CAMILLE BARTON (United Kingdom)
The Grief Portal (2020)
Video, duration 16 min 45 sec

The Grief Portal is a sci-fi inspired video that will bring you back into your body, through a healing ‘somatic movement’ that allows you to rebuild using ‘the compost of your grief’. The collective grief of the pandemic was what motivated Camille Barton to make the film. In their own words:

In this moment, it is clear that we’ve got a lot to grieve about. We are facing unprecedented social, environmental and political challenges on a global scale. Against the backdrop of Covid-19, we are navigating individual grief, the loss of loved ones, the historical grief of colonisation, migration and displacement, environmental grief, and other forms of harm taking place on Earth. This is currently laid bare for all to see. Something needs to change. We must grieve for these systems and allow them to compost, so we can grow more beautiful futures from the fertile soil of our loss.

So how about joining a healing ritual conducted by Camille, whose tender words and movements will soothe you back into connection with your feelings? You can practice with this video in your own living room. We suggest playing the video either with headphones or on good speakers so you can enjoy the bass frequencies.

ZACH BLAS (USA/United Kingdom)
The Doors (2019)
Video, duration 41 min 25 sec

The Doors looks closely at Silicon Valley’s connections to the Californian counterculture of the 1960s, exploring psychedelia, drug use and artificial intelligence. It is a sequel to Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033: a film that follows novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand on an acid trip in which she bears witness to a dystopian future of the Internet. The Doors is set within a mystical artificial garden, and features sequences of computer graphics and psychedelic machine learning-generated imagery related to a new wave of interest in substances known as ‘nootropics’ that enhance cognitive performance.

In contrast to the ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ ethos, taking nootropics or ‘smart drugs’ has gained popularity in the tech industry as a way of unlocking the mind and being able to work harder and faster. Nootropics include commercially available combination ‘stacks’ as well as microdoses of LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. The AI driving this video was trained on image datasets of psychedelic rock posters, LSD blotter art, brains, glass architecture, sacred geometry, broken glass and lizard skin, while the AI soundtrack is generated from binaural beats, crystal bowl sound baths, ASMR keyboard typing, and music by The Doors. The machine-learning imagery, which is halted before it coheres into recognisable patterns, echoes the saturated, colourful imagery associated with psychedelia. Evoking a 1960s liquid light show, The Doors proposes AI as a generator of a new psychedelic experience for the nootropics age, provoking hallucinations of how to see and control the future, optimise the brain for labour and live forever.

This is an online approximation of a multimedia installation commissioned by Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, de Young Museum, and Van Abbemuseum.

YIN-JU CHEN (Taiwan)
Extrastellar Evaluations III : Entropy : 25800 (2018)
Video (Color/ BW | stereo | 1080p HD | 24p), duration 16 min 50 sec

Extrastellar Evaluations III : Entropy : 25800 looks at human civilisation and humanity’s future through the prisms of space physics, extra-terrestrial myths and cosmography.

This work attempts to reveal exactly when doomsday will take place, using hypotheses and prophecies founded on a choreography of fragments of history, mass media imagery and information. Extrastellar Evaluations III : Entropy : 25800 further adapts the notion of ‘entropy’ from the second law of thermodynamics, and connects it to the avarice and belligerence of human nature. Interspersed throughout the video is commentary from a non-human intelligence named Ra on the subject of everything being the distortion of the one infinite Creator.

JOSHUA CITARELLA (USA)
CYF Cutscenes (2021)
Interactive website and video links

CYF Cutscenes maps the radical fringes of today’s chaotic online political landscape. ‘Metapolitics’ is a term used to describe ideologies that fall outside the bounds of the ‘Overton window’, the range of policies acceptable to the mainstream. The goal of metapolitics is to expand the limits of acceptable discourse and inject radical ideas into the mainstream.

Much of today’s discourse is routed through social media and algorithmic recommendations. In CYF Cutscenes, each link represents one node of content that young ideologues might encounter online while en route to metapolitical ideas. Political speech is being curtailed by the increasingly narrow constraints of social media, so many of these videos may soon disappear.

ELLIE WYATT (United Kingdom)
cherrypicker (2021)
Video, infinite duration
Sound by Aubrey Jackson Blake

cherrypicker is an infinitely looping video which explores how photographic practices are used to support and validate conspiracies and belief systems. Responding to the rampant proliferation of photo-as-(pseudo)evidence in 21st century online cultures, the work highlights how the contemporary photographic detail is hijacked to promote myriad agendas, from UFO conspiracies to time travel and the cult of celebrity. Focusing on the circle as a powerful graphic mechanism used repeatedly to denote an area of special importance within the photograph, the work seeks to indicate the increasingly entangled boundaries between insider and outsider, natural and supernatural, belief and knowledge, fact and fiction.

Mimicking the artist’s own experiences of image consumption and information onslaught in oversaturated online spaces, cherrypicker flashes through over a thousand found images in a fast-paced looping sequence, immersing the viewer in an eerie and uncomfortable world of Kate Middleton’s knees and top-secret military operations. The work is accompanied by a sound track by Aubrey Jackson Blake comprising ominous sonic interpretations of computer systems and sci-fi cinema.

