Awesome Experimental

At first glance, we thought these were costumed dancers, but these straw men are machines. Artist U-ram Choe’s Round Table is a kinetic sculpture featuring 18 headless characters supporting table on their backs. Its mechanisms are programmed to keep a rubber band “head” from rolling off the table. The piece was displayed at the MMCA Seoul in 2022.

Motion designer Hideki Inaba’s soothing and hypnotic short film FLOW is a tribute to the ever-changing nature of things. Every frame of the animation could be viewed as an individual painting, as colorful organic forms evolve, disintegrate, and coalesce into new patterns.

Machine learning tech has enabled some truly imaginative imagery. Artist Vadim Epstein helped create a set of ML text-to-video tools that generated this landscape of pseudo-realistic organic forms incorporating veins, bones, and plants. Best enjoyed in full screen with headphones on. Soundtrack by Dvar.

Diatomic studio created and directed this compelling black-and-white short film which uses basic geometric shapes to create hypnotic visuals. By combining, rotating, moving, and scaling the individual objects, hypnotic patterns come to life. Watch it once from a distance, then watch it again, focusing on an specific point.

ChatGPT and other AI tech have been in the news a lot these days. This fascinating short film from Private Island explores the implications of trusting artificial intelligence to solve problems for us. After tasking ChatGPT with improving diversity in the workplace, we’re exposed to some disturbing biases in the AI’s training data.

Derealisation is a psychological condition that can cause individuals to feel disconnected and distant and may result in a distorted perception of the world around them. This trippy short film by Panoply attempts to capture that sense through a surreal sequence of images that play out in photorealistic environments.

Artist Roman De Giuli created this fascinating experimental short film by dropping metallic paints and inks into a fishtank. Using 4-axis motion control and zooming in to 5x magnification, he captured the ethereal imagery. It looks even more impressive if you have a display with HDR support.

This experimental animated film takes us deep into a web of humans and technology. The surreal effect was created by artist ThomasDotCodes with the help of VQGAN-CLIP – a natural language image generation toolkit. Watch in 1080p or higher in full-screen mode for maximum impact. Then, go deeper into the Matrix.

Filmmaker Thomas Blanchard is back with another experimental film of fluids interacting. He created the hypnotic scenes by mixing paint, oil, and liquid soap, swirled together in a circular motion. The crisp and colorful macro footage is accompanied by a smooth an ethereal soundtrack by Alexis Dehimi.

Art meets science in Vadim Epstein’s trippy digital compositions. Ghosts is an experimental short film that explores complexity emergence from AI feedback loops. It makes use of the StarGAN2 neural network to morph between machine-generated images. Sound by Alexander Kopeikin and Fractal Heads.

Every trick a skateboarder ever landed required at least some degree of practice and persistence. Director Najeeb Tarazi offers up an “ode to effort” with this experimental short that takes footage of skateboarders failing and composites it with their successes. Filmed by Dennis Ludwig, Ryan Neddeau, and Frankie Eder.

This experimental video from Donato Sansone aka milkyeyes answers two questions none of us ever asked: 1) What would a human look like if it had a bird for a head, and 2) What would a bird look like with a human face on its body? And the answer for both is the same: weird as hell.

This experimental short film from Pixar effects artists and director Krzysztof Rost is quite the departure from their story- and character-driven productions. Instead, we’re presented with a wordless world to bear witness to nature’s fury. We’d love to see a crisp 4K version, as YouTube’s compression algorithm destroys the detail.

Motion designer Simon Grabowski created this CG sequence of five very different environments, each of which has one thing in common – they’ve been constrained to a small square box. We loved watching these tiny animated worlds emerge and how they each convey a very different sense of place through scale and texture.

Could you use a vacation? Perhaps a trip to Convergence Station is in order. But when we say “a trip” we mean, like on acid. Andreas Nilsson’s short starts out as a retro travel promo but quickly descends into madness as its true destination is revealed. All aboard!

Filmmaker, skier, and animator Sämi Ortlieb combined his passions to create this unconventional take on a ski action film. Through the use of stop-motion techniques, its skiers traverse obstacles that didn’t exist a split-second before they arrived at them.

Hong Kong is loaded with tall and colorful apartment buildings like the ones we saw in The Block Tower. Artist Max Hattler created this experimental animation by taking thousands of individual building photos and sequencing them to create vertical and horizontal movements.

This experimental short film used artificial intelligence technology to stitch together action footage by the STORROR parkour team. The custom-written software identified similarities in their maneuvers and body positions, then manipulated and overlayed the imagery from various locations they’ve visited around the world.

Filmmakers Ryo Kitabatake and Takuma Sasaki created this experimental short film about the everyday pressures that weigh on all of us. The tentacled mass that tugs at our protagonist is boldly symbolic of the complex and intertwined nature of modern life’s responsibilities. Music and sound design by Max Cooper.

Photographer Christopher Dormoy created this hypnotic and indescribable montage of macro imagery using a combination of ice, oil, paint, soap, and flowers. Blow it up to full screen, and you’ll feel like the temperature in your room dropped by 30 degrees by the time you’re done watching.

This eclectic comedy series is made from public domain films, recut by indie filmmakers to amuse and tell new stories. Each episode features dialogue dubbed by actors and comedians, including Nick Offerman, Nicole Byer, Aubrey Plaza, Fred Armisen, Alison Brie, and more. The full season is available now on Showtime.

2001: A Space Odyssey evokes quite the sense of isolation as HAL 9000 picks off the Discovery One’s crew, then Dave Bowman has a quiet, hallucinogenic trip. Filmmaker Lydia Cambron’s dark parody explores the parallels between Kubrick’s universe and the one we’ve been living in since the pandemic started in 2020.

Filmmaker Yiannis Biliris and Visual Suspect offer a trippy new perspective on the world. By digitally manipulating footage of automotive traffic into complex repeating patterns, they visualize “the arteries and veins” of an imagined mega-metropolis.