Phill Niblock created The Magic Sun (1966–1968) in collaboration with the Afro-futurist musician Sun Ra and his Arkestra. It was projected on stage at New York’s legendary Carnegie Hall on April 12 and 13, 1968, as part of the intermedia performance The Space Music of Sun Ra. Increasingly abstract, the figures on screen seem to dissolve into dark stains and blinding flashes, while the music reaches a frenetic pitch: a “free excursion into the outer reaches of sound and vision,” as the announcement of its premiere described it.

Throughout an artistic career spanning over sixty years, Phill Niblock (1933-2024, USA) worked to transform our perception and experience of time and space. Recognized as one of the major experimental composers of his generation, Niblock developed a minimalist musical œuvre alongside its visual equivalent through film, performance, and photography. In the mid-1960s, he gradually moved from photography to film and became cameraman for dancers and choreographers of the Judson Church Theater, including Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, and Lucinda Childs.

Recently acquired by the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Phill Niblock’s six 16 mm films (1966–1969) are now the subject of a photochemical restoration and preservation program conducted under the supervision of the Film Collection Department of the Musée national d’art moderne.

In the “typographic” film IKON-KINO, conceived in 1969 and completed a decade later in 1979, Ulrichs draws inspiration from the cinematic scrolling of film projection. The four letters of the word ikon (icon, in German) are permuted 24 times—in reference to the 24 frames per second, the standard speed of film projection. In this reflexive play of displacement and permutation of letters photographed on the film strip, ikon transforms into kino (cinema).

The German artist Timm Ulrichs (b. 1940, Berlin) is the author of a conceptual and poetic body of work in which language confronts both its foundations and its own materiality. His production is deeply informed by philosophy, particularly the thought of Walter Benjamin on technical reproducibility.

Since 2020, the Film Collection Department of the Musée national d’art moderne has been engaged in a project on typography and the moving image. This initiative led to the publication in 2025 of the book Read Frame Type Film by MUBI Editions. Bringing together twenty-four works from the collection, including IKON-KINO, the volume retraces the presence of writing on screen in experimental and artist film.

M3x3 (1973) is considered the first video art piece in Latin America and a pioneering experiment in computer-assisted choreography. Conceived for nine dancers, the work combined Laban’s movement analysis with Fortran-based notation software, generating choreographic scripts and precise camera positions. Recorded with U-Matic technology at TV Cultura, São Paulo, it used geometric stage design and high-contrast costumes to fuse body and space. The only sound was a metronome, marking tempo while allowing interpretive freedom. Its fragmented rhythms, the sharp geometric body movements and randomized sequences reflect the mechanization of human gestures in the urban post- industrial age.

Analivia Cordeiro (b. 1954, São Paulo) is a dancer, choreographer, architect, and pioneer of computer-based dance and Latin American video art. Her works have been presented internationally and belong to major collections such as MoMA, Reina Sofía, and the V&A.

In 1975, Analivia Cordeiro sent a 16 mm copy of her original U-Matic video to computer art pioneer Vladimir Bonačić in Jerusalem. Hidden from view for almost half a century, the film reappeared in 2022 in the ZKM archive of Bonačić and his group, the bcd CyberneticArt team, during preparations for the retrospective Analivia Cordeiro. From Body to Code at ZKM, and was subsequently digitized.

In Untitled (1973), Urs Lüthi appears seated in three-quarter profile, dressed in black against a dark background, while José Feliciano’s “Nature Boy” plays. A woman’s hand enters the frame, caressing his shoulder, face, and hair with delicate gestures, briefly exploring the open shirt before retreating as the song ends. Lüthi remains passive, his gaze fixed into emptiness, untouched by the touch or the music. The video’s length mirrors the song’s duration, yet the soundtrack serves not as accompaniment but as an undercurrent to the image, creating a subtle meditation on presence, gender and vulnerability.

Urs Lüthi (b. 1947, Lucerne) is a Swiss artist known for his groundbreaking explorations of identity, the body, and self-representation across photography, painting, performance, sculpture, and conceptual art. His early self-staged photo works became iconic within Body Art. Lüthi represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and taught at the Kunsthochschule Kassel (1994–2013). His works are represented in major museums worldwide.

Long considered lost, Lüthi’s videotape resurfaced during 40jahrevideokunst.de (2006–2009), a landmark project for the preservation of historic video art from the 1960s and 1970s. Hidden in the archive of the Austrian Trigon Festival, it was restored by the ZKM | Laboratory for Antiquated Video Systems and secured for the future through digitization.