Sunday | Oct 20 | 6pm

Screening @ Deluge

Data Dreaming

Digital ghosts and generative technologies morph human ideas of data—sound, light, image, music—to question the nature of authenticity and creativity.

Watch Online Free: Monday, Oct 21 (24hrs)

DATA Dreaming

Monique Motut-Firth | 2022 | Canada | 3 min | Vic Premiere

What does data look like? Made using found paper cut outs and overlapped sound, inspired by Hito Steyerl’s Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, DATA Dreaming attempts to track and visualize human ideas of energy and data sets. The soundscape is an overlapping collection of low frequency radio waves, amplifier buzz, radio static, light and sound waves, a tape deck, record player, sonar recordings, sound bites, electric currents, appropriated music, sounds of the sun and space (NASA) and local radio waves. 

Interdisciplinary artist Monique Motut-Firth uses an extensive collection of paper cut-outs to reflect on the world and build new ones. She holds an BA from UBC and an MFA (2015) and BFA (2003) from Emily Carr University of Art + Design; she is a recipient of a number of Canada Council for the Arts grants and has exhibited across Canada and internationally. Motut-Firth works as an artist, independent animator and arts educator in Vancouver; she is sessional faculty at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and teaches foundation level arts to Entertainment Arts and Wilson School of Design students at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. 

The Trace of the Box – Technicalized Good People

Moojin Brothers | 2022 | Republic of Korea | 7 min | Cdn Premiere

The plants and TV screens in Nam June Paik’s TV Garden (1974) maintain their current images without dying, rotting or breaking down through  behind-the-scene maintenance and technological replacement. The chickens, virtually released in TV Garden by the artist, are also isolated from other living species or external changes, and live forever free from evolution, reproduction, creation or decomposition. This all seems to symbolize a future utopia in which the ecosystem is won over and maintained by technology. By borrowing the voice of artificial intelligence the Moojin Brothers ask humans who blindly accept technology without resistance if such an immortal life is what they really want to manifest.

Moojin (無眞) is the starting point of work; by questioning and deconstructing (無, Moo) things that have solidified as dominant values and belief systems (眞, Jin) of society, Moojin Brothers recreate the "human-environment system" of the contemporary era. Humans who reveal themselves through the images of persons and collective voices of those engulfed in the misery of life, and the world heavily armed with common sense and economic rationality form the basis of the artists’ works. They thereupon shed light on those who survive, rearrange collected stories and address the problems of today’s world. Furthermore, the artists document discourse on technological and environmental risks and reconstruct new images from it. Moojin Brothers experiment with an expansive range of media in accordance with the concepts and themes of their works, utilizing the methods that they have acquired from various contemporary channels.

Burn-in

Charles Dillon Ward | 2024 | USA | 2 min | Cdn Premiere

Burn-in is an experimental short about a request to be forgotten, the messy deletion of bodies from photo albums, the faint remains of digital ghosts from the late 2000s, the impossibility of invisibility and the permanence of the internet.

Charles Dillon Ward’s work explores the intimate and alienated relationship we have with the digital world. His films have screened at Palm Springs International ShortFest, Visions in the Nunnery biennial, Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, NoBudge.com, Maryland Film Festival, Austin Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Indie Memphis and Nashville Film Festival.

Dream Machine Ballet

Pierre Ajavon | 2023 | France | 4 min | W Cdn Premiere

In Dream Machine Ballet, the rhythmic impulses of the soundtrack create moving patterns, shapes and symbols which emerge from the unconscious according to different musical phases.

Pierre Ajavon is a filmmaker, musician and composer who lives and works in Paris. References to psychoanalysis and surrealism as well as the study of the relationship between pop imagery and sound constitute the backbone of his artistic practice. His works have appeared at art institutions such as LACDA, Fondazione Ragghianti, Royal Scottish Academy, Pereira Art Museum and CICA Museum as well as events like The Wrong Biennale of Digital Arts, Experimenta, Cairotronica, AIDFF Instants Vidéo and MADATAC.

