Videoprogram of CYFEST 16: Archive of Feelings. A Journey

 International Media Festival VIDEOFORMES

Humanity has always imagined the future as a journey toward a better, smoother life, like a utopian paradise on Earth. It’s been and still is a long way to go, especially when so many singularities find it challenging to match with each other in a world that extends to the infinite in its digital dimension and experimentations. What is left of humanity, then? Does it belong to memories of long-gone feelings?

Should we imagine a cold future where human relationships are reduced to a minimum, where the machine is privileged for a smoother dialogue or stuffed with artifacts that fill the need for sweetness and serenity? Are we able to imagine a future when we find it difficult to remember to stimulate used feelings? These selected works offer a panel to discuss our human dimension and contradictions.

Artistic director for VIDEOFORMES, editor of Turbulence Video / Digital & Hybrid Arts, a quarterly magazine, and curator.VIDEOFORMES is an international Hybrid and Digital Arts festival in Clermont-Ferrand, France. The festival highlights artistic creation such as experimental art videos, installations, hybrid art, VR, AI and Augmented Reality projects and live Video and Music performances. VIDEOFORMES has set up artistic education and culture programs, artistic residency programs, and digital archives. Gabriel Soucheyre is a former teacher at Université Clermont Auvergne, and a video and digital art producer, vlogger, and video-maker. 

Binary Blues

11 min. 4 sec., 2023

Binary Blues delves into the near future, a realm where robots assume authority over every facet of human life. From the mundane to the complex, they control it all, leading humans to have an unexpected surplus of leisure time. Through this artwork, Francesca Fini beckons viewers to ponder the fascinating paradox of monotony in a world that seems otherwise perfect, all depicted through the nostalgic lens of vintage cinema.

Francesca Fini is an Italian artist renowned for her contributions to experimental cinema, digital animation, installations, performance art, virtual reality, and AI. Her live performances often delve into the dynamics between public and private realms, the interaction between performers and audiences, and the representation of these elements. Her work critically examines societal impacts on gender and women’s issues, as well as the mainstream media’s distortion of beauty standards. Her live and recorded art seamlessly blends traditional media with lo-fi technology, interactive design, and generative audiovisual elements.

A half-dreamed memory

6 min. 26 sec., 2021

“It’s an image I’m chasing for, nothing else.” Gerard de Nerval, Sylvie (1854)

Between memory, dream, and nightmare, between human skin and digital technology, we look for an image and a sound to express wishes, affections, fears, anguish, strength, fragility, and hope. This is a process where pleasure resides in the search itself.

Úrsula San Cristóbal is an artist and researcher devoted to experimental music, performance art, video art, weaving, and calligraphy. With an academic background in music, she later specialized in contemporary art and audiovisual media. Ursula holds a PhD in Art History and Musicology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her dissertation on the role of sound and music in video art and performance artworks by Marina Abramović and Shirin Neshat received the Extraordinary PhD Award in 2020.

In memory of

5 min. 54 sec., 2021

How does a fading memory look? A forgotten person faces the material disappearance of what it passed. In memory of those who no longer exist, neither as a face, nor in our memories, nor in a short film.

Mattia Bioli (Italy) is a filmmaker and artist. He created different inter-medial projects, experimenting with every type of media and technique, from photography to animation. His short films have been exhibited at several national and international film festivals, including Visioni Italiane (Cineteca Bologna), Piccolo Grande Cinema (Cineteca Milano), Ribalta Experimental, Filmfest Bremen, TOFUZI, Linea d’Ombra, Minikino Film Week, Kino Otok, IBRIDA Festival. At the same time, he has been running a YouTube channel since 2014, where he tells the background of his personal works.

artifacts of you, artifacts of me

9 min., 2022

Сombining animation, live action, and photogrammetry, this intensely personal document tackles the universal subject of grief. It is an audiovisual reflection on the tension between photography and animation, death and digital reality, and the ghostly nature of space. 

Brecht De Cock (Belgium) studied at LUCA School of Arts, Sint-Lukas Brussels, where he obtained both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Audiovisual Arts, Animation. He is currently studying for a second master’s degree in Cultural Studies at the KU Leuven.

