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Yoan Capote Open Mind, 2008
“Open Mind” is a project to build an underground park made with walls, constructing a labyrinth similar to the human brain. People become metaphors for neurons transmitting information as they walk around the maze.

 

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Yeo Shih Yun Mind Ink Painting Machine V2.0, 2020
In her work titled “Mind Ink Painting Machine,” Yeo transforms the electrical impulses in her brain into compelling, abstract video art. Visually stimulating, the 17-minute piece showcases particles which are reminiscent of brush strokes coalescing with each other and then breaking apart, almost like crashing waves. An immersive and seemingly eerie electronic track lingers in the background. The ambient track, as it turns out, was composed by a close friend of Yeo’s, Andy Yang, a musician and artist, using the Chapman Stick, an electrical music instrument with 10 to 12 individually tuned strings that was devised in the early ’70s by jazz musician Emmet Chapman. The development of Yeo’s work involves two parts. She began with the development of the “ink” in the video, which requires a total of 100,000 particles to appear as a smooth, fluid simulation. She then used the EEG sensors to translate the human brainwaves and converted them into data for the ink painting. The raw data was processed in TouchDesigner, software for visual programming, and used to control the data stream for the simulation. Subsequently, the data from the simulation was passed into an Open Graphics Library which rendered the network to create the final digital ink paintings.

 

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Olga Chernysheva Waiting for a Miracle, 2000
Printed large in glorious colour is a row of photographs of Russian women wearing bobble hats. There’s a fuzzy red one, a woolly brown one, one with red stripes against black and another with raised white stripes. Seen from behind, these hand-knitted globes look like a newly discovered breed of sea anemone or a display of exotic cacti.

 

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Don Cain Mens Amplio, 2013
In Oakland, California, a group of artists are building a massive, interactive brain sculpture that’s meant to be controlled by only one thing: an actual brain. The sculpture, titled Mens Amplio — Latin for “expanding the mind” — is going to be 15 feet tall and will be able to glow, flash colors and patterns, and even shoot out fire. The brain is being constructed from twirling metal tubes and LEDs, and will be housed inside of a large wireframe head. The plan is to showcase the Mens Amplio at different events, allowing spectators to control the brain by wearing an attached EEG headset, which measures electrical fluctuations on the skull as a way of indirectly detecting brain activity.

 

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Yaron Steinberg the brain/city project, 2011
Steinberg has created a giant sculpture of his brain, as he imagines it to be: “It is basically a city inside my brain that has all this different neighborhoods working together to form the city as one thing. I tried to create a platform for me to describe my inner world. It is an object used as a personal diary, an arena were events and worlds are working in symbiosis with one another and form a texture of life”, he says. The sculpture is made out of cardboxes he found in the streets, it is 1,40m high and 1,60m long and contains an electric train, a tape recorder and Christmas lights.

 

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Jan Fabre The Artist Who Tries to Drive His Own Brain Forward, 2007
Silicone, textiles, oak and paint.

 

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Christoph Keller Hypnosis Film Project, 2007
In 2006 Keller began assembling an archive of hypnosis scenes from the history of cinema. A striking number of films contain hypnosis scenes and in most of these scenes, the directors do not resist the temptation of wanting to hypnotise the audience along with the actor as it were. For Hypnosis Film Project (2007), Keller compiled an 18-minute cinematic hypnosis session from sequences extricated from their original plots and are narrowed down to their pure hypnotic principles.

Watch the film here

 

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Jeromina Juan gory brain cap, 2011
I know, I know, another caulking project from me?! I couldn’t resist, especially because it was so easy to turn a regular fitted ball cap into a bloody brain with my caulking gun. It’s best to study pictures of the human brain before tackling this project in order to best mimic the brain’s convolution patterns when caulking the cap.

 

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Jonathan Lasker BRAIN, ANTI-BRAIN, 1987
oil on canvas

 

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Olaf Mooij Braincar, 2011
‘braincar’ is a mobile sculpture created by rotterdam artist olaf mooij, featuring a large brain-like extrusion on the back of a modified used car. by day, the vehicle captures and stores images and video from its travels. by night, this footage is remixed, projected from within the brain sculpture and visible from the outside.