Intervals

Simon Payne | 2023 | UK | 10 min | W Cdn Premiere

Stripes of primary and secondary colours in lateral motion and inverse diagonal motion, subsequently layered, divided and doubled. Intervals can be thought of as a space between two things, a break in activity, a gap in time, the difference in pitch between two sounds or the difference between two colours.

Simon Payne has been making experimental cinema works for over 20 years. His videos are predominantly orientated around bold graphic forms, primary and secondary colours and highly structured sequences that produce conflicting planes and unexpected effects. Sometimes there are contingent elements in his work that correspond with incidental indications of the artist’s hand. The systems that underpin his videos involve the entirety of the screen and every edge. Their effects spill out of the screen, to illuminate the spaces in which they are shown in remarkable ways. Payne has also written widely on experimental cinema for a number of journals and magazines. He co-edited the book Kurt Kren: Structural Films and edited a posthumous book by A.L. Rees, Fields of View: Film, Art and Spectatorship. He is Associate Professor in Film and Media at ARU, Cambridge, and lives in London.

How Can We Escape?

Charlie Tweed | 2024 | UK | 4 min | Cdn Premiere

How Can We Escape? provides a speculative proposal for continuous “escape,” morphing into new personas and post-human forms. From a CGI fish, to underwater organisms, from AI-designed creatures, to microbial animals, from the walk-through for a new house, to dispersal as an artificial cloud. An entanglement of escape routes between different forms emerges, which constantly feed into and contaminate one another via porous borders between digital and physical forms, poor and HD images. 

Charlie Tweed works in video, text and performance. His recent works have drawn attention to the complex impacts of global capitalism in terms of resource extraction, ecological destruction and the deployment of digital technologies to manage populations and environment. He employ strategies of re-appropriation and speculative fiction, often taking on personas of anonymous collectives and hybrid machines, to outline subversive plans for enhancing and escaping control mechanisms and renegotiating relations with the non human. Recent solo shows include: Notes From the Subsurface, EarthArt Gallery, Soon we will become output, Stanley Picker Gallery, i am algorithm at Aspex Gallery and Exeter Phoenix; Notes I, II & III  at Spike Island, Bristol; Animate Projects and Alma Enterprises. His films have been screened internationally at venues including: ICA, CCA, Whitechapel Gallery, Watershed, Plymouth Arts Centre, CAFA, Quad, Derby, Eastside Projects, Castlefield, WRO Media Art Biennale, Aesthetica Film Festival and Rencontres Internationales.

AI Jetée

Adrian Goycoolea | 2023 | UK | 27 min | Cdn Premiere

AI Jetée is a shot-by-shot remake of Chris Marker’s renowned 1962 photo-roman, La Jetée, utilizing generative AI technology to reproduce the original film’s visuals, music and voiceover. This experimental endeavour explores the nature of authenticity and creativity in the age of artificial intelligence.

Adrian Goycoolea was born in Brazil to Chilean and British parents and has lived in Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, New York City and now in the UK, in Brighton. Perhaps because of this diverse background, his films often address issues of location and identity, exploring the intersections of personal memory with social and political histories. Since 2007, Adrian has been a professor at the University of Sussex teaching filmmaking. His work ranges from short, experimental, single-channel pieces to multi-channel art installations and music videos as well as short and feature-length documentaries. Previously, Adrian has worked as a programmer and publicist at Anthology Film Archives in New York City, and his films and installations have been screened widely. His work has been shown at film festivals such as Rotterdam International, Moscow International, BFI Flare: The London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Frameline, Document, FIDOCS and at art galleries including The Artists' Space, Taller Boriqua, La Panaderia and in locations as disparate as Anthology Film Archives and MTV.

Sunday | Oct 20 | 8pm

Screening @ Deluge

Here We Are

Histories of everyday violence, occupation, economic and political struggle in a world where freedom continues to be threatened.