Marina Apollonio and Bottin, Endings: Nightclub (11 minutes, 22 seconds, 2025) 

Endings: Nightclub is a collaborative work by artist Marina Apollonio (Trieste, 1940), whose exploration of optical and kinetic art has been ongoing since the 1960s, and composer and sound artist Bottin (Guglielmo Bottin, Venice, 1977). Drawing inspiration from the hypnotic spiral movements that have long defined Apollonio’s practice — particularly her lacquered wood pieces, Fusione Circolare (2016) and Fusione Circolare Doppia (2019) — the video depicts a spinning vinyl record that embodies the dialogue between the two artists. The work captures the rhythmic expansion and contraction of black and white lines. Meanwhile, a fluorescent yellow turntable stylus, labelled Nightclub, traces the record groove from start to finish. As the record plays, Apollonio’s op-art is activated as a kinetic sculpture, its oscillations synchronizing with the music. Bottin's electromechanical composition pulsates eerily, like deconstructed techno music. It is entirely composed of locked grooves. Bottin explains: “The only sound you normally hear in the end groove is the crackling of the stylus on dust and scratches or the faint echo of the final track. Several audio clips of identical duration—1.33 seconds, the time it takes for the 12-inch disc to make one full rotation—were recorded from different records. Without adding any other sounds, these fragments of ‘media noise’ were filtered and composed as tesserae in a polyrhythmic mosaic — a layered arrangement of accumulations, subtractions, and sudden interruptions.” Visual and auditory perception converge here in a sonic-kinetic artwork where music gives way to silence.

 

Jon Cuyson, Wet Dreams (9 minutes, 24 seconds, 2024) 

Wet Dreams is a silent experimental film composed of fragmented, atmospheric sequences that move between abstraction and figuration. It constructs a porous visual field where bodies, water, and images dissolve into one another, resisting fixed narrative and stable identity. Working with original and archival materials, the film unfolds through gestures, textures, and durations that trace states of desire, displacement, and intimacy. Images emerge, repeat, and recede, forming a rhythm of drift and accumulation. At moments, fragments of maritime histories and contemporary tensions surface, only to dissolve back into a shifting, unstable field. Rather than following a linear structure, the work operates through sequencing and perception. The film becomes a sensorial environment where interior and exterior, body and landscape, remain in flux. 

 

Jennifer West, Stitched Cosmos Animations (thousands of glass astronomical negatives, JWST satellite astronomical images, glass shards, notebook drawings, tools and aperture cards transferred to 6k, musical score by Japanese band, Open Reel Ensemble) (5 minutes, 40 seconds, 2026) 

Stitched Cosmos Animations (scans hand-transferred to 6k, sound) comprises thousands of still images Jennifer West photographed on site at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, including glass astronomical negatives, scientific notations and drawings made by the Harvard Astronomical Computers, aperture cards, and fragments of damaged plates. By re-photographing and filming their surfaces, she translates these time-worn images into a moving image work, reactivating them and dispersing their latent energy into a kaleidoscopic field of proliferating fragments.  Linking the work and discoveries of the Harvard Astronomical Computers to contemporary images produced by the James Webb Space Telescope, the film brings together more than a century of astronomical observation while reflecting on the transition from analog to digital image production. Accompanied by an original musical score by the Japanese band Open Reel Ensemble, West reanimates these archival materials and pays tribute to forms of female labor that have long gone unrecognized within science and across other domains of human culture. West created this piece in conjunction with her exhibition, Stitched Cosmos (Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, May-July 20206), curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi. She conducted related research with the support of a 2025-2026 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship and University of Southern California’s Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences Research and Creative Project Grant. 

 

Jennifer West, Selected Films (2008-2017):

Rainbow Party on 70mm Film (70mm film leader kissed with lipstick & impressed with teeth marks by Jwest,  Mariah Csepanyi, Maggie Romano & Roxana Eslemiah) (39 seconds, 70mm, 2008)

Film transferred to digital video.

 

Lavender Mist Film/Pollock Film 1 (70mm film leader rubbed with Jimson Weed Trumpet flowers, spraypainted, dripped and splattered with nail polish, sprayed with lavender mist air freshener) (46 seconds, 70mm, 2009) 

Film transferred to digital video.  In LACMA/Yuz Collection.

 

I ♥ Neutrinos: You Cant See Them but They are Everywhere (70mm Film Frames of Neutrino Movements - shot in 15 ft Bubble Chamber at Fermilab, Experiment 564 in Chicago - dunked in liquid nitrogen, neutrino movements outlined with invisible ink and decoder markers and highlighters, inked up by Monica Kogler and Jwest, filmstrip from Janet Conrad, MIT Professor of Physics) (37 seconds, 2011)

Roll of specialized film for scientific use of 1,000 Images hand-transferred to high-definition digital video. Commissioned by MIT's List Visual Art Center, funded in part by the Nimoy Foundation.

 

Salt Crystals Spiral Jetty Dead Sea Five Year Film (70mm film negative floated in the Dead Sea and given a healing clay bath in extreme heat in 2008 - stuffed in a suitcase, placed in studio buckets, covered in clay and salt for five years - dragged along the salt encrusted rocks of the Spiral Jetty and thrown in the pink waters in 2013 in below 10 degree weather - Dead Sea floating and mud baths by Mark Titchner, Karen Russo and Jwest - Spiral Jetty dragging and rolling by Aaron Moulton, Ignacio Uriarte and Jwest - DIY telecine frame by frame of salt covered film by Chris Hanke) (54 seconds, 2013)

70mm film negative hand-transferred to high-definition digital video, remastered to 35mm optical print in 2024.  In LACMA/Yuz Collection.

 

Pink Beach Red Desert Dream Sand Film (35mm film print featuring the dream sequence from Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, Red Desert, found on Russian Ebay - taken to the Pink Beach on Budelli Island off the coast of Sardinia, Italy where the film was shot in the early 1960s and dragged along the pink sand beach cove sand, rocks and bushes – sand covered film hand-transferred frame by frame) (3 minutes, 21 seconds, 2017)

35mm film print hand-transferred to high-definition digital video with sound. Commissioned in part by MAN Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro, Sardinia, Italy.