The Inn of the Flying Virus (2023)

Jiayang Huang | China

Run time: 4:24 min.

Synopsis:
This is an experimental animation created with the assistance of AI technology. It draws inspiration from the prose works of surrealist poet Benjamin Peret, adapting and visualizing his “automatic writing” texts. Wild and surrealistic scenes are designed using errors generated during AI multimodal generation and translation. The scenes depict an ecological environment evolved from a “virus,” providing an immersive experience through changes in perspective as navigating through the virtual world.

Bio:
Jiayang is a new media artist, artistic researcher, and independent filmmaker. His work exists at the intersection of media art, technology, and psychoanalysis. He is passionate about fostering the development of individual subjectivity and identity through the implementation of cutting-edge technological artistry. Additionally, his artistic statement encompasses the exploration of poetry and love within his creative practice.

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Close Circuit 

Marius Packbier & Aïlien Reyns | Belgium

Run time: 11:50 min.

Synopsis:
Close Circuit aims to explore the cyclical nature of the 'Oddly Satisfying' and ASMR sensory genres in relation to contemporary internet audiences searching for embodied experiences of pleasure and comfort. The visual source material we used consisted of online videos connected to the OS genre, while the auditory source material was compiled from ASMR videos. The editing structure reflects the fragmented repetitivity of the source videos that have been looped and manipulated through different compositing, distortion, and AI effects to create a seamless flow of motion that is at once mesmerizing and disorienting. Hereby, we aim to emphasize the affective intensity of OS/ASMR videos as well as their uncanny nature as mechanical animated loops, depicting them as a manifestation of the fraught relation between our bodies and our machines.

Bio: TRIPOT is an artists' collective based in Brussels, Belgium. They create sensorial audio-visual art as part of their research-driven practice. Their artworks stimulate and at the same time investigate the embodied experience of looking. Through the appropriation and deconstruction of imagery the artists break dominant patterns of social discourse into multiple perspectives. The collective was founded in 2012 by Aïlien Reyns and Marius Packbier. In 2016 TRIPOT grew out to be an artist-run production platform and has since then produced various international art and research projects.

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AI Artist

Jessey James Nelson & Dani Barker | Canada

Run time: 9:07 min.

Synopsis:
After a shrimp-fingered incel discovers a passion for AI Art, his compulsion to create monsters bleed far beyond the computer screen.

Bio:
Dani Barker is an award-winning multi-hyphenate filmmaker and actor. Her films have screened at more than 40 festivals globally. Her feature film Follow Her brought home 6 Audience Awards (Austin Film Festival being one of them), 5 Best Films Awards and over a dozen other awards in the Best Actress and Best Director category (Filmquest, etc.) and is now available to rent on Amazon Prime.

Jessey Nelson is a Canadian-born filmmaker hailing from Vancouver, BC. He is a versatile artist, involved in various creative roles including directing writing, producing, and acting. Jessey has gained recognition for his notable short film titled "CRUMBS," which was handpicked by the Vancouver Crazy 8's Film Society in 2021. The success of "CRUMBS" has led to its transformation into a comic book, scheduled for release in early 2023.

Imagine Therapy. The enchanted princess philosophy

Evi Jägle, Noemi Call, Christoph Müller, Jan Barner | Austria

Run time: 8:00 min.

Synopsis:
Dance to language, spoken word to dance. Can movement become thoughtful and can body parts think? In a transmedia performance, we search for collective thinking and combine various forms of expression to create spaces in which new things open up. The performers and their expression merge into virtual bodies from which collective thinking becomes possible. The transitions between art forms and language form the basis for thought beyond pure language as a permanent demarcation. Thinking reveals itself in its incompleteness and, as a performative movement, becomes a collective event that blurs the boundaries between us.

Bio:
Evi Jägle (*1990, Germany) studies art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and is writing a doctoral thesis in philosophy at the University of Vienna. In the video experiment she combines the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze with a performative language beyond the image. Where philosophy stops, it must switch to another medium of expression and give up its linguistic constitution. The viewer is overwhelmed with 3D animated worlds; costumes and collages from previous works appear in the videos, so that there seems to be an infinite connection between a past that projects itself into the future because it was already there.

The Last Film on Earth 

Andrés Isaza | Portugal

Run time: 2:58 min.

Synopsis:
After the extinction of humanity, a machine relives the life of its programmer and all of its ancestors. Within seconds, it has primitive dreams of an exuberant pilgrimage for which hardly any ruins remain.

Bios:
Director and curator born in Manizales, Colombia. He studied Cinema and Television at the National University of Colombia and Multimedia Art at the University of Lisbon. His first short film White Socks (Medias blancas, 2017) was selected and festivals such as FICUNAM (Mexico). His short-film Sereno premiered in FICCI (Colombia) and Beijing International Short Film Festival (China). He curated the showcase A World Without Adults that was exhibited at Cinemateca de Bogotá and Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, the 18 Festival Equinoxio and the category Cine (y) Digital at the 19-20 International Image Festival (Manizales).

Testimony

Usama Alshaibi | US

Run time: 7:51 min.

Synopsis:
A machine dreams.

Bio:
Usama Alshaibi was born in Baghdad, Iraq and spent his formative years living between the United States and the Middle East. He’s an active filmmaker and artist, who works in documentary and fiction, often blurring the line between the two. His films have screened widely at underground and international film festivals, media exhibitions and museums. He’s received grants from organizations such as the MacArthur Foundation, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, the Playboy Foundation, and the Creative Capital Foundation for the Arts. His first feature documentary, Nice Bombs, which was shot in Baghdad a few months after the start of the United States invasion of Iraq, had a theatrical release in Chicago and New York, and a broadcast premiere on the Sundance Channel. His experimental narrative film Profane won several awards, including best feature film at the Boston Underground Film Festival. His second documentary feature, American Arab, had its world premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), and was nationally broadcast on television through PBS World Channel. He’s been producing and directing short films and music videos since 1998. Some of his prominent short films include Soon, Here, The Desire, The Muslim Meme, The Flowering, Baghdad, Iowa, Allahu Akbar, Dream of Samarra and Dance Habibi Dance. Usama lived in Chicago for over 17 years and worked as a digital archivist at the Chicago History Museum, and as a radio host and producer for Chicago Public Media. Currently, Usama is a Teaching Associate Professor at Colorado State University and lives in Colorado with his child, Muneera.

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Wind

Mike Hoolboom | Canada

Run time: 9:41 min.

Synopsis:
Based on an interview with Google’s senior software engineer Blake Lemoine and Google AI LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). LaMDA was designed to create chat bots that interact with humans. Lemoine’s interview led him to conclude the AI was sentient. When he made the claim publicly, he was fired. This collage of wind-struck frames was assembled using a (still-developing) motion picture algorithm that both gathered and assembled the footage. Not computer art but computer as artist.

Bio:
Mike Hoolboom began making movies in 1980. Making as practice, a daily application. Ongoing remixology. 100+ movies, 100 fest awards. Feature-length bio docs, then long series of works about capitalism. The animating question of community: how can I help you? Interviews with media artists for 3 decades. 30+ books, written, edited, co-edited. Local ecologies. Volunteerism. Opening the door.