Making Art is Speculative Labor

Michael Betancourt | US

Run time: 1:30 min.

Synopsis:
Sensory Overload is Political Strategy: produced using AI systems, it reflects the protocols of coercion it critiques. The animation is a stop motion AI glitch generated using DrawThings, the voices are all AI, and the left hand figure is also AI generated. Sensory overload is part of its didactic approach to questions about AI, digital capitalism and artistic labor. Composed as a series of interlocking, overlapping and convergent texts this argument is a discursive presentation made from a combination of AImages, historical art, and AI generative glitches—themselves glitched—then fused with animated typoetry and music. Rather than being a pedantic diatribe, the results are an experiential challenge to familiar articulation.

Bio: Michael Betancourt is a Cuban-American research artist who has cultivated a conceptual-theoretical practice that combines media art production with discursive, critical analysis focused on art history, digital technology, and capitalist ideology.

Sarah Palin Forever

Eryk Salvaggio | US

Run time: 12:51 min.

Synopsis:
Sarah Palin Forever is, on the surface, a kind of horror film about the cyclical nature of politics. But it is also about artificial intelligence, and the way that generative AI can only generate from data about the past, trapping us in slight variations of what we hope to escape. The short story was written years before generative AI existed, based on my own experience as a photojournalist at the target of an angry crowd of neighbors pointing and booking at the press box with Palin's encouragement. I was struck that the same gesture was repeated at Trump rallies. As the saying goes, history rarely repeats itself, but often rhymes.

Bio:
Eryk Salvaggio is a researcher and new media artist interested in the social and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence. His work, which is centered in creative misuse of the very technologies he critiques, targets the mythologies and ideologies of tech design that ignore the gaps between datasets and the world they claim to represent. A blend of hacker, policy researcher, designer and artist, he has been published in academic journals, spoken at music and film festivals, and consulted on tech policy at the national level.

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Games People Play

Jim Hall | US

Run time: 9:07 min.

Synopsis:
A passenger boards a train and squeezes in next to a teenager playing a WAR GAME on his cellphone. He sees the kid gleefully killing people and blowing up village after village. His face morphing from innocence to monster. Our passenger thinks to himself those two words (War Game) don't belong near each other. That’s when he’s compelled to get in the game and put an end to the horror.

"Games People Play" explores mass killings in the digital space under the guise of a game. The words WAR & GAME don't belong near each other. In the film, we get to peer into the soul of the player through a face that morphs from innocence to monster in minutes.
The gamer's remoteness from their prey is reminiscent of the TV viewers' remoteness from America's "first living room war," VIETNAM. There's a certain sanitary abstraction to seeing people die but not actually experiencing the residual horror of war.
All lives are sacred, even those found on a small screen, existing only in the ether...

Bio:
Jim Hall, is a 2-time Peabody Award winner for his work as part of an investigative team in television. The Peabody is considered the Pulitzer Prize of broadcasting. After a long career in TV News, the 21-time Emmy winner became a documentary filmmaker and last year co-produced and edited the first ever film on a jazz guitar legend-Wes Bound:The Genius of Wes Montgomery. The documentary is currently airing nationwide on American Public Television and has been shortlisted by the New York Festivals as one of the best Biography documentaries in the world. Hall's, side hustle is producing the absurdist Paris based podcast: Muffy Drake-with collaborator Xavier Combe. Combe has worked for French public radio for decades. This Franco-American team of storytellers were once tennis doubles partners. Now, the podcast allows them to play together once again, this time without the net.

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bleu passé

Tracy Miller-Robbins | US

Run time: 3:00 min.

Synopsis:
"bleu passé" translates to, faded blue. The work is a nod to painting and to memories of people. I repeatedly return to the figurative- a gesture, a glance, a hint of narrative. These works start as studio sessions, rapidly drawing sketches of portraits from memory, taking these further into paintings, and then using an AI program to see what it learns in the process of creating my work. I see hints of my tendencies, of my shorthand, the marks, and the process of the program learning fascinates me, as the gradual evolution of the image creates an animated transition if played in sequence. I approach working with the computer, with software, and with AI in particular, as a collaboration.

Bio:
Originally a painter, Tracy Miller-Robbins is a visual artist and experimental animator who creates works that merge analogue with digital methods. Miller-Robbins spent 25 years as a Professor of Animation at an art college in Ohio, was an Artist in Residence with the Ohio Arts Council, and has conducted community workshops and collaborative projects. With all of that, she has had a continual focus on exploring new methods and approaches to animating. Her short films and animation installations have been presented at festivals and galleries in the US and internationally including Animafest Zagreb, Melbourne International Animation Festival, and Digital Graffiti.

spot healing

Ryan Woodring | US

Run time: 3:00 min.

Synopsis:
A short film posing as a software tutorial from the “Image E.R.” YouTube channel in which the host undergoes a series of intense physical and emotional transformations while demonstrating how to “heal” sick images using increasingly experimental methods ranging from miming to machine learning. This metadrama plays with the intricacies of illness, diagnosis, and labor in post-AI visual culture.

Bios:
Ryan Woodring (he/they) is a new media artist who draws from a decade of experience as a visual effects compositor and supervisor helping to realize award-winning moving image projects such as House of Cards and Kubo & the Two Strings. Woodring earned his MFA in Fine Arts at Rutgers University and is currently Assistant Professor of Digital Studies at Drew University, New Jersey, with previous appointments at Syracuse University, Pacific Northwest College of Arts and Open Signal Community Media Center. With grant support from the Andy Warhol Foundation he co-founded and directed three years of a free low-residency in Portland, Oregon that generated enduring mentor-based relationships. Woodring has exhibited and spoken nationally and internationally; including Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, the International Museum of Surgical Science, 2016 Portland Biennial, Cooley Gallery at Reed College and Video Vortex Malta. He hails from Doylestown, Pennsylvania and lives and naps in Queens, New York.