Previous projects by De Cock have been screened at the Leuven International Short Film Festival, Toronto Animation Arts Festival International (TAAFI) and Flicks International Student Short Film Festival.

Beyond Interfaces—Taiwanese Video program is inspired by CYFEST 16’s curatorial theme of Archive of Feelings. A Journey. Through the perspective of seven groups of Taiwanese artists, with the diverse viewpoints of historical memory, cartography, alchemy, nostalgia, virtual relationship and gaming disorders, “Beyond Interfaces” will examine the connection between technological objects and human emotions.

As a medium of data exchange between two physical entities, the interface, more than merely possessing the function of enabling transmission of information between software, hardware, and external devices, holds as much significance in its interweaving of human emotions and technology, generating complex modes of communications as a result. Through the course of each interaction, it transforms our language, thinking and bodily perception into information, allowing our emotions to seemingly move beyond the interface, and build behind it, a field of emotions.

Tuan Mu is an independent curator and visual artist based in Taipei. He attentively focuses on the potential of cross-cultural study and identity issues in contemporary contexts. His curatorial practices often engage curators, artists, and local people in fieldwork. During this he contemplates how exhibitions are constructed, recalibrating curatorial expectations and ideals. His curatorial proposals have been selected for the SLY Art Space Emerge Curator Project, NCAF Curator’s Incubator Program, and nominated for the Taishin Art Award. His curatorial projects include the exhibition Home: Foundation, Wall Cancer, Skin, and Shelter (2023, Taitung Art Museum) and Humus (2023, MoCA Taipei). 

Clear Calm Free Human

6 min. 45 sec., 2021 (2024 ver.)

A series of alchemical recipes for attuning that is simultaneously mythological, medicinal, and revealing of a cosmological order. To relieve an overflow of shadows in the melancholy lungs, to re-order the emotive in stagnated waters, to keep dexterity and flow and mobility of life. This piece borrows from the spirit of 12th-century Immortal Sister Sun Bu‘er infused with Taiwan’s national recommendation of anti-covid herbal tea.

lololol is a boundless laughter, an endless extension of lol (laugh out loud), an acronym that appears to be constructed by the building blocks of I-Ching and/or computer code. Founded by Xia Lin and Sheryl Cheung in 2013.

Dimension of Sea—Keelung 

2 min. 58 sec., 2024

3.8 billion years ago, the scorching Earth began to cool down, and the atmosphere’s temperature plummeted, leading to a relentless tempest that lasted for millions of years. The rain marked the beginning of the ocean, and the genesis of life forms, consciousness, and waves of cultures.

Dimension of Sea is a data sculpture that records the water colors of the city of rain, Keelung, breaking it down into different data dimensions, witnessing the ever-continuing cycle of waves. By using artificial intelligence to compress 30 days of tidal observation images from the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Keelung Port, the “Generative Adversarial Network AI” re-layers and generates poetic artistry, allowing the waves to be reborn in the virtual world, perpetuating the enduring impression of the city of rain.

Jiun-Ting Lai is a new media artist born and raised in Taipei. His practice focuses on the relationship between technology rights and individuals. He is currently working on the subject of “cognitive enhancement based on human-AI integration” through experimenting with wearable and intricately integrated devices that enhance human cognition as an intermediary means to resist “implantable surveillance capitalism.” He utilizes electroreception of the human tongue to create perceptual sculpture and experiments with the potentiality of human cognitive enhancement on the body part in an invasive yet non-implanted fashion. At the moment, he continues exploring electro-tactility as a form of art in Taipei.

ICING

7 min., 2021 (2024 ver.)

Using numerous phones to play games, the Pokemon Grandpa has created a unique persona in society. He is recorded on Wikipedia, covered by the media, and has even received job invitations because of it. However, carrying so much information alone has led to an overload situation. When faced with the massive wall of phones, you can’t see the joy of playing on his face; instead, you mostly notice the fatigue of handling the vast amount of information. For the sake of the game, having multiple accounts brings him troubles akin to a split personality. His bicycle, once a means of transportation, has lost its practical function. It now serves to carry multiple phones and a power system, limiting his field of vision and mobility and exceeding regulatory modifications, making it unroadworthy. The bicycle has transformed from a human transport tool into a support frame for technological devices. In this relationship, the person is compressed, losing subjectivity, and instead becomes subservient to the tools or merely acts as the activation code for a series of game stages.

