Leiden International Short Film Festival, Jurist Award Best of the Northwest Film Festival, Portland, Seoul International New Media Festival, Montana Film Festival, Antimatter Film Festival, Victoria, Musée national des beaux-arts du Quebec.

This is a confluence of intent and a revisiting of an iconic animation by Norman McLaren - "Synchromy" 1971.

McLaren's "Synchomy"  is an early form of machine art, a formal modernist gesture revealing & reveling in the immediate transparency of code and signal, a chimerical fantasy of speculative references--prophetic futurism reading itself, speaking itself.

What I have done: reinterpreted and composited informed by the morphic quality of code, its slippage and variability, creating a highly saturated abstracted wave ocean horizon/sunrise pulsed imagistcally by the musical track.

 

One can propose that a date of global potentiality realized is that of the first satellite escapes of the outer atmosphere into synchronous orbit about the planet.  The "beep beep beep" of the release from the gravity of the earth harkened a globalization beyond the babble of tongues (of separate nationhood and identity) to the noosphere of our collective reference -- a radical "Synchomy" of aesthetics as bare meaning of meaning (understanding) in the perpetual now. +  furthering of Mclaren's interest in the inner visions, a referencing of  "the strobe attack", a flicker machine capable of spontaneously induce visions of "fabulously brilliant colors and patterns" (McLaren,"On the Creative Process"p. 42).

 

Clips composited

  1.  "Synchromy" McLaren (1971)
  2. "Devil Girls From Mars" (1954)
  3. Pudovkin's"Mechanic sof the Brain"(1926), a study of Pavlov's classical conditioning experiments
  4. Animation Sputnik launch (1957)

Contact VIVO for viewing, review, screenings: distribution@vivomediaarts.com

Film Scratches: Channeling Visions Through Machinery – Robot Pavlov Sputnik

Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays.

A Review by David Finkelstein.

Robot Pavlov Sputnik is a complex and gorgeous eight-minute animation by Oliver Hockenhull. The video derives inspiration (and a main layer of its imagery) from Norman McLaren’s 1971 film Synchromy, an early landmark experiment in simultaneously generating music and geometric animated forms electronically. Hockenhull combines McLaren’s film with a 1950s film about robots, a film about Pavlov, and animated versions of the Sputnik launch, as well as his own original footage. Lisa Walker’s beautiful score combines the tribal feeling of wooden flutes and percussion with sputtering, mysterious electronica.

The result is a deliciously rich and varied landscape of colors and forms, with stripes of soft pastel lavenders and blues, rich reds and yellows, and rapidly changing forms of rounded rectangles, circles, and floating spheres. At many times, the video has the look of a beautiful gouache painting on textured wood. At other times, it is if Klee and Kandinsky joined forces to animate their paintings at dizzying speed.

Hockenhull writes that he used data from the images and sounds of the McLaren film to generate some of the rhythms and colors in the film, and the robot, Sputnik, and Pavlov imagery all speak to the danger as well as the power of automated, machine-driven action. Synchromy was an attempt to electronically join sound and image in a simple way that was innovative for its time. In Hockenhull’s homage, sound and images influence each other in a much more sophisticated manner, using interwoven and strange loops. Machines become a device for channeling remarkable visions.

David Finkelstein is a filmmaker, musician, and critic. For more information on Film Scratches contact lakeivan@earthlink.net.