 

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Ursula Damm Chromatographic Ballads, 2013
Chromatographic Orchestra is an artistic installation which allows a visitor to direct a software framework with an EEG device. In an exhibition environment with semi-transparent video screens a visitor is sitting in an armchair and learns to navigate unconsciously – with his/her brain waves the parameter space of our software – Neurovision. Neurovision interacts with live video footage of the location of the exhibition and its surroundings. By navigating with his/her own brain waves the visitor can define and navigate the degree of abstraction of a generative (machine learning) algorithm, performed on the footage of different, nearby video cameras.

 

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Katharina Fritsch Brain, 1989
plaster

 

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Isa Genzken Mein Gehirn (My Brain), 1984
synthetic polymer paint on plaster, metal

 

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Johan Deckmann The Hypnosis (Record Version), 2016
Johan explained that his psychological practice has great influence on his art. It not only serves as a tremendous inspiration for the content of his works but also as a constant reminder of personal responsibility. “I meet many people who suffer from a circumstance that they themselves have created but they choose not to take action,” he added. “I think it’s tragicomic that underneath our frustration and self-slavery lies this beautiful opportunity.”‘

 

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Guy Viner Axl Rose and Girlfriend Kissing Under X-Ray, 2008
Viner used a CT scan and X-ray machine to photograph the rock star couple.

 

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Ron English Glass Jaw, 2021
From the mind of Ron English emerges his latest twist on reality! Weighing in at a whopping 8 lbs, standing tall at 11 inches, cast from realistically colored solid high impact resin, for the first time in the world, see a full-size brain cast inside of a perfectly recreated boxing glove… The Glass Jaw!

 

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Marvin Gaye Chetwynd Brain Bug, 2014
As the name suggests, at least part of the shape resembles a giant brain or possibly the end of a penis. And it’s main facial features bear quite a lot of resemblance to genitalia; it has quite an obscene orifice. It actually looks a lot more obscene in its source, which is the film Starship Troopers. I’ve seen the relevant scenes on YouTube and the Brain Bug is this denizen of another planet that has telepathic powers and whose sustenance is essentially the brain of others, particularly it seems unsuspecting human visitors to this planet. And the Brain Bug has a host of bug like warriors and is very much like the queen bee in a bee colony you know so everybody depends on but also protects this big thing. In terms of a sculpture its framework is almost like a rudimentary tent. The original in the sci-fi film is very slimy and visceral, while this is made out of, I guess, cotton sheets and canvas and stuffing. It’s very improvised, like all of Marvin’s sculptures and props and installations, and quite painterly, harking back to her training as a painter.

 

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John Baldessari Brain/Cloud with Palm Tree, 2019
A recurrent motif throughout his practice, a cloud was first depicted in the painting God Nose, 1965, in which the artist juxtaposed an image of the sky with an abstracted human body part. The use of isolating body parts became a continuous theme within Baldessari’s practice. Brain/Cloud takes this one step further, directly comparing the shape of the human brain to that of a cloud, exemplifying Baldessari’s proposition that unembodied physical features become newly strange, abstract, and morph into other things.

 

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Anatoliy Kharkhurin/Tovy Harhur What the brain!, 2017
This video collage entertains the idea of vanity of scientific inquiry. The voice in the background lectures about the structure and functioning of the brain. The lecture is accompanied by images of the living brain and brain parts diagrams, which together represent the ‘scientific’ approach to human psyche. These images are juxtaposed with video clips of Leize Jenius artists’ performances representing potential (and rather unpredictable) content of the psyche.

 

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Ilya Filatov Fucking Brain, 2014
We are our brain. Consumption of endless information, scrolling tapes, causes “cheap dopamine”. Due to the abundance of information in our environment, the brain meets its needs, spending less and less neural connections in the cortex. Endless orgasm and pleasure. We lose the ability to think.

 

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Pierre Huyghe Of Ideal, 2019
They’ve been described as the stuff of nightmares but Pierre Huyghe’s Mental Image works are derived from the thoughts of waking subjects. Participants were asked to look at pictures or conjure thoughts of life forms, prehistoric tools, machines, artworks and other entities while their brains were scanned by a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine at Kyoto University’s Kamitani Lab. These scans were then fed to a neural network, computer software that interpreted them by comparing them to a database of pictures taken in the real world. The rapid sequence of amorphous images, reminiscent of foetal fauna or sprouting flora, that Huyghe exhibits are amalgams of the images the neural network sifts through as it attempts to match the visual information from the brain scans.

