WOW selection by Eirini Olympiou, curator @ Athens Digital Arts Festival
Eirini Olympiou (b. 1987, Athens) has studied Fine Arts (BA, MA). As an individual artist, she has participated in solo and group exhibitions and in collaborative projects since 2008. Her artistic practice takes on many forms including painting, photography and mixed media. She has been a video art curator at the international festival of digital arts and new media Athens Digital Arts Festival since 2011, has done curatorial projects with international festivals, for individual exhibitions and also been a member of video art jury in festivals. Her curatorial research explores the boundaries of digital expression. She currently lives, works and studies architecture in Athens, Greece.
Eirini Olympiou @ AND – Artists Network Database
http://and.nmartproject.net/?p=5017
Athens Digital Arts Festival (ADAF) is an International Festival which celebrates digital culture through an annual gathering bringing together a global community of artists and audiences. ADAF aims to encourage, stimulate and promote all aspects of digital creativity by hosting local as well as international artists and communities. Moreover, its goal is to raise awareness on contemporary digital culture, familiarize the wider audience with new media and art, and provide education through innovative workshops focusing on technology and digital arts. In each edition, it always tackles contemporary social and cultural issues related to technological advancements and innovation. Thus, its multidimensional programme offers a wide range of exhibitions, screenings, live performances, workshops and international tributes showcasing artworks that display distinctive characteristics of the digital medium and reflects on its language and aesthetics.
Transitions from Public to PostFuture
List of videos
Gianluca Abbate (IT) Panorama (2015) 07:00 min
Cerezo Azahara (SP) Slopes (2013) 04:37 min
Panagiotis Tomaras (GR) 165 (2009) 02:45 min
Marcantonio Lunardi (IT) Unusual Journey (2017) 03:22 min
Neno Belcev (BU) Sectral Promenade (2013) 03:54 min
Maria Fernanda Bertero (EC) Technolapse (2017) 06:21 min
FIELD (UK) Hidden Layer (2017) 02:54 min
Thomas Valianatos (GR) Fractus machine_Cosmos (2017) 03:34 min
Giada Ghiringhelli (CH/UK) Rhythm of Being (2017) 06:26 min
Gianluca Abbate (IT) Panorama (2015) 07:00 min
A city stretching across an infinite global space: a modern progression of the concept of polis (city), with no uninhabited areas or frontiers where you seek refuge. This landscape,
where there is no way to be readmitted into society once you have been excluded from it, reawakens imaginary worlds in search for equilibrium. Panorama is the first chapter of a
trilogy on the concept of conurbation. I got the idea for Panorama while I was on a train looking at the urban scenery pass me by. The inspiration for the images in the film came
from the forced paths taken by trams and buses, de facto dolly tracks across the city. I used cuts from amateur footage found online, elaborating on and adapting them with computer
graphics techniques, creating a phantasmagoric landscape of a dystopian city that already exists. The man’s living in this place, the complicated life conditions, and the environment’s
influence are so strong they cover up the voice of nature.
Cerezo Azahara (SP) Slopes (2013) 04:37 min
Slope is an experimental video series about the current recession through scenes shot in Northern Ireland (United Kingdom) and Madrid (Spain) and voices from the philosophers Slavoj Zizek, Michael Hardt and Judith Butler.
Panagiotis Tomaras (GR) 165 (2009) 02:45 min
Various miniDV archive tapes of the artist edited in an associational way. Nothing more than presenting instantaneous events with dynamic and tension.
Marcantonio Lunardi (IT) Unusual Journey (2017) 03:22 min
Unusual Journey shows an African man swimming in front of a camera connected to a TV that shows the image to a Caucasian man sitting in an armchair. This is the short-circuit represented following the path of political asylum seekers in Europe. In this video the stories of each of them become, in the face of public opinion, a dress from which they can no longer get rid of. Exactly like the thermal blankets that envelop them upon their arrival.
Neno Belcev (BU) Sectral Promenade (2013) 03:54 min
The author makes a contrast even contradictory parallel between the art and real life, transforming the social message of the video into a multi meaning metaphor of crossing the bridge between the imagination and reality. This video discusses the role of the artist in the contemporary society. It does not present the artist as somebody, who walks together, or against the mainstream, but rather as somebody, who walks on his own path. On the other hand, the video aims to remind us, that very often we are observers of unexpected, unforeseen and extraordinary phenomenon, but we are so deep in our thoughts about everyday life, that we miss them. The video also can be regarded as a metaphor, presented the “walk through life” as a walk through seven different colours, which symbolical meanings refer to seven stages of the spiritual development. Even the video has light in the end of the tunnel.
Maria Fernanda Bertero (EC) Technolapse (2017) 06:21 min
“Man programmed technology unconscious that in the future, technology was going to program man, forming an infinite Ouroboros between them both”. Technolapse is a video art about technolust and its reinterpretation, questioning our ways of doing, since they are molded by technology. The performer, interacts multi-sensorially with a typewriter (mechanic archetype) and with an external manipulation in a game of control, appetite and faith. The reinterpretation is materialized in the form of body extensions. “Heal the mechanization with the same machine, speak with an inner device in its programmed language, and touch the spectator with the same keys”
FIELD (UK) Hidden Layer (2017) 02:54 min
With AI systems playing an ever-growing role in our daily decision making, creative studio FIELD highlights a timely and important topic. Harnessing the insight that human and
artificial intelligence will soon blend into an ‘augmented self’, FIELD weaves together fashion, live action, and CG for its experimental short film, ‘Hidden Layer’. Hidden Layer imagines how the future of AI will affect our sense of identity and humanness – and what happens when these systems inevitably malfunction. In an artificial neural network, the Hidden Layer is where the main computation is performed, but it has no direct connection with the outside world. The film explores how, to a certain extent, deep learning algorithms are simultaneously autonomous, unpredictable, and inscrutable in their decision-making.
Thomas Valianatos (GR) Fractus machine_Cosmos (2017) 03:34 min
The core of «Fractus machine_Cosmos» is an interactive reconstruction of the image and production of real time video, on the basis of the audio information of the image or the visual representation of a sound.
Giada Ghiringhelli (CH/UK) Rhythm of Being (2017) 06:26 min
For an instant, I am. The light touches me gently and I live, burst and shine. This constant, irreversible, rhythmic drift from being to not. Only the memories left. Escaping desires. The
love and the pain. I only have an instant of life. So please. This film is an ode to the rhythm of being. “Rhythm of Being” is an experimental and contemplative film inspired by Henri
Bergson’s concept of vital force and the fact that all existence is a flux of becoming and never at rest, a perpetual generative process that we can’t escape. Through body movements, light and sound, a surreal and artificial world is constructed and deconstructed.