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Dreamland (2017)
Mirai MizueDreamland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.
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Dreamland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.
'Where the City Can't See' is the world's first narrative fiction film shot entirely with laser scanners. Set in the Chinese owned and controlled Detroit Economic Zone (DEZ) and shot using the same scanning technologies used in autonomous vehicles, the near future city is recorded through the eyes of the robots that manage it. Across a single night a group of young car factory workers drift through the Detroit in a driverless taxi, searching for a place they know exists but that their car doesn't recognize. They are part of an underground community that work on the production lines by day but at night, adorn themselves in machine vision camouflage and the tribal masks of anti-facial recognition to enact their escapist fantasies in the hidden spaces of the city. They hack the city and journey through a network of stealth buildings, ruinous landscapes, ghost architectures, anomalies, glitches and sprites, searching for the wilds beyond the machine. We have always found the eccentric and imaginary in the spaces the city can't see.
Three individuals of a broken family are seeking help from mysterious gene editing technology in their quest to find happiness in contemporary western capitalistic world. The dark poetic story draws a picture of possible near future world where human soul has become a matter of molecular biology and gene engineering.
The Lilac Game is a celebration of springtime and a game that audiences can play.
Volume I of Films for a Future, a series of handmade and hand processed 16mm nature films, intended for future viewers living in a time when the natural world no longer exist as it does today.
Ecophagy is a term coined by Robert Freitas that means the literal consumption of an ecosystem. Freitas used the term to describe a scenario involving molecular nanotechnology gone awry. In this situation (called the grey goo scenario) out-of-control self-replicating nanorobots consume entire ecosystems, resulting in global ecophagy.
The video depicts various landscapes and environments that's been affected by several unknown anomalous forces (presumably artificial or unearthly)and been transformed in to an unrecognizable nature.
The essential idea is to portray the aftermath of manipulated synthetic nature and life forms.
Lucy uses The Device to have random sex with faraway strangers. One night, The Device crashes while Lucy's in the simulation, leaving her stranded in a virtual sexpad. There, she's forced to have a conversation with the boy she's just been with: the cheating and challenging Will.
In a not so distant future, relationship compatibility is determined by an advanced algorithm enforced by the federal government. Participation is mandatory and users must be paired with (or reassigned) to their ideal partner within one year or be transitioned to a permanent single lifestyle facility.
After a series of incompatible matches, and time closing in, Blake (John Bubniak) is accidentally launched through a series of turbulent splash portals when his matching device malfunctions in his bathtub, sending him through a whirlwind of glitches in this ill-fated waterlogged love story.
The series about the Nature of things! How is a bird born, why does one come into the world as an insect, mammal or fish? The paper sculptures of Hello World animate the amazing spectacle of life in the wild. 10 episodes, 10 adventures to witness the discovery of the world by 10 different animal species. Hello World, the first naturalistic animation series, an artist's view of the natural world.
During a sleepover, four 9-year-old girls obsessed with space embark on a secret mission in their cardboard rocket. When Dad returns home, what will become of their mission?
"Space Girls" celebrates the power of imagination, the importance of STEM education & girl power.
On a small island a bunch of exotic creatures run across each other.
Caught up in our human lives, we miss out on the amazing. On an airplane wing, a company of snails performs a wonderfully slippery choreography…
On a remote island in the future people are preparing for an important mission.
The series about the Nature of things! How is a bird born, why does one come into the world as an insect, mammal or fish? The paper sculptures of Hello World animate the amazing spectacle of life in the wild. 10 episodes, 10 adventures to witness the discovery of the world by 10 different animal species. Hello World, the first naturalistic animation series, an artist's view of the natural world.
Humanoid robots are like new creatures on our planet. They work at reception desks, in shopping malls or as chefs. And they are coming into our private lives. With an A.I you have to keep your sentences short and to the point.
This piece of advice is given to Chuck as he's picking up his new robot partner Harmony fresh from the factory. Together they go on a road trip through California. As it turns out at a second glance, the sex robot Harmony likes books and can ad lib quote Ray Kurzweil.