Yen-Cheng Chen born in 1998 in Taiwan, graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at the National Taiwan University of Arts. He mainly uses video and installations as his creative media. He also runs a video production company, serving as both director and motion photographer.

Imitation Training

7 min., 2022 (2024 ver.) 

In the movie Snake in Eagle’s Shadow (1978), the lead actor undergoes training in martial arts through imitation. This work, using deepfakes, zeroes in on childhood memories of pretending to be kung fu movie stars. In the process practice and calculation, martial arts and technology, Jackie Chan and the self all gradually converge. When “technology” no longer refers to technology itself, it becomes a tool of nostalgia. This video presents the transformation in my relation with kung fu movies from pure spectator to collaborative editor and the gradual digitization process between physical and artificial interfaces.

Chen Chen was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, in 1997 and graduated from the Master’s program in the Department of Fine Arts at TNUA. His main creative form is video installation. Through various digital interfaces, technologies, equipment, and experiences, he deconstructs and remakes the martial arts films of his childhood, constantly contrasting, connecting, and intertwining the images and concepts in the process of shaping them. This allows him to explore issues related to image and virtual embodiment. In 2021, he participated in the residency program for the “The Great Wormhole in the Coastal Mountains Range Film Festival Artist-in-Residence Program” at the Gihak Artlab in Hualien. In 2022, he was shortlisted for the “The 2022 TNUA Contemporary Art Prize” at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts. In 2023, participated in the Digital Art Festival Taipei “DAFT x ARKO Video Art Screening Project”.

It was just a virtual kiss

7 min. 9 sec., 2020 (2024 ver.)

The love story set in the online game World of Warcraft becomes the basis for exploring how players construct their virtual bodies in the digital world and how these bodies extend into digital form. In this process, the game becomes a medium through which players can touch, embrace, and kiss one another, embodying their avatars in different fantasy races. By crossing to the other side of the screen, players create the illusion of physical and emotional connection, overcoming the limitations of their real bodies. This digital construction of the body is heavily shaped by machinima and computer-generated animation. The game world links digital haptic perception with real-world movement, allowing free traversal between the physical and virtual realms.

Being in the game world raises important questions: Are there other ways our bodies can exist? How far can the media really expand to overcome the physical limitations of our bodies? Will new forms of connection and romance emerge from these digital bodies? Are we anticipating entirely new emotional connections?

Poyuan Juan based in Taipei, is an artist, gamer, and internet addict, has long focused on digital games, cyberspace, and cyberqueer with digital archaeology as the core concept of his creative context. With a learning background in visual arts, he reflects on digital technology from the perspectives of sculpture, painting, and printmaking, presenting a new perspective and way of thinking to reflect on and question the meta-setting behind this post-Internet era.
 Poyuan Juan’s recent works focus on how to penetrate the technical objects and materials behind digital interfaces and images, thinking about digital technology and the contemporary situation in the digital technology world, and how digitalization reconstructs our perception. 

Jakarta Event Book

7 min., 2021 (2024 ver.)

Jarkarta Event Book is derived from the 1595 publication Itinerario by Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, a Dutch cartographer for the Portuguese East India Company. The book documented numerous sailors’ observations and local legends, with the sea monsters on its maps being a key element in constructing Jarkarta Event Book. The main creative method of Jarkarta Event Book is the “rewriting” of world geography. The artist uses Jakarta, the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company in Asia, as a reference point, attempting to create a virtual surface using space remote sensing imagery technology. By employing “pseudo-history,” they create a documentary, exploring a virtual space from a first-person perspective to reconnect and link fragmented historical events. The artist utilizes satellite remote sensing imagery, integrating real-time global observations with digital 3D point cloud technology to multi-temporal establish a composite, surface layer. This layer combines ancient maps from Itinerario with modern remote sensing images, creating a new surface that stitches together different eras, aiming to mend temporal fractures. Through “rewriting” texts, the artist reflects on and creates a technological narrative. 

