Xanadu is a 4-channel video installation by Robert Boyd that represents a history of apocalyptic thought as a series of MTV-style music videos.
Social & External
The people behind it
If a machine would possess a soul it might be a beach. Every single sand corn symbolizes a data-set of a memory captured in the world wide web saved deep down in the ocean. From there the bytes condense and finally reach the cloud. But how would it feel for a machine to see the glitch waves and feeling the shore stones on its case? What would be the colours of the coastline? Glitching Offshore tries to portrait the soul of an AI and the universe behind it. Glitching offshore, alike drifting away as in a psychogeographical dérive (furthermore, away from the "rive": bank) where human intentional yet chaotic action is substituted by pixels' stirrings of the soul.
Pegasus viz. incorruptibility undergoes a stress test to prove its name. Will his code of chivalry stand the attempts at corruption? Here we have four situations in which he gets proved. Criminal solicitations interfere digitally in the shape of data moshing. He takes a rough ride onto the mosh pit of the blockchain. Cybercryptocy video art meets classical Greek mythology.
Queen of the Luna Par(k)ing is a moving image produced by Sara Ferro and Chris Weil. The title itself is a combination of the element moon (from the Italian “luna” ) shining over a parking slot, where a girl is waiting for encountering someone, perhaps the king of the luna park. While acting in the gap of certainties like a lonely queen the moonshine splits its aura into the colours red/blue/yellow, interpreting the interstellar communication signals of Voyager 1 launched by the NASA in 1977. Exactly the year when the protagonist Wundersaar (Luna Queen) was born. Therefore the journey of the Voyager space probe can be seen as a metaphor for the expedition of every human being discovering the unknown in the deep space of life.
SPEED is the result of an artificial intelligence transforming bin footage into something beautiful in order to free the planet from pixel pollution. By video recycling trash shots into video art using the latest algorithm technology, visual art may help to understand our limited resources on earth and how to use them in a respectful manner. Every day we produce millions of clips sharing them on social media without even noticing anymore how much pixel garbage we create. At the same time, we produce every day millions of tons of plastic waste, polluting our environment without even noticing it anymore. SPEED wants to be a symbol of change as we are running out of time.
Bits and blocks are the home of the Super Vario Birds who are dancing to the 8bit symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven.
A dream where obsession for German as a second language mixes up with an obsession for neatness and cleanliness as a distinctive feature of the national culture in question seen from the perspective of a foreigner. The dream is not a nightmare only because the set it is dreamt into is the seashore of the mare nostrum, where the dreaming subject is perfectly at home. A homeland which she, in turn, in her more secret thus naïf dreams would dream of being cleaner and tidier as in the reality, especially in front of such beauty of nature. As is right and proper.
An experimental film comprised of Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING played forwards and backwards at the same time on the same screen, creating bizarre juxtapositions and startling synchronicities.
Performance video about a holiday romance at St Ives, Cornwall.
After concluding the now-legendary public access TV series, The Pain Factory, Michael Nine embarked on a new and more subversive public access endeavor: a collaboration with Scott Arford called Fuck TV. Whereas The Pain Factory predominantly revolved around experimental music performances, Fuck TV was a comprehensive and experiential audio-visual presentation. Aired to a passive and unsuspecting audience on San Francisco’s public access channel from 1997 to 1998, each episode of Fuck TV was dedicated to a specific topic, combining video collage and cut-up techniques set to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The resultant overload of processed imagery and visceral sound was unlike anything presented on television before or since. EPISODES: Yule Bible, Cults, Riots, Animals, Executions, Static, Media, Haterella (edited version), Self Annihilation Live, Electricity.
An exploration of how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war. Three Dead depicts a military exercise within a mock Iraqi town built on the outskirts of Twentynine Palms, California, blurring the line between computer simulation and reality.
An exploration of how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war. In Immersion, Farocki presents footage of a role-playing exercise in which military psychologists demonstrate how to use the PTSD program on their colleagues, who describe traumatic wartime experiences. On a second channel, their descriptions play out as virtual renderings.
An exploration of how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war. In A Sun With No Shadow, Farocki calls attention to the subtle differences between the simulations for combat training and PTSD. With the former, the sun can be programmed to cast shadows in the virtual combat zones, while the latter, less expensive technology does not offer this feature.
Furio’s Furious Fragments & Friends - Furio Jesi (1941 Turin -1980 Genoa), enfant prodige moving between a plethora of disciplines – egyptology, history of religions, German philology, literary criticism - passed away prematurely, not without leaving bright fragments which throw light on mechanisms beneath many socio-cultural practices, for instance regarding cultural belonging, the functions of myth in modern society. He saw kind of “mythological machines” at work underneath our cultural production of meanings, historically determined, departing from a void, something that is still in culture but as residue, a missing link to an alleged authentic experience nowadays compromised up to the point to became just rhetoric, a byword, which is in no way neutral, but a tool, a macchina, for maintaining the status quo and serving the power apparatus. As in the case of holidays, celebrations and festivals.
Strange things occur tonight whether the paranormal phenomenon is the invisible invasion of aliens from outer space or light flashes of another dimension? We will never know. Are we alone or may we encounter extraterrestrial species that are coming at night to conquer our dreams, our body and mind? What are you afraid of?
