• Date
        May 23, 2017

        Inner Pathways

        Gabriel Vanegas - Katharina Klemm / Colombia
        independent
        www.gabrielvanegas.org

        The mystery of the Nazca lines and the lines called "Ceques" at the Bolivian Plateua, lead us to explore different conceptual and aesthetical speculations of this technology lost in time. The Quechua concept of "Pacha," (Time and Space) was one of the worldviews that shaped this majestic artwork and it was created by lost civilizations before the indigenous communities that currently inhabit these areas. We had the opportunity to walk through several of these lines at the Sajama national park in Bolivia; collecting audiovisual material meanwhile commuting with the indigenous inhabitants of the area, who told us several fantastic stories hidden in these pilgrimage routes which connect several worlds. According to the inhabitants the civilization who built the lines, disappeared the day when the sun rose. These perfectly straight pathways can only be seen from satellites. Later on the lines were readapted by the Inca Empire to connect the entire South America. They were also related to their calendar; the movement of the stars; geomagnetism and spiritual paths. They connected the mountains, springs and other sacred places where the gods lived and controlled the destiny of the inhabitants.
      • Date
        May 23, 2017

        Google Rhapsody / BuildingToBirdsLCD10kfps.cine 

        Billy Sims / USA
        independent 
        www.billysims.net/

        A single image serves as the onset for a potentially continuous chain of phantasmagoric imagery. Using Google's image recognition in the search-by-image feature, the video moves through over 50,000 images from throughout the internet, crossing boundaries of professional and sociocultural utility. In reconciling these different modes of use, the search engine must swim across disciplines of visualization, evincing a semiotic coherence to parlay with that of the user. This transformation of content is depicted twofold. Firstly, in one view, a hyperactive slew images progresses over 31 minutes, exposing unexpected topological shifts in rapidly near-anonymous content. Secondly, at an alternatively precise scale, the first 2.6 seconds of the video is scrutinized with a high-speed camera while being played on an LCD screen. The brief moment is magnified over 14 minutes and 36 seconds. At this speed the transition between images becomes apparently processual, and the association of content all the more conspicuous.
      • Date
        May 23, 2017

        callis 

        Laura Sofia Arango Palacio / Colombia
        Universidad de Caldas
        lauarango.wix.com/lauraarango 

        That's how the mass behavior analysis manifest: the days, the evenings and the nights connected among themselves showing a whole idea of the cultural coffee landscape with common sounds full of social chaos caused by these networks where time goes fast and showing how everyday passes by, full of lights and the independent beings inside their “own world”, but dependent on a network created with an identity of masses and informal fraternity. The ceremonial and ritual behaviors are, without a doubt, important elements that contribute to producing the “us”, which is the self-representation without which the group can't exist. We must understand how the connections between the countryside and the city caused a complete transformation of these two, affecting their environment and changing the identities that made them different from each other…they unify and begin to understand the same language, their behaviors and the chaos itself. It's the kind of self individuality of the metropolis that has sociological bases that defend around intensifications of the common stimulus of beings which comes from subtle and continuous changes on the reception of different types of impulses to maintain, internally or externally, mechanized for the appropriation of our environment.
      • Date
        May 23, 2017

        art value

        Vygandas Simbelis / Sweden
        KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
        simbelis.com

        The project “Art Value” examines the notion of political economy and neoliberal values in the art processes, ie production, circulation and consumption. The economy standards and its influences to the art world and to creation in general is a key theme of the project. Critically appropriating principles of such dichotomy discourse, the artist seeks for a synthesis between those two different and opposite paradigms. The viewer of the exhibition is invited to rethink the existing connotations of those philosophical assumptions, elevating the moral and aesthetic values.  It is a speculative project questioning artwork's reception and perception through economic principles, ie through rethinking the notion of the artwork as commodity. It is also a critique of one of the main characteristics of the contemporary art world – the segregation of the art world and its public escalation of the monetary values. “Art Value” is taking place through the exhibition of numbers. This aesthetic turn is examining the contemporary notion of contemporary human (post-human), who radically and decisively believes in numbers. Questioning the exponentially growing trust in numbers and data, its inclusion in everyday life, abstraction and unification of everything that is around us, also through what is digitized, coded and quantified.
      • Date
        May 23, 2017

        STRATA

        Vygandas Simbelis / Sweden
        KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
        simbelis.com

        The STRATA project is concerned with the limits of human senses at those edges where the boundaries dissolve. In an audiovisual film both the audio and the visuals work together – to create evocative and extreme experiences. The project explores the aesthetic properties of analog and digital transformations formed by the limitations and qualities of various forms of sensing apparatus. The result takes the form of noisy and hypnotic soundscapes. An abstract animation is directly and in real-time generated from the sound itself; audio frequencies affect the pulsation of the RGB diode. The artist plays with several parameters affecting the light (eg, amplitude, frequency, phase, frequency modulation, and wave shape). The camera captures the pulsation of the light and generates moving colorful lines through that. In such a generative process, there is no need for any post-production technique. The STRATA film project is closely related to STRATIC audiovisual performance project.
      • Date
        May 23, 2017

        The Green Project 

        Yun Hong / USA
        independent
        www.hongyun.co

        In recent decades, China has had a severe environmental crisis with millions of people suffering from bad air, polluted water and vegetation degradation. Instead of finding sustainable solutions, some local governments make a “big show” of decorating landscape surfaces by using “artificial colors”, such as paint, fabric, or printed imagery to physically cover the no-longer naturally colored environments. At Laoshou Hill, thousands of square meters of mountain were painted green to hide red coal mine pits. In Beijing, the sky surprisingly became blue and clear during special “showing” days like the Olympic Games to let “guests” forget the extremely high concentration of PM2.5. In this work, I use the standardized/industrial meadow green to highlight this “artificial color”. I call it “The Green Project”, a camouflage by the government that uses fantasy to maintain power structures. In this situation, the environment becomes an artificial landscape where citizens are forced to exist within it. The green is a portal to travel between the decayed reality and the fictionalization nature, it blurs the boundary between fantasy and reality, covers the truth with layers of deceit, which makes people's trust in the government evaporate. The more layers of color, the “greyer” the truth becomes.
      • Date
        May 23, 2017

        Âphâr 

        Joao Pedro Oliveira / Brazil
        UFMG
        www.jpoliveira.com

        Âphâr is a Hebrew word that means “dust”. This video is inspired by two passages from the Old Testament: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void. (Genesis 1) Jacob had a dream: He saw a stairway erected on the earth with its top reaching to the heavens. The angels of God were going up and coming down it and the Lord stood at its top. […] He said: Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth. (Genesis 28)
      • Date
        May 23, 2017

        Landschaften Der Vergangenheit

        Juan Escudero / Spain
        Oviedo University

        In this project certain connections with algebraic geometry are explored. The visual part is based on recent research in algebraic geometry, relating the theory of aperiodic tilings with singularity theory in algebraic hypersurfaces.
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