 

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Christopher Wool Maggie’s Brain, 1995
In Maggie’s Brain, the aluminum support is silkscreened, overpainted with white, silkscreened a second time, and then topped with an explosive, floral-like spray in the center. Multiple references—from the allover compositions of Abstract Expressionism to the cool, silkscreened surfaces of Pop Art—reflect Wool’s engagement with the history of painting.

 

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Jinah Roh Mater Ex Machina, 2019
Media artist Jinah Roh’s Mater Ex Machina (2019) travels into the realms of the brain and its power and its interface with human culture via a creepy robot (a green-eyed bald head with puttylike skin on top of an armour-plated, female-breasted metal torso; limbs absent) that looks like the stuff of nightmares.

 

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Various Horror’s Brains, ?

 

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Anne Lindberg Old Brain, 2005
Thread, 650 pounds, 28′ x 5′ x 8″

 

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Eva Lee and Aaron Trocola Dual Brains, 2018
“Dual Brains” is an OpenBCI real-time brain data-driven performance, conceived for Art-A-Hack collaboration and led by Eva Lee. Inspired by neuroscientific research which indicates that human brains are fundamentally hard wired for empathy, especially under conditions of duress. The performers’ brain data is visually presented while they focus their minds on emotionally charged memories, first without physical contact and then while holding hands. Sound created from EEG and ECG data. Performance duration, 3 minutes.

 

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Hannah Hallam-Eames Spilled brains / synthetic circuits, 2016
I once watched this bizarre TED talk where a surgeon was attempting to perform a head transplant. It was very Frankenstein. In my mind, I pictured brains spilling out of the patient’s head like spaghetti. I thought about how then, as though cybernetic, the soft matter would be mashed together with electrical wires then fused together to allow the body’s circuit board to function. I thought about the clunkiness of motherboards on computers and how they operate much like bodies do.

Eames melted these pieces of plastic and mixed their contents together by hand. The plastic orbs were attached to a beam on the ceiling and moved in a clockwise direction through a motor. These kinds of motorised sculptures can be temperamental and often come together through a process of trial and error with the outcome often being a surprise to the artist. Yet this particular work seems to represent the illogical nature of power structures, which have somehow been deemed ‘logical’.

 

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Jean-Michel Rolland BRAIN MUSIC, 2017
The raw data of a Neurosky Mindwave EEG is used here to play generative music. Incoming raw data from the EEG is divided into 512 samples covering brain waves from 1 to 50Hz. These 512 samples trigger piano notes when their values are beyond the decided limit. As the performer enters into meditation, his brain waves cool down and thereby, he’s able to increase their amplification. The musical score and its rhythm are certainly depending on his mood and on the environment, but the performer’s real challenge is to focus his mind entirely on the registered sounds, in order to enter into a closed musical loop where his brain waves – translated into sound waves – become the reflection of the registered notes and so on.

 

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Raymond Pettibon Two drawings, 2013

 

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Roger Hiorns Untitled, 2011
Roger Hiorns’ wall sculptures consist of metal racks acting as receptacles for dark-brown bricks that turn out to be bovine brain matter. It has been rendered down, freeze-dried, injected with chemicals. Hiorns is interested in brain matter, mainly because of its incomprehensible structure. The fact that human beings try to fathom the structure of the brain, with their own brain, is a paradox. Hiorns visits the cows at the abattoir and talks to them immediately before they are killed. This way, through their memory of the meeting, Hiorns becomes encapsulated in the structure of their brain.

 

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Refik Anadol Melting Memories, 2018
Media artist Refik Anadol’s work Melting Memories combines data paintings, light projections, and augmented data sculptures to visibly demonstrate how the brain recalls memories. The installation was created with a custom 16 x 20 foot LED media wall and CNC milled rigid foam, and was shown earlier in 2018 at Pilevneli Galleryin Istanbul. In the work, seething swirls move across the work’s surface, resembling cresting ocean waves, blossoming flowers, and shifting sand. o generate the data, Anadol conducted experiments at the Neuroscape Laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. An artist statement describes the technical process: “Anadol gathers data on the neural mechanisms of cognitive control from an EEG (electroencephalogram) that measures changes in brain wave activity and provides evidence of how the brain functions over time. These data sets constitute the building blocks for the unique algorithms that the artist needs for the multi-dimensional visual structures on display.”