STEINA: “My background is in music. For me, it is the sound that leads me into the image. Every image has its own sound and in it I attempt to capture something flowing and living. I apply the same principle to art as to playing the violin: with the same attitude of continuous practice, the same concept of composition.
Changing the usual perspective when watching a film—the viewer is no longer in front of the images, but beneath them. The translucent silhouette of two people having sex makes it feel as if you are lying directly under a glass bed, watching a couple explore each other with intimacy and curiosity.
Live performance with 16mm projectors. This is a simulation of a prototype for a “feeling machine” envisioned by Dr. D. Forme in 1917. This simulation is based on a short description and diagram found in the doctor’s notebooks. The description focuses on only one section of the machine. Brief mentions of the other sections were included but no detailed information was discovered. The machine was never built, yet according to the description its purpose was “to replace the faulty mechanism of human emotion”.
Arrancar los ojos is a project that proposes a constellation of works around the gaze and its political dimension. A reflection on the concepts of institutional violence, repression and collective trauma, focusing on the pattern of eye attacks by state security forces.
A quiet mediation on the sea (and what might lie beneath the surface?) from the late 70s.
"Delineations" is an experimental short film highlighting Long Island, New York. Made using satellite images from Google Earth, the film explores nostalgia, growth, and confinement.
In 1973, a young gallery assistant goes on a wild adventure behind the scenes as he helps aging genius Salvador Dali prepare for a big show in New York.
A man whose brain becomes magnetized unintentionally destroys every tape in his friend's video store. In order to satisfy the store's most loyal renter, an aging woman with signs of dementia, the two men set out to remake the lost films.
In a suburban landscape, the lives of several families interlace with loss, despair and personal crisis. Esther Gold has lost focus on all but caring for her comatose son, Paul, and neglects her daughter and husband. Lawyer Jim Train is devoted to his career, not his family. Helen Christianson wants to find a new spark in life, while Annette Jennings tries to rebuild hers.
More interested in partying and flirting with young musicians than work, veteran rock journalist Ellie Klug has one last chance to prove her value to her magazine’s editor: a no-stone-unturned search to discover what really happened to long lost rock god, Matt Smith, who also happens to be her ex-boyfriend. Teaming up with an eccentric amateur documentary filmmaker, Ellie hits the road in search of answers.
To escape neglect and abuse from his parents, a young boy plants some strange seeds and they grow into a grandmother.
Captured during Billie Eilish's sold-out world tour, a concert experience from one of the most celebrated and successful artists of her generation, presented in immersive 3D.
When a group of misfits is hired by an unknown third party to burglarize a desolate house and acquire one rare VHS tape, they discover more found footage than they had bargained for.
A poor, struggling South Carolinian mother and daughter face painful choices with their resolve and pride. Bone, the eldest daughter, and Anney her tired mother, grow both closer and farther apart: Anney sees Glen as her last chance.
When a comet passes close to the earth, machines all over the world come alive and go on homicidal rampages. A group of people at a desolate truck stop are held hostage by a gang of murderous 18-wheelers. The frightened people set out to defeat the killer machines…Or be killed by them.
Inside a darkened house looms a column of TVs littered with VHS tapes, a pagan shrine to forgotten analog gods. The screens crackle and pop endlessly with monochrome vistas of static white noise permeating the brain and fogging concentration. But you must fight the urge to relax: this is no mere movie night. Those obsolete spools contain more than just magnetic tape. They are imprinted with the very soul of evil.
Young teen girl Xiu Xiu is sent away to a remote corner of the Sichuan steppes for manual labor in 1975 (sending young people to there was a part of Cultural Revolution in China). A year later, she agrees to go to even more remote spot with a Tibetan saddle tramp Lao Jin to learn horse herding.
Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and the exceptional music by Philip Glass.
Grindhouse combines Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, a horror comedy about a group of survivors who battle zombie-like creatures, and Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, an action thriller about a murderous stuntman who kills young women with modified vehicles. It is presented as a double feature with fictitious exploitation trailers preceding each segment.
Al Pacino's deeply-felt rumination on Shakespeare's significance and relevance to the modern world through interviews and an in-depth analysis of "Richard III."
In the heart of Styria the Karnstein Family, even after their mortal deaths, rise from their tombs spreading evil in the countryside in their lust for fresh blood. Baron Hartog whose family are all victims of Karnstein vampirism, opens their graves and drives a stake through their diabolical hearts. One grave he cannot locate is that of the legendary beautiful Mircalla Karnstein. Years of peace follow that grisly night until Mircalla reappears to avenge her family's decimation and satisfy her desire for blood.
In this anime visual album, a mysterious driver heads deep into a postapocalyptic hellscape toward a ferocious showdown with two monstrous opponents.
A drama set in the American South, where a precocious, troubled girl finds a safe haven in the music and movement of Elvis Presley.
After a mission goes wrong, only one of a group of mercenaries is left alive to avenge his fallen brothers.
Director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born adults after a 7 year wait. The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.
Years after her son's suicide, a woman longs to confront both the past and a friend of his who took his business idea.