A series of spatial limits are defined while a maker imbibes. Interdependence is inherited after a substance cannot be shook. An animal carefully guards an outlined space as a river runs backwards.

Through the visual manipulations of filmstrips, this film explores presence and absence, light and shadow. Photograms are created onto 16mm film, using various false eyelashes, artificial hair, and other textural objects. Brief bursts of light and patterns of intertwining lines create distinct rhythms, which evoke a blinking eye.

In the tradition of the fantastic panoramas of satirist Jonathan Swift or painter Hieronymus Bosch, this video landscape is colonized by a breed of busy clones whose powers of self-generation—and the digital clouds that populate its atmosphere—cannot spare them from the void. Conceived, performed, edited, and with painted landscapes by Peter Sparling, the bizarre fantasy is propelled towards oblivion by the music of Frank Pahl.

The filmmaker from Austria and the dancer from Dakar communicate with one another through their respective media. The black and white 16mm material was shot in Senegal in 2014, at the peanut factory “once famous” according to Gröller. The energetic performance of the dancer took place in her courtyard. The film ends when the dance is over.

North of Eden retraces the experiences of a German teenager on a remote potato farm in the Idaho desert 27 years ago. The film combines photography, poetry and interview excerpt s to investigate the experience of otherness and perception of foreigners in a remote rural community in the American Northwest. North of Eden also explores historical roots that shaped present-day attitudes.

Re-vue is a mutilated love letter to the film’s form in address to the the act of seeing itself. It is shaped as a response to, and in dialogue with, Mike Hoolboom’s 2017 film Color My World. A flicker fest lamenting a lost relationship with narrative cinema, by which it is forever marked.

Through an innovative and unexpected approach to 16mm frame-by-frame cinematography, Pelletier offers a deconstructed and introspective view of portraiture. Idle faces come in and out of existence through a dance of light and texture, toying with our perceptual need to project our own image onto the abstract. Reminiscent of a meditative state, the concept of self can be fleeting.

The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau: Sunken Treasure (1969) is the historical scaffolding of departure for this film, an amalgam of ships’ logs from the deep sea and deep space. Piloting a boat into the void of a subterranean water cave in Central Europe or sinking deep under the Adriatic Sea in scuba gear, the camera sees as if for the first time. Images become untethered from time or geography as a narrator guides us in a journey of exploration that circles back to our own desire for the search.