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Ferdinand, Hi. Yeah, it seems to be getting hairier up here in Europe in general. Fucking hell. But you’ll be fine, obviously. Good luck getting things spotless painlessly. ** Misanthrope, Hi. It could be worse, which isn’t to say it doesn’t suck and that I’m not putting on the best face about itlike I tend to do, but, yeah, super high hopes that it doesn’t get harsher. Diva kids tend to grow up productive and successful and all that stuff. So, cool. Not so cool about your slurring and unsteadiness, but it sounds like a little keeper for the memory banks. ** _Black_Acrylic, Great, congrats! Ben the Phoenix! That’s what I like to hear. ** David Ehrenstein, Indeed. And the trippy parts of ‘The Right Stuff’ too. I thought you were referring to Joe LeSueur. I was friends with Joe in his later life. What a funny, lovely guy. ** Sypha, It takes a big man to admit that, ha ha. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, I feel like there’s something going on with BE that has stamina and a future, but we’ll see. Champagne and fireworks about killing your deadline! I don’t know how well known Jackie Beat is outside of LA. I know she and Sherry Vine and doing a lot of duo stuff these days. Sherry was one of the stars of a performance piece I made with Ishmael Houston-Jones back in 1989 when she was still a young guy named Keith Levy. I don’t know how much early Jackie Beat is online, probably not much, but she used to be mean as hell. Ha ha, I would eat that Buche lickety-split even though, mermen, yikes! Love giving every male escort in the world a shaved bubble butt that shoots confetti every fifteen minutes like a cuckoo clock, G. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Gotcha. Maybe someone will curate that post. I might, but I’m not feeling it, right now at least. ‘Elevated’ is certainly putting a positive spin on that new horror genre. New reviews! Everyone, Mr. Erickson has given his thoughts about and spin to two items. First, an older Ken Loach film called ‘Black Jack’ here, and then the new serpentwithfeet album here. I haven’t heard Meemo Comma’s new album, and you have definitely intrigued me. I will approach it both excitedly and warily, thank you. ** Danielle, Hi, Danielle! It’s been ages, or it feels like ages, and it’s so swell to see you! Whoa, you read ‘I Wished’? That is sneaky, ha ha. I think you’re only the fourth person (that I know of) aside from my agent and publishing people who’ve read it. Eek. Wow, that’s so amazing to hear. Thank you so much. That’s really, really moving, what you wrote. And what I dared hope for. Yeah, it was a tough and intense novel to write. Anyway, yeah, I’m so happy, thank you so very much for telling me that. I’m totally happy to Zoom or whatever whenever you like. I seem to be stuck here in Paris for a while yet, and I’m just futzing around and working inside the confinement. Gosh, Danielle, really, thank you, that really means a lot. Bear hugs for days. ** John Newton, Hi. Glad you liked his films. Happy b’day to your mom! Tim D. was a pretty energetic and extroverted and fun and highly smart person exactly as his poems seem to indicate. No, ‘I Wished’ has been fully written for a long time. I’m not writing poems, no, I wish I was. I’m co-writing a novella with my friend and collaborator Zac Farley and doing early think/note work on a new theater piece I’ll be writing for Gisele Vienne. Golnoosh, If you read this, John Newton said something to you and asked you a question in yesterday’s comments if you didn’t see it. Happy day. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. They are lovely. Or I think so. Art galleries were the only up to date cultural input there was in Paris these days, so losing them is a very tenable deprivation. Obviously, I second your urge to hit SFMoMA et al ASAP just in case. The plan is that the ‘Jerk’ film will play festivals. It’ll get released here, but I doubt elsewhere since it’s a glorified filmed play, and Gisele decided to shoot it in the French version so Jonathan would give the most nuanced performance. But maybe it’ll stream in the US or something? ** Right. I nerded out and decided to do one of my thematic posts about the brain, and you see what resulted. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Jordan Belson died in September, 2011 at the age of 85. In his later years, Belson was an intensely private, almost hermetic, figure. The 30 films he made as an independent, artisanal filmmaker are suffused with mystery, navigating inner and outer spaces via slowly mounting flames of deliquescent light, shimmering starfields, and rainstorms of color.

