Mike Cantor

Mike Cantor is an Oakland, CA-based video artist, computational biologist, and pattern junky.

Cantor is best known for his unique experiments in abstract, collaborative stop-motion animation.  Over the past decade he has generated an immense library of "physical pixels" -- hundreds of thousands of hand-decorated velcro coins, painted cork, easter eggs, and tiny bead sculptures in myriad variations.  To create his films, Cantor assembles teams of artists to arrange these materials in sequences of patterns which are photographed to generated frames of video.  Cantor also use stop-motion animation to document the processes of both "pixel" and sequence creation.  In his most recent film Advanced Doodling, the art and documentary footage are melded together to create a visual feast in which the lines are blurred between process and product.  

Mike Cantor's first two short films screened in over 25 national and international film festivals.  His first film,  Hot Velcro Action, won Best Experimental Film and Best Visual Effects at the LA International New Wave Film Festival.  His collaboration with musician Brandon Patton, entitled Freckle, won Best Music Video at the San Francisco Frozen Film Festival and was featured on cbsnews.com. 

Mike Cantor holds Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from Stanford University and currently works at the Joint Genome Institute, building web-based visualization tools for the analysis of genome sequence data.  

Praise for Freckle