VIET≈NAM ≈ HANOISE

Transfragmentation

2022 · ★ 9

After I had already begun to conduct my first cinematographic experiments in 2015, I shot between 2016 and 2019 (during my time as a student in Rostock) exclusively for this "No Budget Feature-Length Experimental Film", now titled "Transfragmentation", which was originally conceived to last three hours, based on Werner Fritsch's "Faust Sonnengesang" (2011), but now has a running time of approximately two hours. In 2015, I also began my correspondence with the Brussels-based Sound-Artist Unenthüllte, who eventually composed four twenty-minute pieces for this work and has to be regarded as my sole artistic collaborator in this sense. My cinematographic concept was clearly outlined from the beginning: The duration of each shot is exactly 1 minute. Only two elements diverge from this primary premise: The Seventeen Minute Prelude, Created In Post-Production (2020-2022), And The Slow Motion Sequences Involving My Voice-Over, Which Linger In The Heart And At The End Of The Work.

What's Locked Behind That Door?

2025 · ★ 10

In the visually arresting music video for Lunavox’s “What’s Locked Behind That Door?”, a series of metaphorical doors open onto the full spectrum of human emotion, drawing viewers into a surreal journey through fear, desire, and obsession. These portals also frame the chilling descent of a scientist whose relentless experiments lead him into darkness. Guided by the song’s pulsing rhythm, the two narratives intertwine as human vulnerability and scientific ambition collapse into a single vision of corruption and revelation.

Latvian Coyote

2019

An absurd game of “finding happiness” is being played by local Latvian coyotes* and illegal immigrants on the Russian and the European Union border. It is a game with no winner – all participants are driven to play by the sense of despair. While one side leaves home and undertakes a perilous journey to the other side of the globe, hoping to spend the rest of their lives in a free country, the other side risks their freedom to earn a chance to stay right where they are, in their homeland. *coyote – someone who smuggles illegal immigrants

FUCK TV

2019

After concluding the now-legendary public access TV series, The Pain Factory, Michael Nine embarked on a new and more subversive public access endeavor: a collaboration with Scott Arford called Fuck TV. Whereas The Pain Factory predominantly revolved around experimental music performances, Fuck TV was a comprehensive and experiential audio-visual presentation. Aired to a passive and unsuspecting audience on San Francisco’s public access channel from 1997 to 1998, each episode of Fuck TV was dedicated to a specific topic, combining video collage and cut-up techniques set to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The resultant overload of processed imagery and visceral sound was unlike anything presented on television before or since. EPISODES: Yule Bible, Cults, Riots, Animals, Executions, Static, Media, Haterella (edited version), Self Annihilation Live, Electricity.

André 3000: New Blue Sun (Listening)

2023 · ★ 4.5

"I swear, I wanted to make a “visual album” but this is literally the way the wind blew me this time."

The Hypergaussian Wars

2025 · ★ 10

The Hypergaussian Wars is an AI-generated feature-length audiovisual work exploring algorithmic warfare, obsolete media and the transformation of images through repetition, saturation and collapse. Built from thousands of generated images, synthetic landscapes and references to 14th–16th century painting, the film stages a continuous conflict between historical visual culture and contemporary computational systems. Fragments of obsolete video games, ruined architectures, military simulations and post-human figures circulate through increasingly unstable environments. Rather than telling a linear story, the film operates as an image system in which visual excess progressively erodes meaning. The Hypergaussian Wars reflects on memory, obsolescence, artificial intelligence and the persistence of images after their original function has disappeared.

The Yellow Shark

1992 · ★ 8

This live recording was culled from seven September 1992 concerts given in Vienna, Berlin, and Frankfurt by the Ensemble Modern, a Frankfurt-based chamber orchestra that performs only contemporary music. Composed and conducted by Frank Zappa.

Time

2022

Then, now, where? how?

Blue For a Moment

2017

Blue for a Moment is a documentary portrait of Swedish-born, Berlin-based musician Sven-Åke Johansson, a key figure in European improvised and experimental music. Active as a jazz drummer, composer, poet and visual artist, Johansson has spent decades challenging artistic conventions and genre boundaries. Born in 1943, he moved to Berlin in the late 1960s and became involved in the city’s experimental scene, including the Zodiak Free Arts Lab. During the 1970s and 1980s he played an important role in the West Berlin free jazz movement around the FMP/SÅJ label, collaborating with musicians such as Alexander von Schlippenbach and Rüdiger Carl. Influenced by Fluxus and modernist traditions, Johansson developed a distinctive approach based on noise, reduction and the use of everyday materials, anticipating the Echtzeitmusik scene that emerged in Berlin after 1990. The film explores his creative process, artistic philosophy and lasting impact on contemporary experimental music.

Cranes and Voices

Cranes and Voices explores the evocative power of sound through the experiences of people who hear voices and a collective of sound investigators, tenants documenting their neighborhood. By bringing together listening experiences, housing, and creative practices, the film approaches sound as an ambivalent force, questioning our ability to listen—to the city, to others, and to ourselves.

Phantasia

2024 · ★ 8

X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.

Via Dolorosa

2014 · ★ 7

Via Dolorosa captures director’s journey in reconnecting with Vietnamese homeless persons whom she filmed for another short film two years ago. While she accompanied a man in his final days, Jo searched within herself to resolve the original sin of the documentary filmmaker as a bystander to the suffering of others.