Last Lane
Martin, TN, USA

Proyecto: Future Garden

Video art with music.

tag: videoart

Proyecto: Back up my memories

Back up my memories is a reflection on the disquieting perspectives offered by cryopreservation. Is it possible to crystallize the brain? Can memories be frozen before death to be defrosted in the near future thanks to new scientific discoveries? Back up my memories is about the fear of losing memory and therefore of dying. Recovering memories means to long for immortality. So, the fear of losing memories will become the fear of losing data.
At the same time, the video imagines a future in which the infinite digitization and quantification of data has made information overloaded starting a process of crystallization. And certainly the more we will be connected to machines that will keep us alive, the more we will be imprisoned inside a global crystalline structure of data, information and technology from which we will nolonger be able to separate ouselves asit could mean accepting death.

tag: videoart

Marcia Beatriz, Granero
São Paulo, Brazil

Proyecto: Lacuna

Jaque Jolene investigates a cultural space where was a pharmaceutical
industry, taking with her medicinal plant juices and germinated seeds.

tag: videoart

RICE
The Hague, Netherlands

Proyecto: Environment Built for Absence

Beginning in early 2018, the demolition of the Netherland's Central Bureau of Statistics office provided a type of slow cinema for railway passengers traveling between The Hague and Amsterdam. Over the following year, as the building was methodically deconstructed from the top down, I visited the site each month to document the gradual erosion. Using a drone and a digital mapping process, photogrammetry, I created an archive of virtual 3D models. As the building's architecture and its inevitable collapse were reminiscent of English Author J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel High Rise, I further sought to accompany this scene with the voice of a machine learning system trained on the complete corpus of Ballard's writing. This recursive neural network generates texts that describe the materials, invisible bodies, and possible narratives residing within the broken grounds of the building. The resulting installation debuted in Den Haag NL in 2018 and combines video, neon lighting, and the voice of the machine learning system. Together with my research on the intersections of art and technology, this project explores intertextuality, automatic writing, language, vision, and the uncanny divide between human and machine cognition. Made possible by The Modern Body Festival (NL), Yukun Zhu, Google Artists and Machine Intelligence (US), Maxwell Forbes, and the University of Washington Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (US). Narration by Kevin Walton.

tag: videoart

Rodrigo Azaola 
Sydney, Australia

Proyecto: A little better

For several months I followed different cryptocurrency trading and development instant messaging platforms, actively participating in their discussions and even generating debates on specific topics such as trust, value, risk, the meaning of money, the role of central banks, national sovereignty, etc. At the same time, I particularly followed the visual language created for said discussions; all of which carried a particular narrative, permeated with exuberance, irrationality, speculation and greed, but also with true hopes of better and more open and transparent financial future. As I gathered textual and visual material was clear to me that traders and developers, as they attempted to consolidate financial digital protocols legitimized by cryptographic algorithms, were also intentionally or unintentionally establishing value resistant to the oversight of any sovereign state or central banks.

tag: videoart

Silvia De Gennaro
Bilbao / Roma

Proyecto:Travel Notebooks

Futuristic architecture consisting of imaginary animals from cosmic prehistory moves in an atmosphere that combines fantasy with industry. Bilbao, a city with a strong identity, a mixture of ancient values and fascination with progress. But who really are its inhabitants ? Where do they come from?

tag: videoart

Simone Stoll
Germany

Proyecto: The Sacred Space

"Erase those self-imposed concerns and the resentments, angers, lies…" are the opening lines of 'The Sacred Space'. The video shows two landscapes of water, juxtaposed, side by side. One has been filmed on the beach, showing a woman strolling along and then a ride on a big wheel by the ocean. The other landscape was shot closely to the ground by a brook in a forest. The shaky camera and the colour grading of the beach part give a sense of reminiscence, witnessing a moment of the past. One feels the presence of the person filming, whereas the other part is imbued with an atmosphere of tranquility and the lack of any human presence. We all hold memories inside, memories of sounds, odours, experiences. We store landscapes and have often one particular landscape stored inside, the one that represents home. Only a very few places have not been transformed by man, few places without artificial noise, electrical light spills, few places for a person to listen and to let the mind wander. June Singer sees the 'sacred space' as the
source to human being. Sacred Space speaks in a poetic way of reminiscence and the transience of life; life a fleeting moment of memories left behind.

tag: videoart

Stephen Hilyard
Middleton, WI, USA

Proyecto:(Katyusha)

(Katyusha)" is a three channel video piece based on material collected at Pyramida, a show-case community established by the Soviet Union in the Svalbard territory in the high Arctic. At its peak Pyramida was home to more than 1000 coal miners and their families. It was evacuated in two days in 1998 leaving a ghost town. "?????? (Katyusha)" presents three fictional characters who personify different aspects of Pyramida. The Guide takes the form of a gray sea bird, the Northern Fulmar. As the piece progresses we discover clues to the identity of two Lovers, a ballet dancer and a basketball player. The elaborately painted floor of the basketball court in Pyramida is a central motif, as is the abandoned ballet studio in the northern most corner of the town – once the most northerly ballet studio on earth. Time becomes unreliable as the viewer jumps back and forth uncontrollably between two time periods. In the 1980s the lovers meet as adolescent young pioneers in the idyllic summer forests of the Ukraine. After the evacuation a mysterious love token is left behind on the tundra amongst the empty shells of Pyramida. The third unspoken time period is only hinted at – always skipped over, never shown – the time that the lovers spent living happily in a town built of dreams at the end of the world. The lonely voice of a Soviet "numbers station" recites the names of the missing. "?????? (Katyusha)" is designed to be displayed on three synchronized HD monitors arranged in a row, or three high quality HD projectors. It may also be viewed as a single channel "letter-boxed" version.

tag: videoart