Exploring the conscious, the unconscious and the self, By Winds and Tides takes a deep experimental dive into the birth of an idea—how it takes shape, how it is released. An allegorical quest, the film combines images and words into a singular sigh.
Designed for continuous single or multiple monitor display (as well as video projection), the tape is a collection of computer animated sequences of celestial images spanning time and cultures, moving objects and images in harmonic choreography and spatial play.
A psychedelic animation that starts with an irregular ink spread and develops while increasing the degree of confusion.
Surreal environments take center stage in this visual odyssey.
Short film made using cardboard cutouts of a classic Western scene
A strange wire-fingered homunculus navigates through his dreams of different faces and faces, traversing a subliminal and endless variety. They are all different faces, but all have huge eyes that are questioned as to what keeps them apart, perhaps left broken by an impossible love.
African American Express is an abstract animation exploring the impact of consumerism in the Black community. Told in the style of Soviet Propaganda, this animated short dissects the pattern of excessive materialism and consumption prevalent within the Black population.
An underground fight is taking place in a painter's studio between the artist and the ten tyrants.
Cut up animation and collage technique by Harry Smith synchronized to the jazz of Thelonious Monk's Mysterioso.
A washed up actor performs night after night in a grimy theater to a nearly empty audience. However, everything changes when a clueless dog jumps on stage.
This is a didactic film in disguise. A progression of brilliant geometric shapes bombard the screen to the insistent beat of drums. The filmmaker programmed a computer to coordinate a highly complex operation involving an electronic beam of light, colour filters and a camera. This animation film, without words, is designed to expose the power of the cinematic medium, and to illustrate the abstract nature of time.
A time-lapse animated meditation on geothermal energy, erosion, seismic activity and magma. Shot above the Yellowstone Caldera and amongst the Bryce Canyon hoodoos, the film explores how they connect these past cataclysms to the present endangered environment within the sixth mass extinction and future threats to an ecosystem already in collapse. The musical accompaniment, composed and performed by Pauline Kim Harris, is based on a reimagining of the Chaconne from the Partita No.2 in D minor (BWV 1004) by Johann Sebastian Bach.
In 2017, a short anime film called Hypersonic Music Club was produced in Japan. It was directed and written by Osamu Kobayashi, a veteran of the industry who passed away in April 2021. For various reasons, this short anime was never released. It was made public on August 1, 2023.
For the multimedia exhibition Tangenten I (Tangents I), Dammbeck and co-organizer, sculptor and painter Frieder Heinze had planned to collaborate on a film that would combine non-camera animation with 35mm footage of a train ride between the two Dresden districts of Radebeul and Pieschen. When the exhibition was banned in 1978, Heinze turned to other projects, but Dammbeck continued working on the film by himself. Metamorphoses I—the first experimental film ever to be shown publicly in East Germany—marks the filmic beginning of Dammbeck’s long-term art project the Herakles-Konzept (Hercules Concept).
Creating a universe between two small pieces of Cardboard. When Jack and Jill of Cardboard City are separated by Jill's torrid illness, Jack must think outside the box to assure they will be together again.
Filmed on 16mm film, this visual expression is rooted in its archival materials and backed up by the poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. It speaks of the forgotten people, their lives and their deeds. These two Archives have been found on the flea market in Zagreb. One is of a famous architect and the other one is of a famous composer. This film ponders on this occurrence, on the vanishing of and forgetfulness of humans.