Fluxfilm No. 21

Sitting on a promenade in nice with a sign: Watch me, that’s all.

"Single Frame sequences of TV or film images, with periodic distortions of the image. The images are airplanes, women men interspersed with pictures of texts like: 'silence, genius at work' and 'ich liebe dich.' The end credit is 'Television décollage, Cologne, 1963."

Swimming across Nice harbour fully clothed. Ben swims across a bay in Nice.

In an endless loop, unexposed film runs through the projector. The resulting projected image shows a surface illuminated by a bright light, occasionally altered by the appearance of scratches and dust particles in the surface of the damaged film material. This a film which depicts only its own material qualities; An "anti-film", meant to encourage viewers to focus on the lack of concrete images.

Each film frame is a different image from the Sears Roebuck mail order catalogue. The film places pictures of the objects sold by Sears to the consumer society side by side with pictures of female models

Single frame exposures of dot-screens.

Various gestures of hand held razorblade, single frame exposures.

"INVOCATION is Higgins' Satie movie... the purest attempt to clear art from any or all historical, esthetic, thematic, ornamental claptrap to regain the lost-eye consciousness." - Jonas Mekas

Word & number gag, no camera.

A smile gradually fades into a neutral facial expression.

Flicker: White and black alternating frames.

Time counter, in seconds and minutes.

Prestype on clear film measuring tape, 10ft. length. No camera. At the end of every foot of film numbers appear, 1, 2, etc to 10

Numerals on clear film from 1 to 1000."

A 16 mm film, featuring Yoko Ono's own eye slowly blinking, shot by Peter Moore with a high-speed camera at 2,000 frames per second, which is projected at normal speed, 24 frames per second, thus creating a slow-motion effect.

Features entrance and exit door signs, fading through black and white.

Begins with a picture of Marilyn Monroe, then shifts to a female body, shot from belly button down, which is wriggling under piles of cellophane.

Begins with a shot of a demarcation line on an asphalt tennis court. A hand points to the distant landscape, then numbers 408 and 409 appear on a female torso.

X-ray sequence of mouth and throat; eating, salivating, speaking.

Collected as part of the Fluxfilm Anthology (a multi-reel compendium of 37 short films assembled by Fluxus founder and central operator George Maciunas), One captures the lifespan of a single match recorded at 2,000 frames per second using a 16mm high-speed camera. The frame rate is then decelerated to the standard 24fps for presentation. The film emphasizes each gesture, sway and flare of flame as the small pinewood carrier ignites across the landscape of the filmstrip and screen, signalling the drama and poetics of this ”minor” event before the fire is extinguished. One also stands as an unassuming beacon, immortalizing on film the essence of some of Ono’s early concerns as an artist. At the slightest touch of fire, they burst into flame. Strike everywhere. Strike often.

This film consists entirely of close ups of famous persons' bottoms. Ono meant it to encourage a dialogue for world peace.

A handful of rocks and chestnuts falling, filmed with high speed camera.

Shot at 2,000 frames per second, this short shows a man exhaling smoke in incredibly slow motion.

Single frame exposures, color. Different image each frame, various items in the room, etc.

Artype patterns, intended for loops. Benday dot patterns. Dots, lines. Screens, wavy lines, parallel lines, etc. on clear film. No camera.

Close-ups of two faces, shouting at each other.

Color test strip from developing tank.

Following a series of title cards, a man in sunglasses briefly flutters his hands like fairy. Owen Land states that this film was not made by George Landow, and believes it should be credited to John Cavanaugh. "George Maciunas had a number of films which didn’t have titles on them. Then he put them together into his Fluxus reel and tried to remember who made them. It was an intentional Fluxus joke." (Owen Land, interview with Mark Webber, 2004)

Single frame exposures of words.

"Face Smiling. Hammering a brick. CU of an ear (moving?). Face twitching. Dancing on one leg. Rolls, twitches on the floor. Boxes the wall."

Cale makes a short film called Police Car. No sound, and it is in black & white. Part #31 in the Fluxus Film series.

Seeing, Hearing, Saying Nothing. Ben stands with ears, eyes, mouth bandaged.

Lifting and holding up a chest of drawers.

Tips of feet walking at the edge of frame, all around the frame.

Face going out of focus by layering sheets of plastic between camera and subject.

In 1967, Knowles, a Fluxus artist, composed one of the first computerized poems, written in Fortran code, with randomly assembled verses. (An example: “A house of steel / Among high mountains / Using candles / Inhabited by people who sleep almost all the time.”) This significant, jam-packed exhibition revives Knowles’s poem on an old-school dot-matrix printer, and includes related ephemera, including a film by Allan Kaprow. The show also highlights forebears of Knowles’s aleatory composition, with a never-completed book by Mallarmé whose pages could be reordered at will, as well as Marcel Broodthaer’s 1969 homage to it. There are also successors: Nicholas Knight’s intricate paintings of overlapping colored curves were generated by an algorithm, and Katarzyna Krakowiak’s audio piece remixes Knowles’s original poem into skittering musique concrète.