Thursday | Oct 16 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
Magic with Small Apparatus
Sleight of hand and deft of language: films visualizing lack or preponderance of the written; symbolic versus embodied.
Watch Online Free: Friday, Oct 17 (24hrs)
Magic with small apparatus
Paul Tarragó | 2025 | UK | 8 min | Cdn Premiere
Includes feats with cards and ropes, legerdemain, sleights of camera, a perky river and rare insights into the activities of a local magician-ventriloquist from the 1930s. A companion piece to Magic Explained (which probably means this is part two of a trilogy), and similarly lively.
Paul Tarragó is a filmmaker, using both video and celluloid, living in London. His work is a mix of underground experimentation and metafiction, tugging at the leash of film language but with narrative often held close at hand. His films have shown widely on festival and gallery circuits (International Film Festival Rotterdam, NYUFF, EMAF, National Review of Live Art, Triangle France, Kino der Kunst) and include several award-winning experimental narratives, video installation, a collaborative feature, cinematic sketchbooks, moving image and live soundtrack performance work.
Learn more about Paul Tarragó’s work at Automat
EOJ
Tianming Zhou | 2025 | USA | 2 min | NA Premiere
Regulatory signs shot on 16mm, hand-processed with caffenol and subjected to both analog and digital corrosion. EOJ reimagines the anxiety induced by caffeine hypersensitivity and the pressures of social conditioning.
Tianming Zhou (Alaric) works with lens-based media. He explores the within, the beyond and the in-between of landscapes, both physical and conceptual. His works have been showcased at Mimesis Documentary Festival, Experiments in Cinema, Non-Syntax, Leiden Shorts, etc. Tianming completed his undergraduate studies at The University of Hong Kong and earned an MFA from Duke University.
[ pink noise ]
Clint Enns | 2025 | Canada | 11 min | Cdn Premiere
A cinematic text. An anti-immersive experience, an inner odyssey, a world without sound. A collective experience unique to each viewer.
Clint Enns is a visual artist, writer and curator living in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal.
Sie puppt mit Puppen [She dolls with Dollies]
Karin Fisslthaler | 2024 | Austria | 3 min | Cdn Premiere
The video work Sie puppt mit Puppen/ She dolls with Dollies was created as a visual interpretation of the piece by vocalist, singer and composer Anna Clementi and sound researcher, producer and multi-instrumentalist Thomas Stern. Their album DOPPELMOPPEL – Poems by Kurt Schwitters, capturing the spirit of Schwitters’ Merz-Gesamtweltbild, was released by Corvo Records/Berlin. Fascinated by the poetry of the famous German MERZ/DADA artist Kurt Schwitters, the duo began a decades-long artistic exploration and intensive collaboration. They transform Schwitters’ poems into contemporary electronic sounds, from poetry readings to unconventional melodies and experimental sound-poetry eruptions. The visual execution avoids illustrating the text and attempts a visual composition using individual images, stop-motion and various forms of collage created under the camera.
Karin Fisslthaler works in the fields of fine art, experimental film/video, music (as Cherry Sunkist) and as a university lecturer. Her artistic focus primarily revolves around the utilization of found footage, such as cinematic and pop-cultural artifacts. The artistic works have been showcased at international festivals, museums, galleries and exhibitions, and are included in renowned public and private collections in Austria and abroad. She holds a degree in Experimental Design from the Department of Fine Arts and a PhD in Artistic Research, both from the University of Arts in Linz, Austria.
Assets
Christine Lucy Latimer | 2025 | Canada | 2 min | Cdn Premiere
Hundreds of digitally generated filters and assets used by online content creators to simulate a “shot on film” aesthetic are collaged together on expired 16mm Ektachrome. Random contemporary approximations of film artifacts, ranging from industrial to experimental, move through the frame in impossible trajectories. A film about film signified.
Christine Lucy Latimer is a lens-and-time-based media artist from Toronto/Tkaronto, on Treaty 13. Latimer’s work excavates the influence of capitalism and planned obsolescence on 20th-century moving image technologies. Repairing and resuscitating discarded film and tape elements in hybrid gestures, she orchestrates freak anachronistic dialogues between the photochemical, photoelectric and digital. Her work has been featured in hundreds of film festivals and gallery exhibitions across five continents.
Learn more about Christine Lucy Latimer’s work at Automat
Aftersong
Matthew Berka | 2023 | UK | 10 min | Cdn Premiere
Aftersong is a film-poem based on the writings of the English nature writer Richard Jefferies and the music of French composer Lili Boulanger. It is a meditation on the lingering afterimages left behind by the dead where the tension between absence and presence continues to endure across time, rippling through fragments of “period drama: cinema, architecture and nature.” Filmed on 16mm with a voice-over from the contemporary supernatural English writer Quentin S. Crisp.
Matthew Berka is an artist filmmaker and composer whose work has been shown in both gallery and cinema presentations. Previously he has screened and exhibited his films at Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Millennium Film Workshop, Close-Up Cinema, London, Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, Bologna, Italy, Antimatter [media art], Mackintosh Lane, London and ZÉRUÌ, London. He has been part of the cooperative the Artist Film Workshop (AFW), contributing to touring screening programs and workshops. He currently works as a Time-based media conservator at the Tate Gallery. He also helps program the artist-run gallery Mackintosh Lane based in East London.
