Hand-coloured and from the mind of one of the 20th century’s most innovative abstract filmmakers, “Abstronic” combines abstraction and electronics to produce a playful flow of images reminiscent of an abstract painting in motion. Mary Ellen Bute, who was also a painter, created the film using electronic images generated by a specially designed oscilloscope in combination with traditional animation.

This compilation of four films demonstrates the capabilities of the ANIMAC analogue computer, the predecessor to the later Scanimate video synthesizer, which would kickstart a new era in motion graphics during the 1970s. The ANIMAC’s jaunty and fluid forms, created using manually controlled cathode rays which drew on screen in real time, give an early example of electronically designed and animated characters.

Sorensen, DeWitt and Winkler were a dream team of artist engineers, a talented trio whose fluency in new media and technology won them numerous awards and accolades. Their skills in video synthesis and processing are deeply visible in this dreamy, psychedelic drift through synthesised New Age landscapes made of vapourwave colours and swirling, fractal-like shapes.

A union between two artists and their respective mediums of expression: celluloid film and electronic video. Stephen Beck, inventor of his own video synthesizer, and Jordan Belson, a famed abstract filmmaker and animation artist twice Beck’s age, spent two years working together on this journey through spheres of thought, mysticism and form. Deeply psychedelic and yet with all the weightlessness of light.

Originally intended as an anti-drug public service announcement for local television, this 60-second film instead takes us on a trippy ride through Day-Glo colours and pop-art visuals, all melting into each other with the help of the Scanimate video synthesizer. Although one of her earliest films, it was also one of Pat Lehman’s most successful, going on to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

Barbara Sykes, a master craftswoman of electronic visuals, manages to wrangle the abstract into the familiar. Bending and warping the raw colours and shapes of the Sandin Image Processor, she creates a series of images that seem to emanate from some ancient subconscious. Mixed together tightly with its percussive soundtrack, the film is a vibrant experiment in visual music.

Video artist and physics graduate Dan Sandin takes the viewer on a short tour of the Sandin Image Processor (IP), a modular video synthesizer that he invented. What starts as a serious technical introduction to the synthesizer slowly spaces out into a visual experiment in colour and effects, as Dan Sandin, wearing what appears to be a Catholic cardinal’s hat, tries to remain focused.

The rising sun reveals a gruesome crime. In the orange-red dawn, between the dunes and the rippling sea, a young woman is strangled to death. The victim’s neck is marked by the deep imprints of her murderer’s hands. The mother’s moving dirge – based on a poem by Percy Shelley – accompanies us as her daughter Ginevra is laid out and resurrects.

To the sweeping sound of a sitar, thousands and thousands of dots orbit a kaleidoscopic centre, like the individual notes of a raga circle the keynote. Repeated graphic patterns blossom and crumble back into the mass. As traditional as the reference points for James Whitney's breathtaking visual music were, the realisation with early computer animation by his brother John Whitney was just as innovative.

A macabre Italian children’s song tells the story of Mario, a soldier who returns from war and must learn that his girlfriend has left him for another man. Mario decides to kill her. The film picks up on the ambivalent mood of the song and reinforces its vibration in the space between blithe children’s game and brutal murder.

Using the Scanimate video synthesizer, da Vinci’s portrait of Lisa del Giocondo embarks on a surreal journey through real and artificial landscapes. In doing so, Toshio Matsumoto projects a kind of fantasy world of electronic images, exploding colour and movement onto his subject, animating Mona Lisa into a shimmering psychedelic vision accompanied by an abstract electronic soundtrack.

A diver encounters an injured whale. He decides to help the animal and gets a friendly look of thanks. For the space of a few seconds, the border between the two species seems permeable. The whale disappears in the depths of the ocean and leaves the diver wondering whether this was all just a projection of human hopes.

Rectangular shapes in luminous colours proliferate in a black void. They resemble phosphenes, the subjective perceptions of lights that can appear when we rub our closed eyelids. Coloured round surfaces circle each other, even though they live in separate graphic worlds. Lillian Schwartz, pioneer of computer animation, uses the EXPLOR 2D programming language to simulate strange and fantastic galaxies.