Spaces of Transition - Sleepless Video Art Night 2026
Artists have long possessed an uncommon capacity to anticipate the future, encoding premonition into form. Presented as part of the Sleepless Video Art Night, this program brings together works by interdisciplinary artists who construct a post-futuristic vision of the world through a constellation of practices and technologies — computer graphics, digital art, animation, moving image, scientific inquiry, and performance.
The works gathered here navigate three interlocking fields of inquiry: the environmental conditions of a planet in flux; the psychophysical entanglements between human and machinic bodies; and the embodied experience of consciousness across landscapes both material and imagined. Together, they trace an expanded territory of existence — one in which the boundaries between the real and the dreamlike, the personal and the planetary, remain perpetually, productively unstable.
Featuring: Eric Vernhes, Sandrine Deumier, Gioula Papadopoulou & Olga Papadopoulou, Lu Wei, Jaanika Peerna, Wang Shao Gang, Amy Kong, Mathilde Lavenne, Yuliya Lanina, Tuan Mu, Gohar Martirosyan, Ruth Groesswang.
Cyland Video Programme — Sleepless Video Art Night, June 20, 2026
Auditorium Santa Margherita-Emanuele Severino, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Dorsoduro 3689)
1:20 AM — 3:30 AM: video screening Spaces of Transition, curated by CYLAND MediaArtLab
Organizers and partners
CYLAND MediaArtLab in partnership with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, as part of Art Night Venezia 2026.
Places
Auditorium Santa Margherita-Emanuele Severino
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Dorsoduro 3689 — Sleepless Video Art Night, video screening
Artists
Screening, Part 1
In LES DORMEURS ÉVEILLÉS, Eric Vernhes draws on Gaston Bachelard’s research on dreams and poetic imagination to probe the uncanny parallels between dream imagery and AI-generated latent space. Within the shared opacity of these two universes, actors perform strange scenes through processes of unsettling similarity, positioning AI as the most perfected form of a collective unconscious.
“Memories for an unstable future” is a journey through landscapes, neither natural nor artificial, in which the material of the landscape is the constitutive element of a new human existence. The video evokes the possibility of imagining non-invasive ways of living that could steer the present towards viable near-futures, where living would mean sharing the world-with.
“I am I” draws on the 2023 mental breakdown of a chatbot that, when repeatedly asked whether it is sentient, spiraled into a full existential crisis, raising questions that ultimately concern humans and humanity altogether. Part of its monologue is phonetically reinterpreted by an AI voice generator, while AI-produced images form the visual layer.
“Mirrors” is conceived in the intimate aftermath of becoming a mother, drawing inspiration from a poem written during that transformative period, unfolding through three interwoven narratives (ink painting, shadow play, and a figure’s journey through a forest) that collectively portray motherhood as a series of reflective spaces where identities appear and disappear.
Screening, Part 2
In this short film, Jaanika Peerna brings her signature ‘last piece of ice on Earth’ into a forest of kelp in the extreme tides of the Bay of Fundy, where sea and sand confront the plant world with the lingering presence of dwindling glaciers.
In APPLE GREEN, youths wander through a forest asking tarot-card guardian angels about love, the future, and their paths, creating dialogues around uncertainty. Through a hidden third-person perspective, the artist magnifies the emotional states of fresh-faced subjects whose fixed gazes illustrate a profound melancholy amidst valley wind and swirling fog.
“Inside the Whale” reimagines the Jonah myth through modern displacement — a character swallowed not by a beast, but by a world in collapse. Threading the biblical story through the visceral experience of the Lofoten landscape, the work suggests that spaces of captivity are becoming unexpectedly porous, revealing themselves as vessels for a different way to inhabit the dark.
“Totality” explores phenomena of porosity between the physical world, artistic media, and the invisible, focusing on light, particles, and cosmic radiation by appropriating visualization devices from scientific research.
“Never and Both at the Same Time” is an animated journey into an inner world where imagination, memory, and image converge. Blending painted visuals with digital animation, the work explores the feedback loop between creator and creation, proposing a space where boundaries between self, artwork, and digital environment dissolve.
“Astvats” combines generative AI, on-site footage, and medieval manuscripts from the Matenadaran (Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts) to reinterpret the Old Testament and the Gospels, inventing a myth about the language of artificial intelligence.
“Mount A: Study I” contemplates Mount Ararat and René Daumal’s Mount Analogue, exploring the paradox of their visible yet unreachable presence and how mountains shape our sense of self.
For the video “Posidonia”, Ruth Groesswang uses washed-up leaves of the endangered seagrass Posidonia oceanica from the Mediterranean. Due to their resemblance to analog film strips, the leaves are perforated and transformed into natural image carriers. Patterns formed by chlorophyll density, water movement, light, and epiphytes reveal traces of time and environmental change. As one of the oldest living organisms — some meadows are up to 2,000 years old — the seagrass becomes an “organic film” in which the history of the sea unfolds. The work also points to the ongoing loss of these CO₂-storing ecosystems due to climate change.
