Anti-Cosmos

Takashi Makino’s source of inspiration, our place in the world and the universe, never seems to dry up in view of the never-ending flow of immersive films. Generator may well be the earthiest of his films so far, made as a reaction to the Fukushima disaster. A reality check, but in the world that Makino shows, this can never be achieved without looking inwards too.

Under the name Nivhek, Liz Harris (Grouper) maps richly detailed inner worlds where enigmatic vibrations and voices glide dimly in and out of the void. Double album After its own death / Walking in a spiral towards the house consists of opaque assemblages of Mellotron, guitar, field recordings, tapes, and broken FX pedals. In pacing, palette, and poignancy, these sides rank among Harris' most stark, primordial work: fragile, feverish, ominous, and otherworldly. Accompanied by visuals from experimental filmmaker Takashi Makino which were made exclusively for live shows of this album.

A live performance film capturing an intimate concert by composer, pianist and music producer Ryuichi Sakamoto in New York City. The performance marked the first public unveiling of Sakamoto’s new opus, async, hailed as one of the best albums of 2017 by Rolling Stone and Pitchfork.

Shadow presences gradually emerge in Japanese filmmaker Makino Takashi’s abstract cinema composed of layers upon layers of natural imagery that awaken the senses.

“The rain” and “white noise” , “the outside of water” , “the inside of water” , everything become to together and drifting. A dark dark film in rain forest inspired by a music term to “Tranquil”.

Short film by Takashi Makino

Filmed entirely on location in Australia, Double Phase follows a discrete visual chronology captured by Takashi Makino. It considers how the complexity of ’natural world’ continues to be reductively framed within contemporary society. Pushing back against the simplistic and monocular sensing of the world, Makino responds with an intensely affective projection of lived experience. Moving far beyond the capacity of lived day to day experience, the film collides image after image into a cascade of almost-cosmic complexity. A reminder that we must always be reaching out and extending ourselves into the world that emerges before us. (Asia TOPA 2020)

An experimental film by Takashi Makino.

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?

Deorbit, the first collaboration between Makino Takashi and Telcosystems, takes viewers on a voyage from the immeasurable depths of space, visible only as pixels, to micro-space, the celluloid grain itself.

[Space Noise] is a performance in which the double 25 FPS award winner confronts high-resolution video images and 16mm live projection. A duel between the all-dominant immaculate digital and the irregular organic material dissolves in multiple layers of chaos. Enormous quantities of light movements from film loops capture the screen in thousands of pixels of digital projection and create new images in constant change and enhancement. The sound accompanying them live only repeats and spreads the noise, developing images by whirling speed. Noise, located on the tape as a constituent part of the film, becomes the aim of Makino’s quest – Noise-Image. This quest for a new film experience intensifies with additional effects – a smoke curtain reveals the fullness of the light beams’ rainbow spectrum, while a neutral single-eye ND filter creates a three-dimensional illusion.

Experimental film by Takashi Makino

first foray into found-footage filmmaking where human shadows emerge from the dust and scratches accumulated on the filmstrip

A presentation of an expanding formation of "Elements of Nothing". The systematic harsh noise shaped by water and trees gives birth to a storm of novel imagination in the viewer's emotions.

The four elements referred to as "water", "flame", "wind" and "earth" in this film all exist individually while responding to each other, by fighting and loving each other, foster the concept of a world in each individual's "subjectivity".

This work is based on long-exposure still photographs of everyday scenes taken between 2025 and 2026. While there is no video, the accumulation of light transforms into an intense flicker that seems to break through the retina, compressing the sense of time and inducing hallucinations.