‘The question of how he made those images was also a closely guarded secret. Throughout his life, Belson let slip few fragments of information regarding his filmmaking process. He was careful to distinguish his work from animation, for instance—even though his earliest films were made via traditional animation methods—insisting, “I don’t use liquids or models. I use mechanical and optical effects; and instead of using an animating table, I call my setup an optical bench.” The only extant description of that optical bench is in Gene Youngblood’s 1970 book Expanded Cinema. Belson’s primary means of image-making was a purposefully rudimentary, handmade apparatus, a cobbled-together array of a “plywood frame around an old X-ray stand with rotating tables, variable speed motors, and variable intensity lights.” New modes of vision required new techniques to depict them, and Belson continually sought to refine his methods in order to produce unique effects. Séance (1959), for example, provides one of the first cinematic examples of a flicker effect, predating the work of both Peter Kubelka and Tony Conrad. For Light (1973), he introduced cascades of flickering and undulating particles that had not appeared in previous films. One need only to see the pulsing galaxies of Allures (1961) (which may have, in fact, used animation techniques) or the celestial terraforms of Samadhi (1967) to acknowledge the yawning gap between the simplicity of Belson’s setup and the profound complexity of the imagery he achieved. …

‘Having studied painting at the California School of Fine Art (now San Francisco Art Institute) and Berkeley, Belson brought together a keen understanding of materials, color, and form to his moving abstractions. Like his painter-turned-filmmaker friend Harry Smith, Belson was spurred to start making films after taking in screenings of Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren, and Hans Richter at the Art in Cinema series at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the 1940s. Belson also marshaled a number of systems of esoteric knowledge—Eastern religion, alchemy, Jungian psychology, and intoxication—to imbue those abstractions with meaning beyond the kinetic play of their surface beauty. While undeniably cosmic, Belson’s films are not without their representative qualities. Though he acknowledged the hallucinatory qualities of his 1960s films, Belson held fast to the idea that the flaming, spinning mandalas and spacescapes in his works were representations of an inner consciousness. He claimed, “I first have to see the images somewhere, within or without or somewhere. I mean, I don’t make them up.” At another juncture, Belson said that Samadhi “is intended to be a real documentary representation, as accurately as it was possible to make, of a real place and a real visual phenomenon that I perceived—just as I am looking at you right now.”

‘The otherworldly beauty of Belson’s private spectacle also caught the eye of Hollywood filmmakers looking to imbue their productions with the patina of the metaphysical. Stripped of their original contexts, however, Belson’s transcendental explorations transmuted into sci-fi effects fodder, even in such mildly enjoyable hokum as Robert Parrish’s Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969), and Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed (1977), in which Belson’s imagery is the seduction tool employed by lusty A.I. super computer Proteus, who, upon acquiring sentience, also develops the hots for Julie Christie. While those examples merely repurposed older Belson footage, Philip Kaufman hired the experimental filmmaker to create special effects for his adaptation of The Right Stuff (1983), which recounted the origins of the American space program. Belson shot over 20,000 feet of footage for The Right Stuff—enough for a feature film—of which roughly three minutes were shown in the finished work. Belson was tasked with creating images of pilot Chuck Yeager’s breaking of the sound barrier, the Earth, and starfields. He was also asked to recreate the mysterious shimmering “fireflies” that John Glenn reported seeing outside the cockpit of his Apollo spacecraft. (Not entirely coincidentally, Belson’s 1964 film Re-Entry had been inspired by astronaut Glenn’s post-orbit return to earth in February of 1962, and its soundtrack used snippets of Glenn’s radio communications.)

‘For The Right Stuff’s “fireflies” sequence, Kaufman intercut medium close-up shots of a bewildered Glenn (played by Ed Harris) surrounded by Belson’s light flecks with scenes of aborigines singing and dancing around a sparking fire. The camera follows the blaze’s embers as they lift into the night air. The resulting sequence creates the impression that the primitive ritual being enacted on terra firma is aiding Glenn’s journey in the heavens. Regardless of the fact that the film never mentions that “fireflies” were later determined by NASA to be light-reflecting ice particles outside of Glenn’s MA-6 capsule, the invocation of a primitive mysticism via a questionable portrayal of indigenous practices is far removed from Belson’s subjective investigations of human consciousness and perception in his own work. A director with a steadier aesthetic hand, Terrence Malick, studied Belson’s films while working on this year’s Tree of Life, and even approached Belson about creating new work for the project. …