In Tokyo, Grandma Sakurai is introduced to the cute robot Pepper, a present from her son, so she has someone to keep her company. But soon Pepper turns out to be quite capricious, finding the old lady's conversation topics of little interest.
While Harmony and Chuck are searching for love, and Pepper and Grandma are killing time, pressing questions arise: How will robots and artificial intelligence change our lives? What will we win, what will we lose? And, who will be the main protagonists of the future world? The documentary shows us tomorrow's world today.
A short animated documentary about what it means to be conscious in a world that is becoming increasingly artificially intelligent.
In this short film philosopher/neurologist Raymond Tallis argues that consciousness is not an internal construct, but rather relational. Through the intriguing notion that humans are physically unable to tickle themselves, Tallis explores the philosophical notion that we become ourselves only through dialogue with others.
A scientist is diagnosed with dementia and, with the help of his angsty teenage neighbor, attempts to use a time machine to relive the memories of his deceased wife.
Carlotta's Face is an animated short film by brain scientist Valentin Riedl and animation artist Frédéric Schuld, illustrating the world of Carlotta, where faces do not exist.
"haunting Carlotta's Face, neither manipulative nor expected" The Hollywood Reporter.
"the fascinating German short Carlotta's Face" The New York Times
Carlotta's Face has been screened on >200 film festivals, and won 32 awards, among them the Scientific Merit Award at the 2019 Imagine Science Festival.
For more information on the project, visit carlottasface.de
Shroooms is a research project in working with artificial growth algorithms for image creation. How does the use of semi-supervised algorithms inform our creative language? Where do the two worlds blend and create new digital aesthetics?
The sound – also designed by the Ai and us – was conceived similarly, we fed basic parameters to a sequencer from today and programmed 30-year-old machines to give us the results.
All packed with love.
A downtrodden house dog escapes into the woods at night to follow the psychedelic temptations of the natural world.
When a tragedy occurs one Valentine's Day, we turn to a bot for answers.
AIDCC28002025, known as CC, is an AID (Artificially Intelligent Device). She has been leased by Cloverhill Nanny Agency to Lena Howard to take care of her daughter, Adelaide. When a violent incident occurs between CC and Lena, an investigative team must determine what happened.
As a part of the Human Connectome Project, subjects were scanned with functional MRI at the high spatial resolution, while watching a short film clip (from the BBC) showing various human actions and expressions. In the first part, the visualized activity of each brain is also rendered as sound, with pitch and location determined by peaks of activity in each brain image, from moment to moment. In the second part, arcs linking the brain images correspond to the similarity of brain patterns of activation at each second during the scans, with pitch and timbre reflecting the strength of the correlations. We see and hear shifting parallel patterns between individuals, second by second.
Based around the 20's avante garde cinema genre of the City Symphony, Seoul City Machine is a filmic poem for the urban landscape of tomorrow. The film is a portrait of a city where machines and technology are now the dominant inhabitants of space. Our guide to the city is the disembodied voice of its urban operating system software. Scripted and narrated by an AI chatbot the city machine voices its own creation story and explains itself to the citizens it affectionately manages.
The film is an abstract sequence of vignettes, fragments and moments of a future Seoul, a city in which all of the hopes and dreams, fears and wonders of emerging technologies have come true. Using contemporary Seoul as a visual backdrop the present day city is overlaid with cinematic visual effects to depict an autonomous world of machines world where the sky is filled with drones, cars are driverless, the street is draped in augmented reality and everyone is connected to everything.
From Latin 'fear of empty space'
This non-narrative film explores geological self-similar formations of Earth and the frenetic Hyper-development attained by humankind, culminating into a sense of claustrophobic anxiety conferred by the present condition.
It reflects upon the alienation from nature as well as the act of perceiving, and the biased interpretation of the notion of 'reality'; By mixing CGI techniques and real footage the video blurs the distinction between reality and a digital recreation of it; thus making the viewers question themselves constantly whether what they are seeing is real or not.
