Exopoiesis
November Virtual Program
Presented in partnership with Woodland Pattern Book Center
Join us for a casual conversation about the program on Friday, November 5th at 7:00 PM CDT on Zoom!
Atlas • Camila Marchon
5 min 40 sec
Synopsis:
Atlas is a video divided in three chapters that approaches existential questions about God and the begging of the universe. These questions are not answered by scientists. They are raised by a curious artist that questions the existence of God through Michelangelo’s paintings, Google's voice, Google Earth, space stamps, and a famous song. The artist uses appropriation to create something new, putting the past and the present together, providing a portrait of our time.
Artist Bio:
Camila Marchon is a multimedia storyteller from Rio de Janeiro, living in New York. She is very passionate about her work, whether it be personal or professional. For over 15 years, she's been creating engaging storytelling that encompasses all media forms in different formats such as documentaries, TV, short films, video installations, and VR. Her films have been screened in international festivals, and some of her images are part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. Website: www.camilamarchon.com
Dark Matter • Viktor Brim
19 min 52 sec
Synopsis:
Human-made landscapes without people. Giant colossi of steel digging for rock. Fissured earth, steaming chimneys, heaps of scrap metal. Viktor Brim documents places of the past and present state of raw material production: the economy of extraction on which modern life is based. In addition to the almost incomprehensible dimension of these places, the processes have a temporality that can only be grasped over time. This is why the artist’s camera stands still when it observes, registers, records. Daniel Burkhardt writes the following about Brim’s video art: »By exactly calculating the duration of his gaze and precisely cropping the image, he succeeds seemingly effortlessly in letting that which is viewed to speak for itself.« In this way, Brim gets by without any commentary. Instead, the finely arranged sound transmits the never resting whirring of the machines.
His tableaux testify in their audiovisual power to the legacies of the planet’s industrial exploitation, which is progressing unabated even under the impact of the climate catastrophe. In his most recent film Dark Matter (2020), Brim introduces a new level of abstraction: Out of dense fog, remains of debris, power poles, and sparsely lit up industrial plants dimly crystallize. The seemingly apocalyptic scenery alternates with landscapes whose hilly forms evoke the drape of a velvet cloth. Finally, the camera plunges into the huge hole of the world’s largest so-called kimberlite pipe at Mirny in Yakutia in northeastern Siberia, which is surrounded by concentric roads. The contours of the diamond mine lose themselves in the deep black of the abyss, like an infinitely slow fall into the bottomless depths. [Florian Wüst]
Artist Bio:
Viktor Brim (born 1987 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan) is an artist and filmmaker. In his works he deals with cinematic spaces, urban phenomena and the concept of power. The physical manifestation of power structures and their territorial extension is central to Brim's video installations, films, and publications. His work has most recently been presented at the Edith-Russ Haus für Medienkunst Oldenburg, Kunst im Tunnel Museum Düsseldorf, and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art.
3x Shapes of Home • Elisabeth Brun
6 min 58 sec
Synopsis:
The artist revisits her childhood place in the Arctic North of Norway. Over two years, she explores through her camera how these environments have shaped the her attachment and her thinking. Hunting for insight beyond herself she tests her relation to place, against the agency of the camera, the agency of an algorithm and the subjectivity of other creatures.
Artist Bio:
Elisabeth Brun (b.1977 Northern Norway) is a filmmaker, artist and theorist. She holds a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Oslo and is currently a post-doc fellow at Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF in Berlin. For Brun, film is both an artistic practice, and a tool for thinking. Her work take a variety of forms, such as installations, films and academic texts, exploring questions of form, of mediation, of the relation between human/environment, and the way form: architectural, topographical and cinematic, shape the way places are experienced and understood.
Sweeping Sweet • Anya Leonova
11 min 21 sec
Synopsis:
“I drink blue liquid as blueness itself.
I want so much to clean up this mess. I hate it when someone else tries to. They seem to never do it right. They’re unaware of the procedures. They can’t get it right.
I can’t get it right.
Our lives will run like sparks through the stubble.
The rhythm of the sweep makes me more powerful and… tender”
A look, fragmented and separated, downed and redirected is collected at one point, a point of constant search. Assembled and generated. By whom?
Moving chaotically, searching with a look, finding, losing. The stream is capturing. Slow dive, excitedly, restart, new attempt, continue. Changes are no longer fatal, but here they are, they are significant. The movement of the camera is conscious and chaotic at the same time as a look with a slight seeking excitement, which periodically causes nausea of the vestibular apparatus shake. The digital gaze emerges due to a turn, once more sharply drops down, into the textures. Who is your companion? Is he near? Does he holds your hand to guiding you? You are following him.
The main character is a janitor, who is presented as embodiment Artificial Intelligence, which is in search of sensual knowledge of the urban environment. The monotonous performance of official duties combines this profession with algorithmized machine action. There is a certain symbiosis with the biological one, which is manifested in the desire to penetrate the textures, to feel the moment of ultimate affectation, openness to the general in the reflection of the particular. The daily ritual of purification and the inevitable collision with the progressive breaks in the urban landscape bring the hero's reflection to a new level. Cracks, faults - all this is filled with light and the flicker of something distant, something like a ghost, finds its reflection in the gaps of the universe. His body is only an image endowed with an imitation of breath, which appears before the gaze of the Other.
The Sweeping Sweet project is a one-channel video narration that tells the story of an attempt to get to know the city through the perception of digital fragments collected and processed by Artificial Intelligence. The fragments combine the whole image of a real place. Attempt. An attempt to approach the human sensory sensation of the difference in textures, a look at objects and / or their absence, routes of movement and interaction with the urban landscape. The basis of the work included found digital objects, author's landscapes and footages of spaces, translated into photograms, and basic models of characters from stocks.
Artist Bio:
Russian-jewish artist based in Moscow, Russia. In her artistic practice she exposes the mass affects of underground culture, global low trends and the physicality of sound. The main mediums are performance, video and digital objects. Anya took part in more than 30 events related to art, including participation in the MIEFF, an exhibition at the Smirnov and Sorokin Foundation, the Shelter Festival, the Moscow International Biennale of Young Ar and at exibition called ‘Assuming Distance: Speculations, Fakes, and Predictions in the Age of the Coronacenein’ in Garage Museum.