‘Belson would go on to embrace the creative capacities of video editing in Mysterious Journey (1997) and his last work, the aptly-titled Epilogue (2005)—the latter piece commissioned for the Hirshhorn Museum’s landmark “Visual Music” exhibition that same year. In October, a never-before-seen work of Belson’s debuted at the memorial screening. Perhaps this rediscovery marks the beginning of Belson’s own eternal return, his re-entry into a mediascape that bears his aesthetic influence more than his physical imprint.’ — Gregory Zinman, The Brooklyn Rail

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Jordan Belson, 1926 – 2011
Jordan Belson @ IMDb
Jordan Belson @ Light Cone
Notes on Jordan Belson – Raymond Foye
RE-ENTRY: Thoughts on Jordan Belson: 1926–2011
Le cinéma cosmique de Jordan Belson
DVD: ‘JORDAN BELSON: 5 ESSENTIAL FILMS’
THE UNKNOWN ART OF JORDAN BELSON
Jordan Belson @ Matthew Marks Gallery
Jordan Belson: Sentience in Celluloid
Review: Phenomena by Jordan Belson; Samadhi by Jordan Belson
Jordan Belson @ letterboxd
SAMADHI by Jordan Belson
The Secret Paintings of a Hermetic Filmmaker
Making Films for the Inner Eye: Jordan Belson, James Whitney, Paul Sharits
The Search for Lost Transcendence: Cosmic mysticism in Jordan Belson’s films and painting
JORDAN BELSON: VISUALIZING INNER AND OUTER SPACE

 

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Extras

STiCKY DoT MANDALA ViSioNS [FoR JoRDAN BELSoN]

Jordan Belson Paintings 1950–1965

Watch here

 

Tribute to Jordan Belson

 

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Quotes
from Raymond Foye/The Brooklyn Rail

 

Film was just a few years old when I was born so it seemed the most modern revolutionary medium I could use. My films are always arbitrary mindstuff: nothing domestic.

In my work I am proceeding from the belief that anything can be animated. I’m interested in what underlies reality.

There are certain givens in my symbols that are based on practice, or just based on things as they are.

Non-Objectivism: To construct real events in an unreal world. As opposed to most concepts of abstraction where they are trying to get away from the physical world, in most cases.

Many of Kandinsky’s images are like visual letters, or a telegram.

Non-objective art wasn’t non-objective, people just didn’t yet know what the object was.

Each atom contains a simplified blueprint of what’s taking place in the cosmos. Protons and electrons moving around the nucleus, like planets around the sun. In this image green below is earth and sky above is blue, but that is not always the case. These relations and terms are relative in the work.

The tangibles and intangibles are mixed in the metaphysic. The image as a container of wisdom and knowledge.

I’ve tried to develop a sure sense of proportion so that if it’s not right, I can detect it. Granted I may not know what to do about it right away….

Intuition is the basis of my aesthetic judgment. The more you allow intuition to speak to you the closer you are to the truth, and the origins of the universe. I feel I’ve given up a lot of ways of thinking about certain things in order to be closer to intuition.

I try with my work to establish a sense of the monument: a spiritual location, like the great temples, the Acropolis. Symmetrical, beautiful lighting, the most advanced architectural thinking operates on a much higher plane than most modern art does.

There are monsters in my work. I used to despair at this. But then I realized I can’t eliminate them. They’re just part of the trip. The key is just don’t let them think they’re in control. The bardo plane contains all these awful gods and demons. They’re just projections.

 

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10 of Jordan Belson’s 30 films

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Bop-Scotch (1952)
‘In 1952, Belson animated a little masterpiece Bop Scotch, which applied the three-frame exposure of his other animation to objects found on the street. Moving around a manhole cover makes it seem to turn and following the swirling lines in a decorative paving seems to make them sway. Daisies dance and a rock seems to hop about from hollow to hollow in a patterned surface. The effect is enchanting and it became a very popular film.’ — Film Affinity

Trailer

 

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‎Mandala (1953)
‘Mandala came out only one year after Bop-Scotch but already showed a marked progression for Belson, who began honing in on what would become his own unique visual perspective. The film is more along the lines of what one traditionally expects of Belson’s work, namely, visually-centered compositions with circular objects at the heart of the screen growing, moving, and dissipating into a cinematic ether. We see geometric patterns of circles move around to the sound of a gamelan, the flow of the animation undulates between smooth and staccato movement. At one point, it appears as if the sun and the moon are swaying in orbit from one another amidst a backdrop of swirling grain.