Beginning with observing fractalic ever-evolving natural patterns and digital terrain scans, also known as LIDAR (point cloud structures composed of hundreds of million points); Then moving further into gradually developing terrains, where convoluted man-made networks begins to appear and disseminate across the earth's surface. Resulting in a fundamental break of harmonious interdependence, reaching its peak into a hyper-developed yet desolated city, in the midst of a global crisis.
The Term 'Horror Vacui' has been subject to ambivalent interpretation for the artist: On the one hand, it relates literally to the Anthropocene, the way in which humanity has taken over the earth; on the other, it reflects upon the term 'Emptiness' from a Buddhist perspective. In Buddhist philosophy 'emptiness' is seen as the deepest and ultimate truth inherent of all things, stripped down of their physical appearance.
'Here then,
Form is no other than emptiness,
Emptiness no other than form.
Form is only emptiness,
Emptiness is only form.
Feeling, Thought, and choice,
Consciousness itself,
Are the same as this.
So, emptiness, no form,
No feeling, thought, or choice,
Nor is there consciousness.
No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind;
No colour, sound, smell, taste, touch,
Or what the mind takes hold of,
Nor even act of sensing.'
(from the 'sevenfold Puja')
What happens when a major metropolitan area runs out of water? In Cape Town, South Africa, residents fear the arrival of "Day Zero," when the city's taps will be shut off.
High school student and poet, Chasity Hunter, experienced intense flooding in her New Orleans neighborhood during both Hurricane Katrina and recent summer rainstorms. Inspired to find out how safe her city really is, she investigates her city's infrastructure and questions water experts, finding her own voice along the way.
An adolescent boy attempts to untangle his memories of a mysterious infestation, the unravelling of his father, and the little creatures inside us all.
The first dive-in of a Monarch butterfly wing revealing the intricate scale structure, the pigmented scales, (fuzzy) borders. The borders of the wing evoke the borders between countries, notably between Canada, US and Mexico.
The soundscape was created by director Alexis Gambis in collaboration with Mexican neuroscientist and sound designer Andres Saldaña. It contains recordings of the milkweeds in Ontario, Canada (where the monarch emerge from their cocoons), roars from immigration rallies in New York (as the monarch pass over the East Coast) and a track entitled "los gritos de México" - a layering of urban and rural echoes from Mexico(as the Monarch arrive in their hibernating sites in the forests of Michoacan).
The backdrop are the forests of oyamel fir forest Michoacan where the Monarchs hibernate and form their colonies every year from 5 months from November to March.
These images were taken with three different microscopes including an electron microscope.
"The Sulfur Butterflies"
by Robert Silberglied and Chip Taylor, 1971. 16mm film.
Music by Kristina Dutton & Lisa Schonberg.
Original footage held at the Smithsonian Institution Archives
Digitization sponsored by Dr. Arnaud Martin (The George Washington University, Washington DC)
Rearing Anartia and Sulfur Butterflies are 8-16mm films documenting the work of lepidopterist Bob Silberglied in the seventies. Rearing Anartia features Silberglied and entomologist Annette Aiello's field research at the Barro Colorado Island field station in Panama, as they were investigating the factors involved in maintaining two species distinct. Sulfur Butterflies features Silberglied and Taylor conducting research in southwest Arizona, in alfalfa fields that condensed incredible densities of butterflies at that time and allowed them to study in depth how females recognize the males of their own species based on ultraviolet coloration. Silberglied's untimely death in a plane crash left behind an undiscovered body of work, including these two research movies. Fifty years later, we digitized these two films held in the Smithsonian Institution's archives and added musical scores. These films are an early testimony of how creative scientists intended to communicate their passion for the study of nature to broad audiences.
Conflicting layers of animation reveal glimpses into the ecological and economic histories of an American landscape.
The most absurd technique since the invention of the moving image. Through an elaborate process of duplicating the same image over and over again, it creates the illusion of stillness. In this stop motion film, identical figures perform the hopeless task of preserving blocks of ice, like archivists. The repetitive movements reanimate the animals captured inside.
In a synthetic meditation space, an empty shell seeks power.
Tanya has finally created the perfect partner, a beautiful giant slug.
