22 Light-years draws on a range of visual sources, including photographic negatives, diagrams, found patterned papers, and archival footage. These sources merge, sometimes uncomfortably, with video that was screen-recorded while operating desktop home design software. By creating digital floor plans, landscaping, and roofless homes in real time, and manipulating those videos to move them further away from the software’s intent, Geiser fabricates a digitally lush, elliptical, uncanny world, where home planning never results in a tangible home. The familiar material elements (negatives, diagrams, flower seed packets) wear the skin of the immaterial realm, suggesting time as simultaneous, mutable, and unknown. (janiegeiser.com)

22 Light-Years

An elliptical, pictographic animated film that uses flat, painted figures and collage elements in both two and three dimensional settings to explore the realms of memory, language and identity from the point of view of a woman amnesiac.

The Red Book

IMMER ZU is an elliptical, experimental animated film which evokes a mysterious undercover world of secret messages, cryptic language and indecipherable codes. Shot in luminous black and white, IMMER ZU uses miniature two and three dimensional figures and sets, as well as shadow puppetry, to suggest the urgency of a nocturnal mission, a mission of life and death importance. In this dark and richly atmospheric film, with a soundtrack collaged from several film noirs, meaning is constantly covered and uncovered in a shadowed journey toward eclipse.

Immer Zu

In her recent films, Geiser has been exploring the possibilities found in merging video texture with film, creating a kind of deep, ambiguous space, a suggestion of “the floating world”. In ULTIMA THULE, gravity fails, land and sky lose their historical meaning. A small silver plane navigates an ultramarine storm, flying over barely-glimpsed hills, an unlikely ferry to ”Ultima Thule”: the farthest point north, the limit of any journey. The seduction of immersion in blue is too strong to avoid, the land fills with water, and time loses its line.

Ultima Thule

Janie Geiser takes us along on her search for the original meaning of the word 'algebra' with the help of a remarkable series of found objects, medical illustrations and a rich variety of animation techniques.

Ghost Algebra

The realms of childhood, war, and loss echo through Ricky. Double vision illuminates, and simultaneously obfuscates, what can be remembered, lost, or retrieved. A found sound recording forms the spine of the film . . . a scratched audio letter from father to son.—Janie Geiser