CYFEST-11. Digital Video Program: To Touch the Sky
curator Viktoria Ilyushkina
2017-2018
Flights of fancy of humanity, dreams of fame, instantaneous movement, high above the clouds and to other planets – all these things are practically a reality today. Our thoughts and feelings have moved to digital clouds, to computers and gadgets. Our bodies exist in impossibly tall towers, in deserts, in conditions that were previously impossible for life, in space; and consciousness moves across the world without hinderance. Two worlds: the real and the virtual are irrevocably intertwined, and can no longer be separated. What used to be unimaginable becomes reality!
“Art absorbs modern technologies, creating augmented reality. The artist constantly acquires new tools to create images and metaphors of the real world. What does our world today look like, how does it translate to another visual language, how does our transaction transform, and our perception of the known?”
THE CYFEST 11 DIGITAL VIDEO PROGRAM is curated selection of video art works via open call, in various innovative genres: animated gifs, net art, 3D and stop-motion animation, cinema 4D, mockumentary and performance art, gaming, digital collage, and experimental films.
Artists
Alexander Borisov (Russia) / Clouds, 2017
Sci-Fi video art where Leonard Cohen’s “The Partisan” lyrics are spoken by a machine. The words “Germans” and “France” are changed to “Humans” and “Internet”, turning this war song into an unlikely computer resistance complaint where trouble and humour come together for better or for worse.
Mark Cypher (Australia) / Biogram, 2017
Biogram is a net-art work that generates real-time topological visual and aural models based on the sentiment analysis of tweets that reference ‘experience’. The art-work contends that rather than being a singular subjective event, the space of experience is entangled with multiple networks of human and nonhuman objects that help us perform what we might express as ‘experience’. In Brian Massumi’s words these tweets are Biograms, event-perceptions irretrievably entangled with combinations of senses, times, networks and software; in constant flux. Likewise in the artwork, the generated images, animations and sounds are intimate signatures of this networked and partially ephemeral activity.
Kseniia Galkina (Russia) / #IAMAHOLOGRAM, 2016
IAMAHOLOGRAM is a mocumentary video about people who have become holograms. To be a hologram means ceasing to have corporeal form, becoming completely digital in the physical sense, and not having a body. The work refers to the idea of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky about the final transition of the human being from a material state to an energy state. He saw “radial humanity” as the last stage of evolution. Are holograms a new technology which changes the existence of human beings, evolution or another form of escape from the real world?
Ariane Loze (Belgium) / Subordination, 2015
This work is part of a research project created at the invitation of Medienwerkstatt for Kraftwerk Mitte. It is an experiment about concepts of control and dominance, the possibility of casting doubt on the role of the subordinate who carries out orders. In this project the artist plays all roles at once: actor, camera operator and director. Ariana Loze invites viewers to play at being a researcher of hypertext.
Egor Kraft, Pekka Tynkkynen, Alina Kvirkveliya & Karina Golubenko (Finland-Russia) / Air Kiss, 2017
Air Kiss is a film and web based project portraying a scenario where citizenship is a digital membership – and ownership – to a collectivized system in which governance is done by AI. The project explores the social, political and aesthetic repercussions of algorithmic decision-making executed based on citizens’ location and behavior. It takes a critical standpoint towards a future society –neither a dystopia nor a utopia – where state and corporate governance is rendered obsolete through collectively owned and globally distributed neural networks which provide state functions as virtual services.
Maxim Svishyov (Russia) / Tsvetasis, 2017
With a 4D cinema computer program the artist creates imaginary kinetic sculptural compositions and puts them into an urban environment. In this work the artist counterposes the world with its plastics of live nature and stressful rhythms of megapolis. The artist sees it as a reflection of a possibility of saving a «living» element inside technological computerized environment.
Alexander Dupuis (USA) / three paths, 2017
three paths uses the motion of three points as the basis for generating sound and video. Three virtual microphones feed back in software, with this feedback creating an emergent relationship between the motion of each mic and the resulting sound. The microphone paths are also used to move pixels in a video feedback system, building a loose but intuitive audiovisual relationship between the audio and the visuals.
Ben Grosser (USA) / Touching Software (House of Cards), 2016
This a supercut of touch-based human-computer interactions from the popular Netflix show “House of Cards”. The result illustrates not only how the show’s actors perform the manipulation of software, but also how software performs through the actors in return.
Andréa Stanislav (USA)/Half a Generation, 2011
This work is an elegiac meditation on the grandiose architecture of Dubai, the laborers who built the city in “half a generation”, and its pending environmental decline — a visual iteration of the manifest destiny of global capital. Emerging as a dystopic, soulless vision of the future, notions of civil society, individual rights, and identity are subsumed in the logic of capital.
AUJIK (Sweden)/ Spatial Bodies, 2016
“Spatial Bodies” depicts the urban landscape and architectural bodies as an autonomous living and self-replicating organism. Domesticated and cultivated only by its own nature. A vast concrete vegetation, oscillating between order and chaos.
Tanya Akhmetgalieva (Russia)/ Need to wake up, 2016
A paradisiacal spring. A magical, constantly distorting fountain with shimmering water. Drops shine with bright colors. A closed system. A sign of eternity. Loneliness and isolation…
Alexander Senko (Russia)/Points of inflection, 2015
Sound and visual effects are mutually dependent. An algorithmic composition creates a figure with different frequency ratios and phase modulation. The curve generates the step, harmony and volume of the sound. The points of inflection on the curve create rhythmical structures. The work was created using a visual language of programming with pure data.
Elena Gubanova & Ivan Govorkov (Russia)/ World Famous!, 2017
An ironic statement by the authors about the main motivation of artistic work. Only this prospect attracts the modern artist, everything else is just the invention of a devious mind.
Andrey Kasay (Russia)/Seems, 2017
The clip “Seems” (part of a trilogy of music videos) for a song by Ilya Lagutenko / Mumiy Troll is the work from the Russian artist and illustrator Andrey Kasay, the creator of the Flakonkishochi animation brand. His works can be seen on MTV, Red Bull, CNN, Washington Post, New Yorker, Google.
Jean-Michel Rolland (France) / The Partisan, 2017
Sci-Fi video art where Leonard Cohen’s “The Partisan” lyrics are spoken by a machine. The words “Germans” and “France” are changed to “Humans” and “Internet”, turning this war song into an unlikely computer resistance complaint where trouble and humour come together for better or for worse.
