Michael Fleming

Our consumer society is dominated by show, the "outside world" passes us by as a long stream of images without much meaning. We have become passive spectators of pictures from popular culture, the media and advertising, we are swallowed up by them and experience less and less difference between image and reality, yearning for sovereignty, wanting to be transcendent, for liberation and looking for cohesion, justice, reason, coherence and like-mindedness. In short; control versus loss. Entangled in this dichotomy, the intertwining, the intermingling of waste and utility brings us into a supplementary tension; drowning in this void in search for an eternal present!

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? It means to know that one is food for worms. We emerge from nothing, we have a name, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self- expression and with all this yet to die. Man is out of nature and hopelessly in it: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. ….Tik-Tak.

Never Never Land is about our obsession with physical perfection, domination, and wanting to control everything – not only being the perfect human, but also creating him. Chance is replaced by choice.

Three scenes reflecting on paradise, lust and hell. In 'The Garden of Delight' beauty and evil go together like in a dream. We dive into a world of erotic derangement, inhabited by dancing lovers, lustful mutated baboons, tropical birds, deformed pin-ups, butterflies and body-builders. This hand-manipulated collage film, made entirely out of 35 and 8mm found-footage, explores the marriage between heaven and hell, our irresolvable endless conflict that goes with human nature. Inspired on the triptych 'The Garden of Delight' by Jheronimus Bosch.

A 35mm found-footage hand-manipulated collage film focusing on the depiction of fear and revenge seen in commercial cinema. Manipulating our fear of mortality, it suggests we decimate what threatens us. The surface of the film material has been treated the same way: peeling, scalping, cutting and burning the images.

A pulsating bombardment of images about our insatiable pursuit of perpetual happiness and freedom from fear. A frame by frame hand manipulated 35mm celluloid collage film, the found footage is augmented by stills that were taken from various magazines, then distorted and deformed.

A found-footage, hand manipulated, cameraless 35mm celluloid film.This collage film is about the perpetual image flood we receive daily. Loaded with iconographic images of consumerism and amusement. The film releases an overflow of our own popular culture to the viewer.