Ruins and Resilience - Karel Doing

Programme

• Whirlwind (NL 1998, 9', 16mm)

  The origins of this film came from documents shot during the preparations and the executions of several collectives performances performed by the British group Loophole and the Dutch artist Karel Doing. Using frame by frame, long exposures and optical effects, these performances were manipulated and intensified. The essence of cinema, writing with light, is portrayed as a hallucination.

• Energy Energy (NL 1999, 7', 16mm)

  Progress revisited. Found-footage film, compiled from industrial, instructional and promotional films from the first half of the twentieth century, presenting progressive thought and technological developement. But did everything really go so well?

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  The Mulch Spider's Dream (GB 2018, 14', 16mm)

  Kindling the vision of a spider. What is it like to be a spider? A creature that lives in the same environment as we do and yet has an experience far removed from ours. The film evokes a non-human world through shape, colour and rhythm. The seemingly abstract images are made by using the internal chemistry of plants interacting with photographic emulsion, a type of image that I have called a "phytogram".

• A Perfect Storm (GB 2022, 3', 16mm)

  Oxfordshire landscape imprinted on the film's emulsion. A Perfect Storm is a landscape film or, more precisely, a landscape imprinted on the film's emulsion. The artist has used seeds, tiny composite flowers and other small elements of cultivated plants that grow in his garden and wild plant species gathered from a nearby nature reserve.

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  Babbler, Fairy and Thrush (GB 2022, 4', 16mm)

  An unfiltered stream of perception: small objects and grand panoramas appear simultaneously. The certainties of near and far, detail and overview, inside and outside are deliberately thrown into confusion. Aided by in-camera superimposition and travelling mattes, a near abstract experience is created. Sunlight filters through semi-transparent surfaces, while small holes and cracks allow the light to travel unrestrained.

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  Oxygen (GB 2023, 6', 16mm)

  Blades of grass racing across the screen.

• Agapanthus (GB 2024, 6', 16mm)

  A mosaic of organic forms that tumble on top of each other.

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  Liquidator (NL 2010, 8')

  A project making innovative use of existing archive images of Willy Mullens’ silent film Haarlem (1922). The original film shows the city in straightforward shots and camera movements. Due to deterioration these images changed in a dramatic way. In the adaption Karel Doing zooms in on these effects with the aid of digital techniques like optical flow and morphing. Michal Osowski collaborated on the project with sound that is directely linked to the image, he used the changes in density of the film to control complex filters and distortion effects.

• Wilderness Series (GB 2016, 14')

  By using plants, mud and salt in conjunction with alternative photochemistry, images are 'grown' on motion picture film. What in first instance is perceived as abstract turns out to be a concrete precipitation from phenomena that surround us in everyday life. The 'aliveness' of the images is underlined by Andrea Szigetvári's evocative sound-design.