Abstract
Online curated programme ‘Relentless Melt No. 48: Touching Without Touching’, presenting nine new experimental animation films by SCM students on NOWNESS Asia.
Curatorial Statement by Max Hattler (published on NOWNESS Asia)
What does it mean to make a film with your hands when your hands are holding a scanner, a camera aimed at a CRT screen, or a strip of found film footage? The nine films gathered here don’t answer that question so much as enact it, working through it frame by frame, surface by surface, second by second.
Relentless Melt No. 48: Touching Without Touching brings together works from the 2026 Abstract and Experimental Animation classes at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. All made by students encountering experimental animation for the first time, these films share a preoccupation that feels genuinely contemporary: a hunger for materiality in a medium that has, by default, become frictionless. Rather than embracing digital smoothness, these filmmakers fold analogue procedures back into their workflows, scanning physical objects, re-photographing screens, working directly onto celluloid, and documenting the street to recover texture, instability, and time.
The programme spans a wide range of approaches. Some works are rigorously structured around visual music: every frame mapped to BPM, every transition timed to a frequency shift. Others are more atmospheric, proceeding by accumulation and drift. Several are deeply local, rooted in Hong Kong’s material culture, its neon-lit streets, its iron shutters and old mailboxes, its calendars and clocks. Taken together, they propose that abstraction is not a withdrawal from the world but a way of re-encountering it: stripping away narrative to leave only rhythm, texture, light, and the trace of a human hand.
Curatorial Statement by Max Hattler (published on NOWNESS Asia)
What does it mean to make a film with your hands when your hands are holding a scanner, a camera aimed at a CRT screen, or a strip of found film footage? The nine films gathered here don’t answer that question so much as enact it, working through it frame by frame, surface by surface, second by second.
Relentless Melt No. 48: Touching Without Touching brings together works from the 2026 Abstract and Experimental Animation classes at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. All made by students encountering experimental animation for the first time, these films share a preoccupation that feels genuinely contemporary: a hunger for materiality in a medium that has, by default, become frictionless. Rather than embracing digital smoothness, these filmmakers fold analogue procedures back into their workflows, scanning physical objects, re-photographing screens, working directly onto celluloid, and documenting the street to recover texture, instability, and time.
The programme spans a wide range of approaches. Some works are rigorously structured around visual music: every frame mapped to BPM, every transition timed to a frequency shift. Others are more atmospheric, proceeding by accumulation and drift. Several are deeply local, rooted in Hong Kong’s material culture, its neon-lit streets, its iron shutters and old mailboxes, its calendars and clocks. Taken together, they propose that abstraction is not a withdrawal from the world but a way of re-encountering it: stripping away narrative to leave only rhythm, texture, light, and the trace of a human hand.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Publication status | Published - Jun 2026 |
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