‘Although Belson’s works operate as stand-alone films, that is to say visual-temporal stimulation crafted to approach a meditative state devoid of outside interference, one might liken his approach to some of the writing of Jung, who describes, in Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, that “the severe pattern imposed by a circular image of this kind compensates the disorder of the psychic state– namely through a the construction of a central point to which everything is related, or by a concentric arrangement of the disordered multiplicity and of contradictory and irreconcilable elements. This is evidently an attempt at self-healing on the part of Nature, which does not spring from conscious reflection but from an instinctive impulse.”

‘Belson employs the seamless, constant movement allowed by the filmic medium to distill the audience’s interaction with his art work down to this “instinctive impulse”. As a concentrated temporal passage, Mandala projects a series of circle-based arrangements not to his own ends but as a way of conveying this self-healing to the audience. As we perceive the film, “we are driven to the conclusion that there must be a transconscious disposition in every individual which is able to produce the same or very similar symbols at all times and in all places.” Jung described this as a “collective unconscious” and Belson achieves a similar experience for his audiences through the non-representational images projected within the sealed space of the theater.’ — arkheia

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Raga (1958)
‘An early animated film by Jordan Belson.’

Watch the film VOD here

 

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Allures (1961)
‘I think of Allures as a combination of molecular structures and astronomical events mixed with subconscious and subjective phenomena – all happening simultaneously. the beginning is almost purely sensual, the end perhaps totally nonmaterial. It seems to move from matter to spirit in some way.’ — Jordan Belson

Watch the film here

 

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Re-Entry (1964)
‘Belson uses colorful abstract gaseous images of light against a black background as a visual recreation of Bardo or the three states of being at the moment of death as defined by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. “Belson aligns the three stages of Bardo with the three stages of space flight: leaving the earth’s atmosphere (death), moving through deep space (karmic illusions), and reentry into the earth’s atmosphere (rebirth).’ — WorldCat

 

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Samadhi (1967)
‘Is it possible to create a film that both induces and reproduces a transcendental experience? This thought fascinated Belson and other avant-garde filmmakers of his time, such as James Whitney and Stan Brakhage. The melting pot of counterculture, psychedelics and Eastern philosophy of the late Sixties set the scene in which these filmmakers would create their films. Belson recalls the revolutionary transformation and impact of psychedelics on the arts at the time, having himself experimented with LSD and mescaline: “It somehow set the stage for insights…The new art and other forms of expression reveal the influence of mind expansion”.’ — Sophie Pinchetti

 

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World (1970)
‘A combination of molecular structures and astronomical events mixed with subconscious and subjective phenomena—all happening simultaneously. The beginning is almost purely sensual, the end perhaps totally nonmaterial. It seems to move from matter to spirit in some way.’ — Jordan Belson

Excerpt

 

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Chakra (1972)
‘In Chakra, I was able to transfer the traditional order of the chakras into a film, starting with the first (lower) chakra and working up to the seventh (top) chakra…’ — Jordan Belson

Trailer

 

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Music of the Spheres (1977)
‘Belson’s works often provoke responses that rely heavily on abstract comparisons to the cosmos and outer space but this is perhaps one of his most celestial films. The opening titles even circle around a planetary surface, suggesting a kind of gravitational pull toward the center of the frame which winks at Belson’s predilection for centered compositions. While the fascination with cosmic imagery is ever-present, the audience’s geographic orientation is constantly thrown into question through repeated zooms both in and out of various objects. The soundtrack, offering a lush arrangement of marimbas, bells, and arpeggiated synths, plays off of the wondrous images Belson concocts on the screen. Shimmering colors evoking the Aurora Borealis, faintly-perceivable molten lava, splashing embers, and rushing waterfalls. Finally Belson zooms out from the serene texture of light reflecting on the surface of a lake to reveal our location within a tropical paradise. An entire universe contained within the sparkling glimmers of luminescence – a perfect metaphor for Belson’s filmography.’ — arkheia

