame that banana before bringing angels into the world.

The video tests you patients as you become increasingly uncomfortable, it is the same invocation one develops whilst they wait to see their dentist.
The silence and dull interior setting is sterile, institution like and ugly.
This double channel work flashes back and forth to add to the disruption to of one’s ability to stay patient. A test of human duration, even at only 01:16 we are happy that the piece ends when it does.

Hitchcock famously defined suspense: We all know the bomb is going off – we just don’t know when. Robin is clearly playing with us. Teasing us. Being nasty to us. Making us feel. The build up. Anticipation. The Moment. Come on. Come on. COME ON! Don’t make me wait anymore… who is the car going to hit? What is she making in the kitchen? What is HAPPENNNNINNNNNNNG?