parallel 

Lawrence Bird / Canada
University of Manitoba
vimeo.com/lawrencebird

A continuous video of moving satellite imagery captured along the 49th parallel, the Canada/US border, "parallel" mobilizes imagery from Google Earth's historical database to expose discrepancies in the archived image of the planet. As one follows the pan, anomalies in the image become apparent: digital artifacts having to do with when a given area came under the eye of a satellite, and at what resolution. As the virtual camera moves, the physical border appears, disappears, is replaced and displaced by both geographical features and media artifacts.

Blurrings, double exposures, seams between satellite tiles, images from different seasons or times, all create a parallel landscape with its own boundaries, topography, areas of density and intensity. Digital and material realms mingle, charged with the politics of two nations and the legacy of colonial epistemology. Soundtrack comprises found audio, and ambient sound from ISS and an MQ-9 Reaper drone. 

Parallel is an evolving, frequently updated project. Previous iterations have been screened at: Coder et Decoder la Frontiere, Anti-Atlas of Borders, Université Libre de Bruxelles (April – May 2016) Once is Nothing, Inter/Access Gallery, Toronto (Feb. 2015); Movable Borders Furtherfield Gallery, London, UK (May 2013), Another Atlas, RAW: Gallery of Architecture & Design, Winnipeg (April, 2013).

  • Date
    May 23, 2017

    Scenario: Valugan  

    Melissa Dela Merced/Phillipines
    University of the Phillipines Film Institute
    melissadelamerced.com

    Scnery:Valugan is based on a video installation which attempts to bring the user into various places. My first visit to the Valugan beach is 30 years after my father's first visit to the island and he narrated the changes the island is going through. Rocks were being picked off and sold as the popularity of both the beach and island is growing. I believe there is beauty in the rocks and the sound preserves its presence in time. Instead of a parallel projection of the scenery. I have decided to project the images on the floor to give emphasis on the rocks on the shore as the images are of such. By silencing out the noise of the urban and focusing on the slow crash of the waves and distant chatter of the residents of the island. I want to bring you to the beach.
  • Date
    May 23, 2017

    Three-Dimensional

    Camilo Hermida / Colombia Universidad de Caldas
    camilohermida.weebly.com

    The video explores the construction of three-dimensional spaces and questions the generation of artificial worlds, where organic is represented by polygonal geometry. It invites the viewer to immerse themselves in environments that mutate digitally, but where evolutionary processes and transformations are modeled from reality fragments. Construction of objects are not just developed with 3D tools as visual construction, it is also generated thereafter parameters of programming which reconstruct fiction and imagination in an aleatory way.
  • Date
    May 23, 2017

    Solar Flare

    Michael Fox-Jessica Rodrigues / United Kingdom-Mexico
    University of Hull-University of Guanajuato
    jessicaariannerodriguez.wordpress.com

    A1-SolarFlare | B1-StillTransmitting | B2-Even When I'm Gone A piece in three movements inspired by the film Sunshine. The piece was made with a damaged synth, and recordings of an old family piano; The synth constantly warps like how traveling through space involves the distortion of space and time itself, and the detuned piano samples are manipulated to express more than the raw sounds can. The distorted and twisted video effects reflect and amplify these themes.
  • 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.
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