Relentless Melt No. 45: Digital Analogues and Analogue Digitals

Relentless Melt No. 45: Digital Analogues and Analogue Digitals

Date: 30 April 2026 (Thursday)
Time: 7:00 pm
Venue: Nock Art Project Space｜16A, Kwai Bo Industrial Building, Wong Chuk Hang, Hong Kong Island.

110 people attended the event.

Curatorial Statement by Max Hattler

This programme brings together new short films produced in the abstract and experimental animation classes at City University of Hong Kong. Working primarily in digital environments, the students were asked to complicate the apparent immateriality, precision, and controllability of digital image-making by introducing at least one analogue or lens-based intervention into the process: marks, textures, dust, projection, refilming, screen-based capture, prisms, optical distortion, and other forms of contact with the physical world. The resulting works move between clean geometry and unstable matter, between synthetic control and contingent interference.

The title, Digital Analogues and Analogue Digitals, names a productive double movement. On the one hand, digital systems increasingly simulate the look, texture, and irregularity of analogue media, producing digital analogues of grain, dirt, flicker, softness, and indexical imperfection. On the other hand, analogue materials and lens-based processes can be folded back into digital workflows, where they are sampled, edited, layered, synchronised, and transformed into components of computational image construction: analogue digitals. Rather than treating the digital and the analogue as opposites, the films in this programme explore their mutual contamination.

Many of the works are structured in close relation to music, adopting principles of visual music, rhythmic montage, graphic correspondence, pulse, repetition, and audiovisual counterpoint. Here, synchronisation is not merely decorative accompaniment but a compositional method through which movement, texture, shape, and timing become audible in visual form. Digital abstraction is repeatedly pushed toward material event: projected, refracted, re-photographed, degraded, and returned to the edit as transformed footage. In some works, even generative AI is used not as a substitute for invention but as a way of fabricating a digital semblance of analogue materiality, raising questions about simulation, authenticity, and the aesthetics of artificial tactility.

A second group of films emerges from a kinestatic approach to the patterned surfaces of the city and the built environment: paving stones, fences, façades, temple ornament, gridded structures, and hand-made repetitive drawings. These works discover latent animation in the world by isolating recurrence, symmetry, vibration, and serial variation. Their patterns are not only visual but potentially sonic. Through the optical sound software process used in the course, the full frame of the image becomes a site of sonification, allowing graphic movement to be read as sound and collapsing the conventional separation between what is seen and what is heard.

Across the programme, abstraction is not a retreat from the world but a way of re-encountering it. Dirt becomes rhythm; architecture becomes pulse; projection becomes distortion; the screen becomes a surface to be re-photographed rather than a transparent window. The films ask what happens when digital images seek the contingency of matter, and when analogue procedures are reinserted into digital circulation. What emerges is neither nostalgia for obsolete media nor celebration of technical novelty, but an expanded field of experimental animation in which materiality, mediation, and audiovisual form remain in relentless melt.