Ad meliora, or “towards better things” combines hundreds of separate images that create a deep meditation on being, creativity and nature; a mandala of forms that becomes highly symbolic of life, death, yesterday, now, and the next moment. Flowers, plants and textures were photographed in places such as nature conservatories, cultivated gardens, vacant properties and parking lots. The familiar landscape appears molten, luminous and renewed. Ad meliora is suggestive of adaptation, resilience and transformation.
Category: Film
The Other Side of Now
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than – this” The opening line of the poem touches on words by Fredric Jameson that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
The 16mm film evokes the everyday-ness of life in the abandoned public spaces of the present-day city, colonised by nature and wakening to new possibilities after the long period of pandemic. Erased by the ebb and flow of urban regeneration, these repurposed sites are resonant with the city’s histories, rewilded by visions from past and possible futures.
Poem spoken by Ruth Mitchell.
A Creative Associates project for the Sustainable Earth Institute, University of Plymouth.
Dream Trash Journal
Anonymous (Did You Last, Ancient Nebula)
Of extinction
Petrichor
Petrichor explores the analogy between the degradation of nature and the experience of helplessness as part of human consciousness. Heavily inspired by experimental documentaries and ethnographic films, I focused on combining images of locations and objects that have been discarded and disregarded with the stories and memories of incarcerated women. The sound design, which incorporates not only the voices of the women but also archibal voicemails and recordings, completes the impression of a removed and haunting filmic reality that encapsulates the notions of loss and hope.
Questions for a Dinosaur
Cosmos Obscura
Warning: This video contains flashing images.
Score by Irina Escalante-Chernova
In Cosmos Obscura, the universe is at once known and unknowable. New patterns, rhythms and metaphors are born from old ones, and familiar celestial bodies are refracted into strange and unusual forms. The visuals were created from photographs taken from the Voyager II spacecraft. Photographs of the planets and their moons were abstracted and animated in order to create various patterns, rhythms and images.
The musical work was originally created for 8 channels and subsequently adapted to the stereo version. The music focuses on the work from different backgrounds with the noises of nature and those which have an electronic source.
Weir and clouds 3
The screen contains two moving images: a single shot of clouds in a blue sky placed directly above another single shot of water flowing over a weir. The cloud density in the shot of the sky changes over time – a change which influences the appearance of the water flowing over the weir. The image contains two shots of different forms of water.
The Divine Visions of Hildegard von Bingen
A short film visualizing the ecstatic visions of the divine by renowned German medieval nun, philosopher and mystic Hildegard von Bingen, born in 1098, who invented the language Lingua Ignota, composed music and made discoveries in natural science. These were seemingly bestowed upon her by God through her visions in a period of time when this was forbidden for women. She was a writer, botanist, painter and a truly mysterious female trail-blazer. What did she see?
This abstract film by Paul Vernon was commissioned by Filthy Lucre supported by Arts Council England, with vocals from Josephine Stephenson, arrangement and recording by Joe Bates and music by Hildegard von Bingen.
MEMORY VI An Ostrich’s Eye Is Bigger Than Its Brain
MEMORY VI An Ostrich’s Eye Is Bigger Than Its Brain is a rumination on why people remember certain trivial or mundane facts but might be unable to recall ostensibly larger ideas or details/events of greater significance. The works in this series, MEMORY, reflect different facets of human memory that I am interested in. They attempt to visualize my own questions about and inquiries into how human memory functions and how it might be reflected by the moving image. (Chung)
Merry-Go-Round
Somnambulistic circus Ribera & Velazquez welcomes everyone to the show “Merry-Go-Round”, where shadows that escaped the Platonic cave turn the carousel in the foggy catacombs.
