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Simone C Niquille ’s CGI film Beauty and The Beep
“I can’t help you with your film because people just want a gay film or lesbian film, and this mixture of sexuality in your film is just not going anywhere.”
– Taiwanese-American filmmaker and pioneering internet artist
Shu Lea Cheang , citing a frustrated distribution agent’s rejection of her gender-fluid sci-fi cinema. “My films have always been diversely queer, in terms of race, gender and sexuality,” Cheang explains. “I was known for gender-hacking and genre-bending.”
Foregrounding food production and consumption, Deirdre O’Mahony ’s “The Quickening” opens at Trinity College Dublin’s Douglas Hyde Gallery. In its eponymous film (2024, image), the Irish artist documents years of consultation with farmers and policymakers, conveying the “reality of farming and the centrality of soil to human, animal, and insect life.” Kicking off a tour, O’Mahony will subsequently screen the film in Carlow, Waterford, Kilkenny and other towns across Southern Ireland.
“Many technologies are modelled on our anatomy—they are extensions of us. I wanted to get closer to the sirens, to see them as a ‘circuit of an ear and a mouth, listening out for threat and broadcasting it to the population,’ to quote the film.”
– Artist
Aura Satz , describing the noisemaking subject at the heart of her debut feature film
Preemptive Listening (2024). In conversation with associate producer
Tendai John Mutambu , Satz discusses sonic aesthetics and how adopting an abolitionist framework impacted her narrative.
Gala Hernández López ’s sci-fi documentary for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world Hal Finney , who, in a fictional future, implements societal biostasis for economic gain.
“We want to hijack mass media in order to radicalize people politically. Videogames have an enormous potential to question ideology and they don’t fulfil this potential at all .”
– Austrian machinima collective
Total Refusal , on what drives their videogame appropriations. In the film
Hardly Working (2022), for example, they cast NPC workers in critique of contemporary labour. “Videogame narratives are very obedient to authority,” the collective says, “but there’s no reason that they have to be.” [quotes edited]
A bold step forward for filmmaker Gary Hustwit , Eno premieres at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City (US). Telling the story of fabled music producer Brian Eno with a twist, Hustwit takes the generative approach beloved by his subject to heart and presents a generative documentary—no two screenings are alike. With the assistance of software artist Brendan Dawes , interviews, unreleased material, and archival clips are mixed into a randomized narrative about the producer’s five-decade career.
“Copyright only works above a certain threshold of importance. That’s something you learn as an artist. Your voice doesn’t matter.”
– Artist and experimental filmmaker
Robert Seidel , on how little leverage artists have against data-hungry AI companies compared to major institutions like
The New York Times , which
sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement the day before Seidel’s talk at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37c3)
Total Refusal ’s newest videogame exploit Kinderfilm (2023) premieres at Locarno Film Festival (CH) in the prestigious international competition. Set and shot entirely in Rockstar’s action adventure Grand Theft Auto V
“Back to Earth: Contested Histories of Outer Space Travel” opens at New York’s Canal Projects. Nuotama Bodomo , Zahy Tentehar , and Alice dos Reis contribute to a film program that counters colonial space narratives (conquest, mining, tourism, etc.) with intersectional perspectives. Subash Thebe Limbu’s film Ningwasum Yakthung “knowledge, culture, ethics, and storytelling are still intact.”
Resurfacing fabled 18th century partially-dissected wax figures used in the study of anatomy, “Cere Anatomiche” opens at Fondazione Prada Milan, presenting four anatomical venuses and 72 drawings from the La Specola collection alongside a companion film by David Cronenberg . Entitled Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection , the Canadian director’s short dwells on how the figures’ uncanny “body language and facial expressions do not display pain or agony.”
The Lustenau (AT) art space DOCK 20 celebrates the videogame interventions of Austrian “pseudo-Marxist media guerilla” Total Refusal in an immersive solo exhibition. Known for appropriating blockbuster titles for cultural critique and counter narratives, the machinima collective stages three works that deal with sleep, work, and recreation. Their newest piece, Club Stahlbad (2023, image), is a Cyberpunk 2077
“The Technate,” an exhibition by Peter Behrbohm and Markus Bühler that “follows the wires” of North American internet infrastructure, opens at Berlin’s panke.gallery. The show centres their eponymous research project (2023, image), a reenactment of a 1947 road trip (from California to British Columbia) promoting the technocracy movement . In it, the duo cosplay as technicians (with a robot dog), and visit technoculture hotspots including Internet Archive and Noisebridge .
OUT NOW :
Buozyte & Samper (dirs.)
Vesper
A fable about the aftermath of ecological collapse, centred on a 13-year-old girl’s resilience and biohacking skills
Delving into their (eponymous) new film (image, 2022), “Capture,” a solo exhibition by Metahaven , opens in Trondheim, Norway. In it, the artist collective explores ‘knowability’ on three fronts: a rumination on the inscrutability of bats, CERN’s hunt for the Higgs boson , and the remarkable qualities of lichens . Their displayed media, and accompanying textiles and collages contemplate consciousness in “both speculative deeply implicated ways,” writes curator Stefanie Hessler .
“Letters, Lights, Travels on the Street (Bokura ga tabi ni deru riyuu )” opens in NYC. A collaboration by New Art Dealers Alliance (aka NADA) and NowHere, the Jeffrey Ian Rosen-curated show presents “a dynamic cross-section” of Japanese (fine) artists including Ken Kagami , Motoyuki Daifu , and Maki Katayama . Of note: included is “psychedelic, boundary-exploring” (electronics-infused) film by the late Minoru Yoshida (image: Epicurism of Space Universe on the Rock , 1975).
An ethnographic exploration of the work and daily life of non-playable characters, Total Refusal ’s meta-documentary Hardly Working premieres (and wins best direction) at Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland. The film follows four digital extras—a laundress, a stableman, a street sweeper, a handyman—toiling away in the videogame Red Dead Redemption 2
Art director Adam Pickard tweets an AI reimagination of Charles and Ray Eames’ iconic short Powers of Ten DALL-E 2 meditate on 57 text prompts—which are included—and apply the new inpainting feature to fill the gaps.
“He was the first man to fill a movie screen with pixels. Now, every movie you see was created on a digital machine.”
– Information technology pioneer and philosopher
Ted Nelson , cited in
Ken Knowlton ’s obituary. Knowlton, who died on June 16, was an American engineer, computer scientist, and artist whose work at
Bell Labs in the 1960s paved the way for computer animation. To create his self-referential 1964 short
A Computer Technique for the Production of Animated Movies , for example, Knowlton paired a dedicated programming language with an automatic micro-film recorder.
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