GEOFFREY LILLEMON (USA)
Parallel Archeologies (2020)
Video, duration 4 min 12 sec

Parallel Archaeologies is an ancient portal that has opened up at the bottom of a well. Like a black hole, it sucks our attention inwards, streaming distortions of alternate Internets and code-cracked dimensions as we fall into a cosmic, spiralling, binary bliss – but then the robotic hacker cats come and mess it all up.
It all starts when The Gods assemble a select group of ancient avatars to decide on the shape of a new, fantasy universe. The avatars get to work, but quickly realize they can’t agree on what shape the new universe should be! The mermaid wants it to be square, the centaur wants it cylindrical, and the reptilian wants it ‘Mobius’.
Frustrated by their inability to decide, they all fall into a deep slumber.
While they sleep, a clowder of hacker-cats descend upon and spoil their plans by stealing their avatar code and sending it to an AI engine.
When the ancients awaken, they find themselves trapped inside AI software, their identities consumed by data libraries. Stuck with only fragments of their eyes freaking out, the Internet collapses, sending the universe into an endless binary black hole. Until, that is, it restarts…

Commissioned by Cinekid, supported by Mondriaan Fund

JULIETTE LIZOTTE (France)
Sisters of the Wind (2021)
Online platform
Sisters of the Wind is the fruit of artistic research into witches, eco-feminism and science fiction from 2018 to 2021. It is a story woven through seven videos that can be experienced in different ways: as an online world-building workshop and role-play session, as a publication, or as an interactive audio-visual performance. For Weird Gnosis, Sisters of the Wind was adapted as an online experience.

In the current context of the global pandemic, it is important to find new and safe ways of being together and reinforcing our bonds. The Sisters of the Wind experience was first imagined as a physical one, but it feels just as relevant in an online format, reinventing ways of feeling close to each other and to the world around us.

Sisters… ˜o˚ ‘‘.)* ‘ ‘‘.’··º ° ‘‘ ‘ ‘ ·’ ‘0’ .º•.· ·.˜ *,’,˚˚ ˚oº°•˜ The wind is returning, as it always does. Sometimes it blows so hard that it carries artefacts away from the cities it has torn apart: seeds from faraway places, trees that didn’t have enough time to grow strong enough. As the wind comes and goes in waves you relocate, always seeking a protected area in which to settle. You are witches. Together – from maiden to mother to crone – you pay attention to the world and try to make sense of this life through the phases of the moon. The feminine spirit dominates in your community, and all gender expressions are celebrated. When your precarious way of life is threatened by an unsettling prophecy of a deadly wind that will prepare the earth for a new cycle, will you go on a journey to find the source of this wind? What will you discover on the way? This adventure will transform you, your sisters and the earth forever.

Let’s embark together on this wonderful adventure!

AGNES MOMIRSKI (Slovenia / the Netherlands)
siXren (verbum medicinae) (2020)
Video, duration 37 min

Sound: the missing link between man and nature. Ancient patterns of language and sound have long been seen as healing, transformative and medicinal agents. Practices such as Ancient Greek rhetoric, word magic and ritual poetry, as well as contemporary cognitive science and wellbeing methods, all utilise the primordial power of utterance, rhythm and sound to affect our animal senses, and consequently our body biology, brain chemistry and sensory and cognitive clarity.
The work explores the psychoacoustic effects of ancient verbal and sound formulas used in healing ceremonies, and abstracts and reapplies them into the matrix of contemporary sounds. Sonically and visually, we enter the liminal space between Earth-rhythms and noise-music, between digital and animate, pre-modern and hyper-modern.
The siXren (verbum medicinae) project was inspired by models of ancient healing rhetoric and verbal formulas, which establish a new relationship with (inner) nature for the coming post-human era, and inform the current sonic imaginary in our techno-environment with poetic and healing sensibility.

siXren (verbum medicinae) was made in collaboration with beepblip (sound) and Brina Vidic (visual and costume design); video DOP Rajko Bizjak.

SUZANNE TREISTER (United Kingdom)
TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS: New Cosmological Models for Survival (2021)
Online presentation

TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS presents microcosmic, non-colonialist plans towards a techno-spiritual imaginary of alternative visions of survival on Earth and habitation of the cosmos.

TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS encourages the unification of art, spirituality, science and technology through hypnotic visions of our potential communal futures alongside those of possible extra-terrestrial entities or civilisations.

Countering invasive agendas of governments and the private space industry, TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS proposes a political metamorphosis and transmutation of human consciousness towards a new Earthly and interplanetary paradigm.

TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS consists of multiple components from the categories Project Diagrams, Earth Eco Systems and Architectures, Reinvented Technologies, Interplanetary Social Structures, Designs for Spacecraft, Apparel, Interplanetary Space Habitations, Interplanetary Meditation and Biospheres Islands, Crystal Architectures, Vultures, Rituals, Stars and Visions.