Projects
- 2026
Taking inspiration from 20th-century avant-garde experiments in graphical sound generation, the entire image in O/S functions as an optical soundtrack. Abstract motion becomes sound. What you hear is what you see.
- 2025
Taking inspiration from 20th-century avant-garde experiments in graphical sound generation, the entire image in O/S functions as an optical soundtrack. Abstract motion becomes sound. What you hear is what you see.
- 2025
Taking inspiration from 20th-century avant-garde experiments in graphical sound generation, the entire image in O/S functions as an optical soundtrack. Abstract motion becomes sound. What you hear is what you see.
- 2023
Shot entirely from an apartment on the 36th floor of a high-rise building, the images in this experimental animated documentary survey large parts of Hong Kong’s cityscape, drawing attention to the individual lives hidden inside its buildings - together alone, collectively sequestered. Initially recorded in 2020 and completed in 2023 with the advantage of critical distance, TWENTYTИƎWT / 二〇二〇 attempts to encapsulate the darkness, confinement, and uncertainty of the year 2020.
- 2023
Taking inspiration from 20th-century avant-garde experiments in graphical sound generation, the entire image in O/S functions as an optical soundtrack. Abstract motion becomes sound. What you hear is what you see.
- 2021
In this stereoscopic installation two-dimensional abstract animation is turned into immersive images with strong three-dimensional depth. Utilising a two-screen, semi-Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, Vœrtex creates a unique experience for the viewer, a hybrid space situated halfway between immersion-in-abstraction and the real world of the gallery space.
- 2019
A symmetrical matrix of generative synthetic growth iterations of varying frequencies and intensities.
Concrete Abstraction: Road Triptych is a motion painting that takes Hong Kong’s urban topography as its canvas. Road markings explode and contract across three synchronised screens in a portrait of the otherwise overlooked paints and stains that adorn the city’s streets.
- 2019
This experimental animation approaches Hong Kong’s built environment from the conceptual perspective of celluloid film, by applying the technique of film animation to the photographic image. The city’s signature architecture of horizon-eclipsing housing estates is reimagined as parallel rows of film strips: Serial Parallels.
- 2018
Motion creation, energy transmission, kinetic combustion. Audiovisual collaboration between composer Lux Prima, director Max Hattler, and a group of animators from the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong.
- 2017
A visualisation of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5, created with student animators at School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.
- 2017
Repetition and distortion drive this audiovisual collaboration between composer Lux Prima and visual artist Max Hattler, where fuzzy analogue music and geometric digital animation collide in an electronic feedback loop, and spawn arrays of divisional articulations in time and space.
- 2016
Shapeshifter explores video glitches induced by digital signal processing compression artefacts, which have given rise to a whole genre of YouTube videos dedicated to exposing shapeshifting reptilians hiding behind the surface of the video screen. Shapeshifter was created as the Official Trailer for the 29th Stuttgarter Filmwinter Festival for Expanded Media.
An animation installation that explores binocular rivalry and random dot stereograms in an attempt to create impossible spaces which break and subvert stereoscopic perception.
- 2015
—O| is a triptych of abstract animation loops. This work takes inspiration from Wayuu patterns and transposes them into a contemporary moving image context. A forever-expanding, mandalic circular structure, symbolizing the universe, is flanked on one side by moving vertical patterns which stand for rain, growth and life, and on the other side by horizontal patterns, symbolizing earth, drought, and death.
- 2015
This video work, commissioned by MONSTRA 2015 to mark the 80th anniversary of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa's death, presents the viewer with four of Pessoa's many faces: his heteronyms Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos, and his keen interest in astrology and spiritualism.
Responding to the compositional and aesthetic qualities of abstract expressionism and cameraless animation, All Rot uses photographic reanimation to render the mundane environment of a decaying crazy golf course into a rapturous split-screen experiment in synaesthetic cinema.
Constant Sky, a fulldome 360 film by Max Hattler, is inspired by the father of Russian cosmonautics Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
- 2013
Visual artist Max Hattler and advertising agency Contrapunto BBDO have collaborated to create abstract political short film Stop the Show (aka WAR). The film, commissioned by Amnesty International, is a reference to international relations and arms trade. The campaign was created in support of a United Nations treaty to regulate the arms trade between countries and reduce worldwide killings through firearms. Inspired by Collision .
Do you need more proof? Sensational crystal-clear footage of shape-shifting UFOs recorded under the influence in Farra di Soligo, Italy.
We have liftoff! Model Starship, a very brief encounter with another world.
- 2012
Using the New Age idea of a 'dimensional shift' as inspiration, Shift combines science fiction themes through abstract, stop motion animation of objects and colour.
The unknown X becomes a whole symphony of shapes... In a universe where everything is by itself yet can intersect with each other, cross-action seems the best way to solve an unknown equation.
- 2011
Two animation loops investigating the boundaries between human and abstract form.
- 2011
Exploring mirroring and feedback through abstract shapes, RE:AX takes us on a journey of action and reaction.
Official Festival Trailer for VIS Vienna Independent Shorts 2011. Bbbooommm-basss-tttick colour bar psychedelia.
- 2010
1923 aka Heaven is one of two animation loops directed by Max Hattler, inspired by the work of French outsider artist Augustin Lesage (1876-1954). 1923 is based on Lesage's painting A Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World from 1923.
A circular looping animation projection installation and award-winning abstract universe by Max Hattler.
- 2010
When conflict becomes a spectacle, the lines between destruction and entertainment get blurred…