Learn more about Matthew Berkas’s work at Automat
Phonetic Philmmaking
Rennie Taylor | 2025 | Canada | 20 min | W Cdn Premiere
For as long as I can remember, it has been difficult and uncomfortable to express myself when speaking aloud or when writing. I would often silence myself to avoid the feeling that I was making a mistake, a word out of place or mispronounced, to avoid the embarrassment of repeating and having to clarify my thoughts. I have always lived with the disruption of language intertwined with my experience of living with a learning disability. Phonetic Philmmaking, a 20-minute experimental Super 8 film, satirizes normative language conventions and transforms them into a new visual vernacular linking metaphorical and literal meanings within the verbs, nouns and pictures. This film explains my world—if only I can find the right word.
The film was shot over a year in Toronto and New York City, capturing a variety of words through chalkboards, electronic signs, flyers, neon signs, posters, porcelain tiles, sewer grates, stained glass and storefront graphics. This abundance of text is offset by images of bunting, cats, eyes, fence posts, flowers, garbage, locks and newspapers. Featuring an original soundtrack by Daniel Brlas, Phonetic Philmmaking is shot entirely on Super 8 film. This format, now in its 60th year, evokes the amateur home movie aesthetics of the past while renewing its relevance in the present. With the help of Cullen Ritchie, elements of the footage were purposely distressed to emphasize textual illegibility. This material destruction mimics my own relationship to syntax and the film serves as a visual deconstruction of language rules.
Rennie Taylor is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. His practice focuses on the everyday with an emphasis on nostalgic signs and symbols found in popular culture. Engaging in the practices of photography, filmmaking, animation, collage and illustration, he explores themes of consumerism, the handmade and obsolescence. He investigates decay within technology which corresponds to his material manipulation of celluloid, ephemera and found objects. His short experimental Super 8 films and videos have been screened across Canada and Internationally in Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Serbia and the United States. These films have appeared at festivals such as Antimatter, Dresdner Schmalfilmtage, Engauge and Light Field. He is currently pursuing his MA in Cinema & Media Studies at York University, received his BFA at Toronto Metropolitan University and an Ontario College Diploma in Fine Arts at Centennial College.
Thursday | Oct 16 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
Death of the Author
There is no escape, The Machine is everything. AI-generated screeds against, and love letters to, our new overlords.
Watch Online Free: Friday, Oct 17 (24hrs)
I’m Happy Again
Charles Dillon Ward | 2025 | USA | 4 min | Cdn Premiere
A director struggles to remake Singin’ in the Rain with AI actors.
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 (London), Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival (Switzerland), Aesthetica (England), Antimatter (Canada), NoBudge.com, Maryland Film Festival, Austin Film Festival, the Chicago Underground, Indie Memphis and Nashville Film Festival.
Samantha
Nina Yuen | 2025 | USA | 9 min | Cdn Premiere
A kaleidoscopic meditation featuring multiple speakers exploring identity, transformation and self-perception. Created using AI text-to-image prompts, the film weaves poetic vignettes about aging ADHD "Manic Pixie Dream Girls," robotic women seeking autonomy and the complex relationships between inner and outer selves. Through fragmented monologues, it examines feminine archetypes and the search for authentic existence beyond algorithmic prediction.
Nina Yuen lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. She received her BA from Harvard University (2003) and her MFA from Bard College (2014). Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna; De Appel Arts Center, Amsterdam; Chinese Arts Center, Manchester; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland; Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii; Freud Museum, London; Museu de Arte Contemporanea Niteroi, Brazil; Museum het Dolhuys, Netherlands; The Stenersen Museum, Oslo; Rijksakademie, Amsterdam; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Tavistock Center, London; Living Art Museum, Reykjavík, Iceland; and Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, Germany. Her films have been screened at aCinema, Milwaukee, WI; Art Film Hour, Hong Kong; Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany; Kassel Documentary Film & Video Festival, Germany; Millennium Film Journal, New York; Mumbai City Museum, India; Rotterdam Film Festival, Netherlands; San Diego Asian American Film Festival, California; and TQW Tanzquartier Wien, Austria, alongside a host of international arts and film festivals.
FoUBARthes: Death of the Author
Dayna McLeod | 2024 | Canada | 3 min | W Cdn Premiere
Media performance artist Dayna McLeod asked ChatGPT to write an increasingly snarky and heated dialogue between Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault about The Death of the Author, inspired by Barthes’ famous essay. This script is performed by AI actors of the theorists, with Dayna’s AI doppelgänger, DaynAI, acting as host to their debate.