Producers: Ihor Dyurych, Liliya Mlynarych, Sergiy Nedzelskyy, Maxim Asadchiy
Director of Photography: Serhiy Mykhalchuk
Art Director: Svitlana Makarenko
Music: Oleksandr Shchetynsky
the Dark Rift
We are pleased to present the final video in our series spotlighting the work of Michael Betancourt.
the Dark Rift is a 2 minute movie produced from a mixture of archival footage and a NASA video of the Moon rotating, synchronized with music by composer Dennis H. Miller, who also produces visual music animations. The title for this movie is a reference to Maya mythology. They believed the “Dark Rift,” a group of interstellar dust clouds that divide the bright band of the Milky Way galaxy lengthwise, and whose alignment with the Sun marks the winter solstice on Earth, was the road to the underworld. Moon imagery demonstrates this fantasy::reality dynamic throughout my work. The multiple windows and glitches appearing throughout this movie appear not as interruptions, but as shifts in resolution. It is only at the end when an astronomical photograph of the Dark Rift begins to appear ‘behind’ the Moon that these windows become physically present as layers of image—it is through the shifting relationship they have to the black areas on screen that they become physical. This change in perception is a shift between abstraction (the windows as glitched parts of the image) and realism (layers lying in front of a more distant background).
Dancing Glitch
As part of The Florida Review and Aquifer: TFR Online’s celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month and Latinx contributors, we are featuring three videos by multi-media artist, theorist, and historian Michael Betancourt. This week we present the second video in this series, Dancing Glitch. Betancourt’s work will also be featured in the upcoming fall print issue of The Florida Review.
Loie Fuller, the American choreographer and dancer, was an early inspiration for Cubist abstraction with her Serpentine Dance; her performance in Lumiere vue no. 76 (1896) provided the original source material for this visual music work.
The Kodak Moment
As part of The Florida Review and Aquifer: TFR Online’s celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month and Latinx contributors, we are featuring the work of multi-media artist, theorist, and historian Michael Betancourt. We will feature one video by Betancourt every week until October 15th, starting today with The Kodak Moment. Betancourt’s work will also be featured in the upcoming fall print issue of The Florida Review.
The silent film actress Mae Murray, known as the “girl with bee-stung lips,” appears in fancy dress, pouting and flirting with the audience. Hers is an archetypal image of white feminine beauty from the start of the twentieth century, a form that was already old when the source film was shot in 1922, here glitched and fragmented—yet remaining coherently recognizable throughout this movie. The music is from a vintage 1920 recording of inventor, visual music pioneer, and symphony piano soloist Mary Hallock-Greenewalt playing Chopin’s Nocturne in G Major.
Our Pool
Our Pool is about the space in-between. Digitizing my family’s VHS collection of home movies was an experience I don’t think I could forget (an experience ironically filled with moments I didn’t remember). Some of the tapes featured family members I had never met or only met once or twice. Others, like this short clip of my mother, father, and siblings in my grandparent’s pool, affectionately labeled “Our Pool,” brought back a swell of memories. One part haunting, another exhilarating; nostalgia meets revelation in the space between screen and memory: boy and girl: self and family.
Two Videos by Carl Knickerbocker
The Whole Speaks
An experimental documentary about a modern-day blacksmith and wordsmith, Nelms Creekmur. A text excerpt from his novel, NERBO (from the Italian meaning vigor) provides the backbone for the placement of the moving images, which were shot in his workshop in Atlanta.
Video by Caroline Rumley
Text by Nelms Creekmur
The Word of Several Million Years
Aquifer Now Accepting Film Submissions!
As Aquifer continues to expand its offerings into visual arts and new media, we are excited to announce a new call for submissions of film and video work!
We are looking for experimental works of film or video that are 15 minutes or less and utilize moving images as a means to poetic expression, formal exploration, or abstract and open-ended narratives. Compelling, personal works that push the boundaries of cinematic convention will also be considered for publication.
We recommend entries be works that have completed any intended festival screenings and do not have plans for future distribution, as they will be hosted on the Aquifer site and YouTube channel long term. Submit film or video works as Vimeo or YouTube links and include any passwords required for viewing. There are no requirements for year of completion or premiere status.
For more information please review the General Submissions guidelines. When ready, submit your film through our Submittable page for Short Film/Video.