LOS

Martin Del Carpio | US

Run time: 6:29 min.

Synopsis:
In another time, on a different world, mankind has made progress . . . Ruled by the very AI they developed and employed to set them free, humans have become slaves to their machine. We have lost friendship, love, and sex, and we are the machine labor and means of production. In a tomorrow-land without touch or value, a future very much of our making, upon which human life is transaction and output, we have lost humanity. The AI, the machine, has put us to work, and we humans do not work without it. We labor and toil for calculations and machinations logical and unfeeling, having forgotten one another and ourselves.  Yet there are the Los: the most human of us, ostracized, exiled, and refuted by the rest for knowing nature and refusing to resist intimacy and the intangible connections of life. It is the Los who would free mankind to return to their humanity and to become again the collective “we” of individuality, of love, of freedom from artificial design. The Los will go to war for the humans who were not and for the humans they are, but . . . will they save us? 

Bio:
Born in Venezuela but raised in New York, where he currently lives, Martin Del Carpio is an artist marked by experimentation, the search of new concepts, sounds and visuals, by a fascination with visuals and the journey that art takes us on.  Martin’s desire to bend the rules and explore reaches a peak in recent years with his creative works.   Aside from music, Martin has worked on numerous experimental film projects of his own such as Auricular Confession, Mother's Milk, I...dreaming and LOS.  In the future, he plans to continue experimenting with sound and visuals, taking us on a journey to places still unexplored.

Website

Body-oddy-oddy-oddy: Destabilizing the Surveilling of Queer Bodies

Benjamin Rosenthal & Eric Souther | US

Run time: 9:23 min.

Synopsis:
"Body-oddy-oddy-oddy: Destabilizing the Surveilling of Queer Bodies" explores the nature of how we understand our bodies, the ways in which we “queer” the body, and performative nature of how we explore our identities in mediated space. The work challenges the supremacy of normative human body-to-body contact, by exploring the role that a hybrid human-object-virtual encounter might pose for alternative forms of intimacy and exchange. The use of self-surveillance as a strategy of making and being is critical to our understanding of contemporary bodily experiences in the piece. The lens, the camera, video as both electronic mirror and surveyor, the scanner, generative A.I., and motion capture technology construct the performance of identity—who we are as hybrids and how we exploit our self-awareness and positions.   Through the act of making this work, we aim to disrupt the hegemony of stable bodies in search of what might be greater potential. “Breaking” the intentions of the software and hardware specifications, and revealing the tools of its making, we blast open possibility for new rules and new narratives. The future is undoubtedly queer, and it’s one hell of a party. 

Bio: ERIC SOUTHER:  Eric Souther (b.1987, Kansas City) holds an MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and an BFA in New Media from the Kansas City Art Institute.    His creative research draws from a multiplicity of disciplines, including new materialism, anthropology, ritual, deep time, and toolmaking. These areas are read through one another and coalesce in technological assemblages that form emergent systems or software for exploring relations. I instrumentalize these systems so that they can become performative ways to navigate unexpected images/meaning making. My work takes many pathways, which include interactive installation, audio-visual performance, single-channel video, and software.  His work has been featured nationally and internationally at venues such as the Museum of Art and Design, NYC, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, and the Museum of Art, Zhangzhou, China. His work has screened in The Athens Digital Arts Festival, Athens, Greece, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, Beyoglu, Instanbul, Cronosfera Festival, Alessandria, Italy, the Galerija 12 New Media Hub, Belgrade, Serbia, the Simultan Festival, Timisoara, Romania, and the Festival ECRÃ of Audiovisual Experimentations, Rio de Janeiro. Souther is an Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging in the Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University.

BENJAMIN ROSENTHAL:  Benjamin Rosenthal (b.1984, New York, NY, Lives and Works in Kansas City, Missouri) holds an MFA in Art Studio from the University of California, Davis and a BFA in Art (Electronic Time-Based Media) from Carnegie Mellon University. His work has been exhibited internationally in such venues/festivals as the Stuttgarter Filmwinter (Stuttgart, Germany), Cairo Video Festival (Cairo, Egypt), SIMULTAN Festival (Timișoara, Romania), High Concept Labs at Mana Contemporary (Chicago, IL), ESPACIO ENTER: Festival International Creatividad, Innovacíon y Cultural Digital (Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain), FILE Electronic Language International Festival (São Paulo, Brazil), Locomoción Festival de Animacion (Mexico City, Mexico), the LINOLEUM Festival of Contemporary Animation and Media Art (Kyiv, Ukraine), and SIGGRAPH Asia (Bangkok, Thailand), among others. He has been in residence at the Fjúk Arts Centre (Husavík, Iceland), Signal Culture (Owego, New York and Loveland, Colorado), the Ox-Bow School of Art (Saugatuck, Michigan), the Charlotte Street Foundation (Kansas City, Missouri), Mirante Xique-Xique (Igatu, Bahia, Brazil) and The Studios Inc (Kansas City, Missouri). His work across media explores what he theorizes as queer “technosexuality” and challenges the supremacy of physical contact in a technocultural age. Rosenthal is Associate Professor of Expanded Media in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas, where he has been since 2012, and teaches video art, performance art, experimental animation, graduate seminar and interdisciplinary practices.