Dayna McLeod is queer performance-based media artist. Her work uses humour, and capitalizes on exploiting the body’s social and material conditions using cabaret, duration, remix, video and installation practices. Her interests of artistic and theoretical research are in media representations of sexuality, queer identity and how bodies marked female are perceived as public property. She won numerous awards, including Le Prix Powerhouse from La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse in 2014 that celebrates mid-career women artists who have significantly contributed to the cultural life of Montréal, various Audience Choice Awards at film and video festivals like the Prix du Public in the Experimental category at Cineffable, Festival International du film Lesbian et Feminist de Paris in 2019, and Best Video Essay mentions from the British Film Institute in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Disaster Free
Kian Peng Ong | 2024 | Singapore | 9 min | NA Premiere
Disaster Free is an AI film that speculates upon the shifting hydrological systems driven by global warming. Set in the near future, the film narrates a third-person account of the events leading to the flood of Singapore. It challenges the common perception of Singapore as a disaster-free zone, confronting the notion that we are distinct and somehow protected from the waters that surround us.
The film follows Yuexi, a young Singaporean who grew up believing Singapore was disaster-free. As rising sea levels and storms ravage the island, she watches Singapore transform into a half-submerged city. Once-familiar places become vague memories, clashing with a new reality of floating retrofitted homes and skyscrapers turned shelters. Reflecting on the past, Yuexi realizes that the boundaries between land and water were never as clear as she thought.
Kian Peng Ong is an artist whose work is situated at the intersection of art, computational culture and ecology. His research focuses on the imperceptibility of climate change, exploring immersive and synaesthetic ways of connecting our consciousness to the impending ecological disaster.
The Machine
Daniel Brody | 2024 | USA | 13 min | Cdn Premiere
In the short AI film The Machine, William Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg and Orson Welles come together to investigate the digital apocalypse. They must travel deep inside the mysterious entity known as The Machine to unravel the mystery at its core.
Daniel Brody is a multimedia artist who is interested in creating works that open up new psychological and spiritual spaces. Brody was born in New York City and is a graduate of The Cooper Union School of Art. He currently resides in upstate New York. His films have been installed in museums, won numerous awards and been screened at festivals around the world. Highlights include: screening on PBS, first place Ann Arbor Super 8 Festival, top Jurors Award at the Artist of the Mohawk Hudson Region and screenings at Athens Digital Arts Festivals 2024 “Techno(s)cene” and 2025 "Simulacra."
Learn more about Daniel Brody’s work at Automat
HEAST
Francisca Friedrich, Lena Isabella Deisenberger | 2024 | Austria | 2 min | Cdn Premiere
A portrait of Austria captured with a broken camera, accompanied by an enhanced and AI-generated version of the national anthem.
Francisca Friedrich is an Austrian cinematographer and artist studying at the University of Arts Linz. She is scholarship winner of the Talent Academy Linz-Cannes 2024 and scholarship winner of extraordinary students at the University of Arts Linz 2024. As a director, her films have been shown at the Cannes Short Film Corner, Prix Ars Electronica and have been shown in competition at the Vienna Shorts Film Festival 2025.
Lena Deisenberger is an Austrian director studying at the University of Arts Linz. Working on various film sets as a kids’ acting coach she had the chance to gain experience in the industry. In 2018 Lena created the video design for the opera SIMON at Musiktheater Linz. She has been part of Innsbruck Film 2023, was scholarship winner of the shortfilmlab LISFF and participant in the Talent Days VIS. Currently she is working on two fiction short films in post production.
Learn more about Francisca Friedrich & Lena Isabella Deisenberger’s work at Automat
Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm
Eryk Salvaggio | 2025 | USA | 33 min | Cdn Premiere
Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm contrasts computational processes of diffusion models and the human metaphors used to describe them—such as temperature, creativity, image recognition, memory, reason and the unmodeled. It is a spiritual sequel to the 2023 film Flowers Blooming Backward Into Noise. Created from a blend of glitched AI-generated video, archival and found footage, the film is not about machines at all, but rather, seeks to assert a humanist counterfactual to comparisons between human thought and the limited capacities of generative AI. The film approaches these metaphors at face value, but slowly peels back the superficial nature of such comparisons to examine the nuance, and appeal, behind the comparisons of humans and today’s computer systems.
Eryk Salvaggio is an artist working critically with AI-generated media, using and subverting tools to reveal the problems embedded within them. As an artist working critically with technology, his work openly acknowledges its complicity. As such, the work is created through glitching the machines, repurposing generated imagery to emphasize biases or other problems or highlighting the image’s relationship to its social, technical and cultural context. Through video essays, sound art and performance lectures, Salvaggio’s work confronts essential debates in AI, such as the politics of extraction, dehumanization and information pollution that lay at their heart. Salvaggio’s work informs and reflects his interest in tech policy spheres; he is an artist but also a writer and researcher challenging the myths of artificial intelligence, flagging dangers such as surveillance linked to automated decision-making, and advocating for expanded data protections online. As the founder of the Algorithmic Resistance Research Group (with Caroline Sinders and Steph Maj Swanson), Salvaggio pioneered the practice of creative misuse of AI systems as a tool for revealing the biases and harms the models could create. He is a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge researching AI and the Humanities and a researcher at the MetaLab (at) Harvard University in AI Pedagogies.