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Fountain of Dreams (1984)
‘Belson’s imagery is ever enchanting, celestial colors dissolving into one another in a luminous and abstract dance. The gentle accompaniment of Liszt’s music blends with the swirling lights into a lovely cinematic synesthesia.’ — letterboxd

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Ferdinand, Hey. Ah, you’re heading up here. Is Belgium locked down too? I don’t even know. The lockdown here is annoying, but, frankly, other than art galleries being closed, which majorly sucks, and the obnoxious govt. permission form one must fill in and print out and put somewhere on one’s person before walking out one’s door, it doesn’t feel hugely different than before. ‘Discontents’! I’m very proud of that book. I think it lays out and represents the queer punk era very well in its own way. I really want to get it reprinted somehow. I need to look into that. Big up, sir. ** David Ehrenstein, I think I can guess who you would refer to as God. Let me check. *click* Yes, I was right! ** Jack Skelley, Trade of all Jacks. (1) Thanks for the ©. It’s pretty. (2) Agreed. (2 again) Exactamundo. (3) No one does rhetorical jives better. (4) Ditto. (5) I’ll pay especially close attention to any  mysterious tastes that might make appearances in my mouth. (5 1/2) Yes, I do think there was a huge drop post-Peter Green, although I do really like the first post-Green album ‘Kiln House’ a lot. Then the dreary Bob Welch era, although some of Danny Kirwin’s songs during the period are really good. I love Danny Kirwin. He was my big rock star crush when I was young. Then I think the remade FM as Nicks/Buckingham showcase era is mostly solid but utterly unremarkable. (6) No, it’s your playground. I’m just playing. ** Dominick, D!!!! Yes, we decided that ‘Jerk’ should really be preserved for future generations, ha ha, or whatever, since it’s been our most successful piece, and one of our best ones for sure. Oh, Billie Eilish’s performance wasn’t so exciting in and of itself. She just wandered around singing and stood on the hood of a car prop. I just think she and her songs are interesting and that something is going on in them. I feel like she could evolve into an even more interesting artist. That’s it, I guess. I don’t know who Bimini is, but I trust you that that was unforgivable. Love using his time machine option on Jackie Beat who used to be the meanest, scariest, most exciting trans/drag performer in Los Angeles fifteen or so years ago before she lost weight and remade herself into a merely okay, toned down, audience-friendly act, G. ** T, Hi, T. Thanks a lot for thanking them. And thanks re: our lockdown thing. Yeah, this has to be the last one. Trudging along. I hope you’re sprinting through your world. Take care. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. You must have had very, very low expectations about the Grammys. Yeah, the ‘WAP’ bit towered far above everything around it. Interesting/weird that rock was so completely sidelined apart from the borderline nap-inducing Haim. Well, there was that ‘Snuff/Gore (in quotes)’ post here a few days ago. That doesn’t count as ‘torture porn’? If not, are you offering to make such a post? I would be more than interested if you or whoever wanted to, of course. ** Golnoosh, Hi, G. Thank you, thank you so much again! I’m glad you finally got to see the comments. I didn’t know that invisibility problem is persisting. Ugh. Aw, thank you so much for the kind words and the humbling comparison, my friend. Have the bonnest day! ** Scott mcclanahan, Hi, Scott! Thank you, and it’s so great to see you! My pal Zac and I were talking about you exorbitantly the other day and wondering when you might publish a new book. Any hints? Take care, great sir, and much respect to you! ** Jeff J, Hi. Yes, I ended up going for the final day of the ‘Jerk’ shooting. I think, ultimately, it worked out okay. Gisele came around. There’s one key puppet show scene that’s shot in a problematic way, but mostly it looks pretty good. We’ll see when we start the editing next week. And it was melancholy to see the very last ‘Jerk’ performance. It’s been alive and touring for more than ten years. Crazy. A little novel progress sounds like plenty under the circumstances, so … great! I’ve only read a little Bruce Chatwin, but I liked what I read. Do you think I should read more of him? ** Okay. Today the blog focuses on the very beautiful and singular films of Jordan Belson, whose work you may or may not know, but, if not, now you can, and knowing his stuff is highly recommended. See you tomorrow.