Girls are weird. Babies are weird. Bodies are extra weird. "Las del diente" is a film about now, a time when women are tired to choose between having kids and their careers. Days in which anomalies in the reproductive system are celebrated instead of stigmatized.
In a suburban mansion, Martha sneaks into her son's virtual reality chamber. Here, he wanders through a desert with extraordinary powers. The machine is intended as a psychiatric treatment, yet Martha's trespass sets in motion a series of threatening events. The virtual reality, it seems, has begun to leak into their home. Inspired by Melodrama films of the 1950s, THE DESERT examines feminist heroism through the lens of contemporary sci-fi.
In this video the viewer is taken to a surreal landscape of great beauty; a land of trees that subtly shifts into more hallucinogenic terrain… At the end, the dreamers dream, and the sleepers sleep.
The film depicts an encounter with a mysterious, luminous, electrical substance. Inspired equally by medieval accounts of visionary experiences and by 19th century photography of the invisible, Pwdre Ser joins Kirlian photography with hand-processed images.
Pwdre Ser is the Welsh name for a mythical substance that has been observed by many since the 1400's.
Cyanovisions is a short film that blurs the lines of science fact and fiction. It doubles as a multimedia project spanning the genres of video, installation, dance, bioart, environmental science, and fashion – involving diverse Bay Area artists from the queer community and beyond. Cyanovisions examines climate change, harmful algae blooms of cyanobacteria, and biotechnology; and hopes to redefine our perspectives on our impact of the ecosystems we inhabit, other species, and imagine more symbiotic futures.
"Real" documentation of the night iBooks was released to the public.
"Please agree to terms and conditions to be a part of the Community," says the Big Data crystal ball as it bathes you in positive affirmations and hyper-personalized ads, "All for your own benefit, of course." You are a never-ending energy source. Feel your body becoming heavy and relaxed, and just say, "Yes!"
An experimental film about current technology seducing us to sacrifice our privacy, in hope of an optimized life.
A Fox-dressed man breaks the space time limits with only one goal: to spend some time with his wife. But below this recreational act there's a far more complex and ambitious plan.
Demonic revisits the infamous Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic of the 1980s, a mass hysteria where people around the world recovered memories of debauchery, murder, human sacrifice and satanic cults. Blending archive and reconstruction the film uncovers the forces at play between psychiatry, media, and false memory.
TROPICS draws an orbit around a Mexican farm. Scattered voices seem to revive and disturb the memory of the place. Crossing the matter, the film attempts to stop time and men, and reveals the ghost of a lost paradise.
A psychiatric patient with a brain implant that allows her to relive her dreams finds her reality being encroached upon in unappetizing and surreal ways, in Brandon Cronenberg's psychedelically retro thriller.
The United States and China are in the midst of a power struggle: a new "Cold War" of technology with companies like Huawei at the center. "Cablestreet" offers viewers an unprecedented look inside the notorious telecoms company.
Filmed in the Andean Mountains in the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguita in Northern Chile and Northwest Argentina, ALTIPLANO takes place within a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts, and coloured lakes. Fusing earth with sky, day with night, heartbeat with mountain, and mineral with iridescent cloud, ALTIPLANO reveals a vibrating landscape in which a bright blue sun forever threatens to eclipse a blood-red moon.
Coupled with a soundscape generated from infrasound recordings of volcanoes, geysers, Chilean blue whales, and more, ALTIPLANO makes use of in-camera editing to create evocative visual rhythms through the clash of color and form. Landscapes pulse and stutter, transformed through complex 16mm pixelation and superimposition techniques into spaces that exist in a multitude of times simultaneously. Located at the heart of a natural ecosystem threatened by a century of saltpeter and nitrate mining practices, and recent geothermic exploitation, ALTIPLANO reveals an ancient land standing witness to all that is, was, and will be.
