Fall.Small.Pivot

Cassandra Tytler Australia/2026/5.04min
Filmed with members of Perth Roller Derby by attaching cameras to their bodies, Fall.Small.Pivot. transforms the roller rink into an abstract field of colour, motion and impact. The skaters’ movements blur and reform, shifting between velocity and suspension, contact and pause. The camera moves with the skaters, registering friction, balance and force as lived sensation rather than distant observation. Rather than presenting the sport as spectacle, the work draws attention to the physical intelligence of skating – falling, supporting, adapting in real time – as a study of interrelation and shared responsiveness. The result is a moving image experience that is felt as much as seen.

Marks/Marks

Jacob Tenzin Canet-Gibson, Harrison Waed See
Australia/2026/7.13min

MARKS/MARKS examines the relationship between the mark making of optical lens technologies (writing with light) and the mark making of painting within the context of digital technology and mass data.

The film maps the movement of Harrison Waed See in the studio painting to generate the tempo and trigger audio and visual effects. Similarly digital image sonification and digital data sonifcation of still and moving images of Harrison were used to generate further noise and visual effects.

Alongside this, the soundtrack also includes amplifcations of the sound of his movements and paint brush.

Serene Hues

Rita Tse Australia/2024/4.24min

Serene Hues, hand-processed, solarized, tinted, and toned, is a meditative journey into the tranquility and vibrant beauty of nature. The surprising and unexpected images created through process-driven filmmaking, which is improvisational and interactive, embody the wabi-sabi aesthetic of impermanence, incompleteness, and imperfection, emphasizing the creative process of producing the work.

explan/implant
Josh Weissbach USA/2022/3.16min

A lifetime of surgeries continues with an upgrade in battery life and a downgrade in scar tissue when the filmmaker has his original pacemaker replaced after sixteen years.

In the Heavenly Cutting Room Floor

Emma Penaz Eisner USA/2025/2.59min

A woman on her deathbed summons her creator, chastising him and demanding a justification for her life's trajectory, in this fusion of stop motion animation and dreamlike live action video.

Chew This

Delphyne Panther-Brutzkus USA/2025/1.39min

Influenced by Yoko Ono's 1964 performance art; "Cut Piece", Chew This! is an explosion of energy, anger, and spirit. Formatted short, fast, and sweet just like that of an angry spitfire punk song. This short explores topics of sexual exploitation, violence against female/femme bodies, as well as the voyeuristic lens we view them from. Breaking down a conflict of womanhood in terms of giving/taking/being taken from. Blink and you'll miss the show!

The 5th Floor

David Baeumler USA/2025/8.06min

The beauty of loss, decay, and transcendence

Merlin Horse

Patrick Anthony Tarrant Australia/2025/6min

Malcolm Le Grice's Berlin Horse (1970) is reimagined for a time of AI-enabled editing software and digital-analogue hybridity. Looping and phasing in Le Grice’s film are replaced with a concern for masking and speed. Digital masks created with the aid of AI facilitate solarised and colour-separated images before ultimately giving way to masks of latex resist applied frame by frame to lengths of 16mm film. It is the animated effect of these masks that produces the 24 beats per second necessary to keep up with Starfarer's music track, GoFast.

Ode (An Acknowledgement of Sea Country)

Kirsten Hudson Australia/2025/6.15min

ODE (An Acknowledgement of Sea Country) is a speculative cameraless animation created from handmade, biodegradable macroalgae celluloid. Developed through a research collaboration with scientists from CSIRO and the Indian Ocean Marine Research Centre in Western Australia, the work reimagines cinema as a sustainable, ocean-responsive process.

Over the course of twelve months, seaweed washed ashore Whadjuk Noongar Boodja was respectfully gathered and transformed into agar-based bioplastic film. Each frame was composed using both contact printing and botanicollage, layering native macroalgae into the substrate so that tides, pigments, and decay could inscribe themselves into the image over time. The film’s soundscape was generated through bio-sonification, recording the electrical activity of living seaweed via a plant-wave interface, allowing ocean flora to shape the sonic field from within.

Running for 365 seconds - one for each day of the year - ODE unfolds as a durational gesture toward deep, cyclical time. Part cinematic elegy, part ecological offering, it invites the viewer to encounter the more-than-human intelligence of the ocean. Experimenting with what cinema could be in a time of ecological crisis, ODE (An Acknowledgement of Sea Country) merges biodegradable film substrates, ocean science, and the sonic agency of seaweed into a cameraless form that gestures toward a post-petrochemical, more-than-human moving image.

In the Shadow of Small Acts

Cassandra Tytler Australia/2025/8.39min

In the Shadow of Small Acts is a video artwork that begins in the Jarrah Forest of Western Australia. At its centre is the polyphagous shot-hole borer, a tiny beetle whose movements destabilise entire ecosystems. The film draws parallels between this slow biological destruction and broader colonial systems of extractivism and control over land and people, including the ceremonial cutting down of a Jarrah tree to proclaim the British colony in 1829.

Rather than presenting history as a fixed record, the work unsettles and re-performs archival materials to expose how stories are constructed through fact, omission and fiction. It considers the Jarrah Forest not only as a site of ecological change but as a witness to layered histories of dispossession, industrial transformation and resistance. In exploring connections between small, cumulative acts and large-scale environmental change, the artwork asks viewers to consider their own place within these interdependent systems.

Contact the host of Experimental Showcase 1