Abstraction
I liked the Tim Hecker video the most and was also the most inspired by it. I liked his use of repeated cuts through the first 2/3rds of the video and then the film kind of "falling apart" in the last third, (color, a direct object and scene, and then it transforming into black and white and an "unfinished" feel. I also liked that the pendulum that was swinging back and forth was out of focus so that the viewer does not know what they are looking at right away. The use of the music in the film complemented the video so well that the song transformed along with the video over the course of the duration. The feel of the video was earie so that the viewer could not guess what was going to happen.
I also liked the Oskar Fischinger film about the wax pieces being dropped through a machine, I thought the subject of the video was very organic-looking and that you can't really go wrong with basic shapes. The film being in black and white was interesting because you could not guess what was happening without reading about it first and it felt more like a sculpture piece rather than a video.
I agree that Fischinger's experiments truly converge with sculpture—it's like some enormous kinetic sculpture apparatus just to generate those painstakingly tedious animations. As your viewing reference like these, be sure to always be on the look out for connections between histories and practices, and the ways in which the history of creative practice feeds into the next. Fischinger's experiments are a kind of stop-motion, not unlike Mack's lighthearted animations a century later. Ratte (the video artist who made the Hecker music video) is emphasizing a digital degradation process in the way that her imagery seems to dismantle and dissolve, similar to Brakhage's hand-made process of scratching and altering frames of a film, four decades prior.Digging into these connections and contrasts a bit further would open up more ideas for your own work. I'm looking forward to seeing if Ratte's style of color effects and sound synching shows up in your project!
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