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 (5 minutes, 40 seconds, musical score by Open Reel Ensemble, 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.