The film UMBRA deals with rare and common optical phenomena that occur in nature. These phenomena evoke familiar images such as shadows or reflections on a water surface; but also unusual ones like the "Brocken spectre" or the pinhole effect during a solar eclipse. These ancient and natural projections can be considered as pre-cultural and independent of any apparatus. They occured even before mankind and are united by their intangible, ephemeral presence. In their immateriality and fragility, they are precursors of the cinematic image. The film UMBRA develops a visual dialogue between phenomenon and apparatus, archetype and image, self and self-perception.
Experiments in perception are being conducted in a wonderland of damaged images. It has to be lived once and dreamed twice commences with white noise and machine droning, gray video static and colorful distortion artifacts – in essence, with the beauty of electro-magnetic interference signals. Rainer Kohlberger conceived his work as a post-apocalyptic science fiction film, its story unfolding after the sixth great mass extinction has succeeded in wiping out the human race. A civilization of replicants bioengineered by Homo sapiens before they died out is now taking over the otherwise uninhabitable earth. A murmuring voice off-screen attests to this while reporting confusion over its own genesis and existence, time and again inundated by Peter Kutin´s multifaceted sound design.
The basis of this work is constituted by flashing phantom images and ghostly digital scenes in which water surfaces and natural sites are vaguely discernable as shadowy figures appear and disappear: Kindred to cinema, the ghosts in the machine make their perpetual rounds and serve as a distant reminder of the vanished human beings. Kohlberger´s permutating abstractions render kaleidoscopic and hieroglyphic textures and envision toxic landscapes. The viewer travels through cellular cultures or stellar nebulae, through microcosms that seem to mirror the macrocosm – the universe.
It has to be lived once and dreamed twice tells of the imminent hegemony of artificial intelligence, of mind and body, electricity and computer, spirituality and technology, and the age-old narrative of love and fear. "The mind is a strange loop", reality is only an idea. A future world uninhabited by human beings provides perspective on an era of hysterical images. Was the world merely a lucid dream? (Stefan Grissemann)
Diana Vidrașcu (1987, Romania) is a filmmaker based in Paris, France. Working with film, photography and installation, Diana Vidrascu questions the narrative devices of cinema by challenging the limits of the narrative discourse and codes of the film genres. Her films reveal a meditation on the visual language. The storytelling displays interruptions in the logic flow of events, creating parallels with the fragility of memory and the personal perception of time.
On 1972 the astronaut Charles Duke landed on the Moon on the Apollo XVI. He was in charge of taking photos of the lunar surface with a high-resolution camera.
'The Sasha' is a film about the human perspective on Earth and our constant struggle with our temporal and spatial limitations. From the exploration of space to cyberspace, from an analogue Moon in 1972 to a virtual Moon in Google Earth today. A story about parallel universes where eternity seems to be lost between frames and interfaces.
The View from Nowhere explores humankind's place in nature through the science and technology of CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva which artists Semiconductor gained access to during an artist research residency trip.
Driven by an interest in the material nature of our physical world and how we experience it through the lens of science and technology, Semiconductor go looking for the techniques that are developed at CERN which ask fundamental questions about nature, and the languages which have evolved to make sense of it.
Through juxtaposing discussions around the application and processes of theoretical physics with filmed footage in CERN's hi-tech workshops, Semiconductor explore the dichotomy that is revealed between the surprisingly creative pursuit of theoretically modeling our physical universe and the fixed/hard classical nature of producing instrumentation to test these notions. It reveals a sense of the scientific frameworks developed by man to explore matter beyond the limits of human experience, whilst raising questions about our place in the larger nature of reality.
The title The View from Nowhere refers to the philosophical concept that science should remain an objective analysis of the natural world, if it is to be seen as having value.
The View from Nowhere was co-commissioned by Arts at CERN/ FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool)/Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, France.
NASA roboticist and Curiosity -rover driver Vandi Verma works on Mars on a daily basis from her desk at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Los Angeles. Her work of navigating the rover in the Martian terrain relies to a large part on images and the technologically advanced use of them. The film creates a philosophical journey into the intriguing world of Mars science. Through the lenses of various experts we learn how NASAs' images are made, used and manipulated for the sake of science, but also public information. Mars is the ideal place for an investigation into our paradoxical relationship to photography. Do images reflect reality or shape it?