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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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

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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).

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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 GlitchBetancourt’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.

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