PRE-ORDER [shipping October 2026]: Blake Williams • Short Video Works 2009-2025 [3D Blu-ray]

Description

“No filmmaker since Ken Jacobs has been so consistently committed to exploring the aesthetic potentials of 3D technology” — Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope

Following up on Grasshopper Film’s 3D blu-ray release of PROTOTYPE (now available exclusively through our shop, here), we are happy to offer this limited collection of all of Blake Williams’s short video works made since 2009, tracing the evolution of his interests in depth illusions, obsolete media technologies, and structural abstraction.

The thirteen films in this package includes his early graduate studio experiments, his found footage triptych for red & cyan Anaglyph 3D, and his four most recent films made for full stereoscopic 3D. These films—many of which have so far been exclusively accessible at one-off festival screenings and repertory events—are being made available on home media for the first time.

LIMITED EDITION OF 1000 UNITS

Region: ALL

Film details:

2D*
1. No Signal (2009, 4.5 min.)
• A consumer-grade DLP projector is powered on without connection to an external source, thus prompting the device’s default ‘No signal’ message. The artist’s hand waves through the projected message, creating something out of nothing.
2. A Cold Compress (2010, 12 min.)
• A studio experiment in which an offscreen 16mm film projector slowly pans its light across a bouquet of yellow daisies. The projector’s 24fps flicker clashes with the 29.97 frame rate of the capture device; as the shot repeats again and again—doubling in speed with each successive play—the light phases in and out of coherence.
3. Space-ship (2010, 3.5 min.)
• A short and sweet magic trick in the guise of science fiction, featuring fluorescent light tubes, foley sound effects, a camera’s step aperture, and a very smooth tilt.
4. Depart (2011, 10 min.)
• A poetic essay about motion tracking, digital manufacturing, and physical absence, wherein Williams set out to forge an on-screen interaction with fireflies that never took place. Set to a score of air traffic control radio, transportation ambience, and ominous drones, the piece intermixes found and self-shot footage until they are indistinguishable from one another.
5. Coorow-Latham Road (2011, 16 min.)
• A trek down the entire length of Coorow-Latham Road, a short and barely inhabited path in Western Australia connecting the town of Coorow (named after a poetic Australian Aboriginal word) to the town known as Latham (named after a white settler). Luxuriating in the artifacts of early Google Street View algorithms, the film begins by facing straight ahead, then slowly pans to the left over the course of the journey until it achieves a rear-view gaze back at the road travelled.
6. C-LR: Coorow Latham Road For Those Who Don’t Have The Time (2013, 1.5 min.)
• Racing up and down the length of Coorow-Latham Road using the Google Street View Hyperlapse application. A re-take of Coorow-Latham Road, and a nod to Michael Snow.

 

Anaglyph 3D**

7. Many a Swan (2012, 5.5 min.)
• A short film about folding—folded paper, folded land, folded timelines, folded video planes—that daydreams about the Grand Canyon (seen here in various ads, music videos, and anonymous found footage), the art of origami, and rewinding history.
8. Baby Blue (2013, 10 min.)
• Clips of trains, space shuttles, beaches, and cyclopes butt against one another to present a melancholic impression of mutating technologies, gestures, and organisms caught between one state of being and another.
9. Red Capriccio (2014, 7 min.)
• A found footage film in three movements, forging clashes between motion and stasis, police and the policed, reds and blues.

 

Full Stereoscopic 3D***

10. Something Horizontal (2015, 10 min.)
• Originally made for the Anaglyph format before being re-finished in full stereoscopic 3D, this transitional film sees Williams barrelling through stroboscopic glimpses of Victorian domestic surfaces and geometric shadows, transforming the physical world into an impressionistic fantasia where sensory abstraction and narrative linearity are invited to co-exist.
11. 2008 (2019, 12 min.)
• Images of blooming cherry blossoms, radiant colour fields, and domestic miscellany are re-photographed off the screen of an obsolete televisual device in this stereoscopic aubade, conflating endings with beginnings while pondering the idea of unity.
12. Laberint Sequences (2023, 20 min.)
• Shot in Barcelona’s Laberint d’Horta, this miniature epic charts several journeys into the garden in search of its centre, where a statue of Eros waits. As the film navigates the maze’s false pathways, its recursive structure begins to crack, and a mysterious underworld floods its gates.
13. FELT (2025, 15 min.)
• Williams revisits motifs and graphic strategies from his first 3D film, Many a Swan, and applies them to new methods and contexts. A traverse across the Western United States in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 US Presidential election is the starting point for this futurist odyssey, where we observe familiar sites in a new light, and the world gets lost in the fold.

*2D and Anaglyph 3D works can be played on any Blu-ray player and viewed on any display.
**The disc comes with one pair of red & cyan glasses, which can be used to view the Anaglyph 3D films.
***Works in the Full Stereoscopic 3D format require a 3D Blu-ray player, 3D display, and compatible 3D glasses.