Metadata
1971 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Peter Foldès
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
Hundreds of movements registered on an early National Research Council computer produce fluid, morphing images in one of the first computer-animated films.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to canonize this as 'the first computer animation,' but what actually matters is that Foldès weaponized a military research tool to make something genuinely unhinged—watching raw data become flesh is so much weirder than the mythology allows.
Metadata sits at the precise hinge between two media traditions: the avant-garde's embrace of process and the emerging computational aesthetic; Foldès's decision to let the data visualization remain visible rather than hide it established a lineage we're still working through.
The singular move here is refusing to smooth the data into recognizable form—every morphing shape stays tethered to its mathematical origin, and that friction between human desire for figure and machine output is what makes eight minutes feel almost unbearably alive.