Margot Guillemot and Chiehsen Chiu focus on spatial expression strategies and cartography, integrating perception, form, and historical analysis. Their works have been exhibited at Double Square Gallery (2022), Jogja Biennale (2021), Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (2021), Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei (2021), and received the X-Site Project award from the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 2021.

Wandering Ghost No.4 

3 min. 52 sec., 2020

Wandering Ghost No.4 is a VR installation that features a vertical, mechanical platform where users wear VR headsets and move through a simulated tower. Inspired by the Tower of Babel from Genesis, which symbolized humanity’s failed attempt to reach heaven, the installation reflects on the concept of “utopia”—a paradoxical notion of a perfect place that doesn’t exist. The artist constructs a virtual Tower of Babel, combining historical and ruinous elements to illustrate the loss of unified language and cultural fragmentation. This collapsing tower serves as a metaphor for modern global events and the ongoing quest for meaning in a never-ending historical cycle, urging reflection on the true nature of “utopia.”

Ya-Lun Tao was born in Taipei, Taiwan. Ya-Lun Tao is a pioneer in the Taiwanese new media art scene. He is the recipient of numerous prestigious honors and awards, including the International Digital Festival of Contemporary New Media Art (MADATAC) in Madrid, Spain; the most iconic contemporary art award in Taiwan—the Taipei Arts Award; and the Taipei County Prize. He participated in numerous artistic residencies in Europe and The USA. Ya-Lun has also held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Taipei; the Digital Art Center, Taipei; the Taipei Fine Arts Museum; the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, the Hong Kong Arts Center; the Headland Center for the Arts in San Francisco; the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts; IT Park; and Double Square Gallery.

The presented program explores various approaches artists take to preserve, understand, and transform different types of information: individual, social, historical, socio-cultural, biological, and technological, analog, and digital. The film by Heejeong Jeong is created using deeply personal documentary photos and video materials, which are transformed through the author’s techniques. Gagik Ghazareh’s work utilizes found documentary footage, re-edited to reflect the author’s decision to reject personalization, instead identifying a shared temporal pattern (the spirit of the era). Daria Belova’s feature film explores historical memory and the memory of place. In her performance, Liza Dandy raises questions about the differences between the physical and virtual existence of the human body, using a costume inspired by the design tool “Opacity.” JML (José Man Lius) synthesizes themes of museum storage, DNA secrets, and the emergence of avant-garde bio-architecture with the help of AI in his project. Collectively, these works illustrate the diverse perspectives of contemporary artists on the global issue of preserving human memory, which remains critically important today.

Time to Live

8 min., 2012

Gagik Ghazareh did not participate in the shooting of the film and had no connection to the actors. The footage, shot on 8mm film in the 1970s in Soviet Armenia, belonged to the family archive of the musicians seen in the film. Ghazareh helped digitize it under the condition that he could use it freely if desired. He assembled the film in a moment of deep sorrow after losing a relative whose wedding took place in a similar atmosphere when he was just a child. It was a time when his grandparents were the family’s pillars, and life felt rich and full.

Gagik Ghazareh, in Vardenik, Armenia, is a film director and producer known for his bold stance on human rights and resistance to political violence. He studied Feature Film Directing at the Armenian Pedagogical Institute during the challenging post-Soviet transition. His works, often censored by authorities, include a video essay about Artak Nazaryan and the documentary Listen To Me, Untold Stories Beyond Hatred, which faced pressure from the government and the church. Ghazareh has participated in international platforms and is known for his innovative approach, founding the “ONE SHOT” International Short Film Festival and “ONE SQUARE METER” Theater Festival. He currently runs the Open Platform for Arts NGO, continuing his experimental and documentary-focused projects.

