This Sunday, August 24, 8pm - 9pm (doors at 7:30pm), the gallery is screening a selection of experimental, non-narrative films produced between 1894 - 1940. The total runtime of the films is approximately: 1 hour, 8 minutes, 07 seconds. ratio . Trey Ross, Shuai Yang, Cesar Herrejon, Joey Serricchio, Sue Shu, Saun Santipreecha. July 26 - September 6, 2025. Group Exhibition. …. This screening scatterplots an early history of experimental film, where sound, rhythm, and abstraction are worked-through as formal problems in view of moving images, visual metrics, and the constructions of a cinematic gaze. Beginning with W.K.L. Dickson’s The Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894), one of the earliest synchronized sound experiments, and The Flying Train (1902), a proto-documentary travel film, these initial ‘tests’ demonstrate the superposition of cinematic processes as a scientific, technological, commercial apparatuses of mass-æffects, as well as clastic mediums of experimentation. In the 1920s, artists associated with the European avant-garde—Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, Fernand Léger, and Marcel Duchamp—began to treat film as a medium of visual music. These “absolute films” pursued a language of scopic rhythm and sonic geometry, reflecting interwar fascinations with abstraction, synesthesia, and mechanizations. Works like Rhythmus 21 (1921), Symphonie diagonale (1924), and Ballet mécanique (1924) translate musical principles into visual compositions. By the 1930s, this experimental lineage continued in Britain and the United States with Len Lye’s painted films (A Colour Box, 1935; Kaleidoscope, 1935) and Oskar Fischinger’s An Optical Poem (1938). These works embraced both commercial and artistic contexts, using new color processes, advertising commissions, and studio support to advance non-narrative film. (For example, A Colour Box was produced as an advertisement for the British General Post Office, while Fischinger’s film was a commercial commission by MGM.) Built between science, abstraction, and spectacle. The result was a body of cinema that framed film as a material time of ratio, rhythm, and perception. ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Selected Films: Dickson, W.K.L., dir. The Dickson Experimental Sound Film. 1894. Duchamp, Marcel. Anémic cinéma. 1926. The Flying Train. 1902. Richter, Hans. Rhythmus 21. 1921. Ruttmann, Walter. Lichtspiel Opus II. 1922. Richter, Hans. Rhythmus 23. 1923. Eggeling, Viking. Symphonie Diagonale. 1924. Léger, Fernand, and Dudley Murphy (with contributions from Man Ray). Ballet mécanique. 1924. Ruttmann, Walter. Opus III. 1924. Ruttmann, Walter. Opus IV. 1925. Duchamp, Marcel. Anémic cinéma. 1926. Lye, Len. A Colour Box. 1935. Lye, Len. Kaleidoscope. 1935. Fischinger, Oskar. An Optical Poem. 1938. __________ Image: Still from Lichtspiel Opus II (1922) by Walter Ruttmann.