Come and Play 

30 min., 2012 

Berlin. Grisha, a Russian-German boy, fools around with a wooden stick toy gun. The longer he plays, the further he is thrust into an altered reality. The boundaries between the past and the present, the real and the surreal, start to blur. Images from bygone Berlin appear; streets and buildings still carry the memories of war. Suddenly, he is caught in a nightmare of another lifetime, a nightmare that is still present today. Come & Play is a film about the memory of a place. Time does not disappear, and the past does not go away. Everything coexists in one moment. 

Daria Belova was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and graduated from the Faculty of Philology at St. Petersburg State University. She worked as a journalist, serving as deputy editor of the magazine Big City (St. Petersburg). In 2010, she moved to Germany to study directing at the German Film Academy DFFB in Berlin. Her film Come and Play won the Discovery prize at the Critics’ Week of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, and her 2023 film A Woman in Makueni was selected for the official competition at the Berlinale. Her short film Ballet Story and the TV documentary series Am I Psycho? (Ostwest, Berlin, 9 episodes) have been screened at over 150 festivals, earning more than 15 awards. Since March 2022, she has also been active in human rights work.

House of Wind

8 min. 5 sec., 2023

Through the identity of a house where the past and present coexist, it talks about the void of the sense of self and the illusion of hometown.

Heejeong Jeong is interested in the power of landscapes that are difficult to capture through the logic of reason, using photography and video. The artist uses unique colors and screen compositions to visualize symbols that are not easily read, revealing the dangers or fascinating moments embedded in ordinary daily life. At the 2017 Seoul International New Media Festival, she won the Audience Award for “The Red Room.”

MÜ. Protean Architectures

3 min. 50 sec., 2024 

The film presents a futuristic museum with a dystopian view of culture. The term “Mü” plays with rich polysemy and an intriguing oxymoron. This play on words and symbols enriches the title, highlighting the protean  and paradoxical nature of the architectures explored in the film. MÜ. Protean Architectures delves into the ethical and copyright controversies surrounding AI technologies. Developed with AI from OpenAI, RunwayML, ElevenLabs, and Adobe. Viewers are immersed in the MÜ museum, an art attraction exploring avant-garde architecture with living materials, where the walls interact with visitors. But who is MÜ really? Avant-garde architecture comes to life through biomorphic materials and cymatic moving structures that interact with visitors. MÜ unfolds, merging with human digital DNA, creating a hypnotic vibration. The final screen reveals the true nature of MÜ: a work of art, a virus, a weapon, and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

JML (José Man Lius) was born in Paris, of Caribbean origin (Guadeloupe), JML is a polymorphic artist (photographer, filmmaker, and scenographer). By combining various mediums, from object to image, from photography to video and virtual, he positions his work at the frontier of controversies between Arts and Science. Deeply rooted in collective memory and intangible heritage, his approach aims to create new meanings through the prisms of immersiveness, ethics, and ecology of life. His devices and installations unfold in exploratory experiences of the complex relationships between Nature, Artifice, Culture, and random temporality. The convergence of different forms of writing reveals a mesology of environments, exploring territories, hybridizations, identities, and the limits of the body. His work has been exhibited in collective exhibitions, festivals, and international biennials such as the Torrance Museum, VIDEOFORMES, Institut Français, Mémorial Acte.

Opacity 

2 min. 5 sec., 2024

The performance is a self-portrait of the artist. Using a costume that mimics the computer technique of opacity, she plays with the concept of virtual experience. Opacity is a term used in computer graphics to describe the degree of an object’s transparency. It is typically a tool in graphic design and editing software that allows you to make an image or a selected element completely invisible, revealing a gray checkerboard pattern underneath.

Modern individuals exist on the edge of reality and virtuality, constantly feeling the need to be seen online. They change virtual masks, transforming gender, appearance, and age. Sometimes, it seems as if their body is a blank canvas, ready for a new visualization, where even emptiness can become an image. 

Liza Dandy is a multimedia artist. Her works at the intersection of such media as photography, video, performance, object, sculpture and graphics, addressing the topic of identity and its meaning. The images created by Liza balance on the verge of reality and fiction. Born in St. Petersburg, graduated from Stieglitz Academy, Department of Costume Design and School of a Young Artist at the Pro Arte Foundation.