Distortions of The Past

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Michael Sadowski (aka derealizer) – Distortions of The Past – Austria

Fractal elements that resemble cosmic structures evoke the illusion of traveling through a fractal universe. Rules, in the form of prompts, and chance interact with each other to create a visual fantasy.

Bio

Using Stable Diffusion, a visual synthesizer, the artist turns fantasies into videos using just a PC, similar to the invention of printing 600 years ago. Exploring the interplay between software algorithms that create visual worlds and the artist’s mind guiding this process is incredibly exciting. Unlike traditional cinema, there is no ‘reality’ or humans involved, making it a satisfying medium for creating visual art.

Credits

Visuals: Michael Sadowski
Music: Distortions of the Past by Dreamstate Logic

A Writer’s Odyssey

Seis anos após o sequestro de sua filha, um homem é contratado para matar o autor de um romance de fantasia, mas o mundo do romance parece se cruzar com a realidade. No romance, Redmane é o governante de uma aldeia que ele comanda com punho de ferro. Um jovem herói está em uma missão para acabar com o governo de Redmane. De alguma forma, o romance parece estar impactando a vida no mundo real e, portanto, a corporação quer impedir o autor de continuar seu trabalho.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a 2009 fantasy film directed by Terry Gilliam and written by Gilliam and Charles McKeown. The film follows a travelling theatre troupe whose leader, having made a bet with the Devil, takes audience members through a magical mirror to explore their imaginations and present them with a choice between self-fulfilling enlightenment or gratifying ignorance.
cinema full

カロリナ・ソアベッカ
Каролина Собечка
Wildlife
FILE FESTIVAL

At night a projection from a moving car is shone on the buildings. The car projects a video of a tiger whose movements are programmed to correspond to the speed of the car: as the car moves, the tiger runs along it speeding up and slowing down with the car, as the car stops, the tiger stops also. The framerate of the movie corresponds to the speed of the wheel rotation, picked up by a sensor. The viewers are elevated from the everyday reality through this element of fantasy into a world with more dimensions, possibilities and perhaps beauty.

Planet City

Planet City, by Los Angeles-based film director and architect Liam Young, explores the productive potential of extreme densification, where 10 billion people surrender the rest of the planet to a global wilderness. Although wildly provocative, Planet City eschews the techno-utopian fantasy of designing a new world order. This is not a neo-colonial masterplan to be imposed from a singular seat of power. It is a work of critical architecture – a speculative fiction grounded in statistical analysis, research and traditional knowledge.
It is a collaborative work of multiple voices and cultures supported by an international team of acclaimed environmental scientists, theorists and advisors. In Planet City we see that climate change is no longer a technological problem, but rather an ideological one, rooted in culture and politics.

Spherical Harmonics
Spherical Harmonics is about the strange power of the CGI image. It’s a fantasy under construction, full of digitally created memories, counterfeit physics and controlled accidents. A place where reality fails because it’s too perfect. Spherical Harmonics sits stylistically at a halfway point between the glossy product displays of Oxford Street and the workhouse construction of Soho’s post production scene.

video

Spring Summer 2019
Quinn’s clothes conjure a couture fantasy, with unabashedly extravagant shapes and lavish embellishments. This season the look veered between thigh-grazing confectionary frocks and a more dramatic voluminous silhouette that tumbled to the ground and swept the floor. The floral cocktail dresses of last season were even frothier this time around, bold in the shoulder and replete with handfuls of bows along the sleeves. If that sexy, legs-for-days line evoked frivolity, then the longer, grander gowns readdressed the balance.
FASHION LONDON

Your double my double our ghost
The installation acts a space for the consideration of intimacy and meditation– both alone and with others that may share the space – through the merging of the viewer’s own reflections articulated through a composition of shifting light and emerging sounds which fill an otherwise dark chamber. Functioning similarly to the classic funfair mirror– the flexible silver two-way mirror sheeting forming an ethereal hanging centrepiece– the work invites the viewer to consider representations of themselves which appear distorted and transient, and which merge with those around them to form ‘new presences’. In this sense the viewer may see themselves multiplied or doubled with another viewer, or find themselves alone in a rare moment of literal reflection providing a contemplative space or eliciting a hallucinatory fantasy bringing forth ideas in neuroscience around the Self and Other.

Dans 13 Tongues
Choreographer CHENG Tsung-lung has always been fascinated by his mother’s stories about “Thirteen Tongues”: the street artist and legendary storyteller from their neighbourhood in Taipei was known for being able to slip into various roles. With his full-length work, CHENG succeeds in becoming a modern “Thirteen Tongues” himself: He transforms Taoist rites, festive parades and the bustling street life of Taipei into a fantasy world, blurring the past and the present, the real and the surreal. Against a mysterious soundscape of Taiwanese sounds, Japanese Nakashi melodies and the electronic music of LIM Giong, the dancers stomp and tremble in ecstasy like enchanted shamans in an endless festival.

Mindscapes
The BR41N.IO Hackathon brings together engineers, programmers, physicians, designers, artists or fashionistas, to collaborate intensively as an interdisciplinary team. They plan and produce their own fully functional EEG-based Brain-Computer Interface headpiece to control a drone, a Sphero or e-puck robot or an orthosis with motor imagery. Whenever they think of a right arm movement, their device performs a defined action. The artists among the hackers make artful paintings or post and tweet a status update. And hackers who are enthusiasts in tailoring or 3D printing give their BCI headpiece an artful and unique design. And finally, kids create their very own ideas of an interactive head accessory that is inspired by animals, mythical creatures or their fantasy.

БЙОНХО КИМУ
His Lucid Dream
“My artwork begins with an assumption that “mankind is in continuous pursuit of new desires.” All kinds of desires are exaggerated, minimized, and deleted in order to achieve a pre-established goal. And the more these desires gather together, the larger and more complicated the constructed being becomes. Thus, this is the constructed fantasy, a fantasy of desire, and a fantasy of our time.” – Byoungho Kim

DIM

DIM’ is a music video based on the footage from the pilot episode of FJER, a poetic and freaky urban fantasy web series about the young bird-woman Crane’s emancipation from her father, ruler and lover Hawker.

FILE Sao Paulo 2019 | Anima +

Satyricon
Fellini Satyricon, or simply Satyricon, is a 1969 Italian fantasy drama film written and directed by Federico Fellini and loosely based on Petronius’s work Satyricon, written during the reign of Emperor Nero and set in imperial Rome. The film is divided into nine episodes, following Encolpius and his friend Ascyltus as they try to win the heart of a young boy named Gitón within a surreal and dream-like Roman landscape.
The film opens on a graffiti–covered wall with Encolpius lamenting the loss of his lover Gitón to Ascyltus. Vowing to win him back, he learns at the Thermae that Ascyltus sold Gitón to the actor Vernacchio. At the theatre, he discovers Vernacchio and Gitón performing in a lewd play based on the “emperor’s miracle”: a slave’s hand is axed off and replaced with a gold one. Encolpius storms the stage and reclaims Gitón. On their return to Encolpius’s home in the Insula Felicles, a Roman tenement building, they walk through the vast Roman brothel known as the Lupanare, observing numerous sensual scenes. They fall asleep after making love at Encolpius’s place. Ascyltus sneaks into the room, waking Encolpius with a whiplash. Since both share the tenement room, Encolpius proposes they divide up their property and separate. Ascyltus mockingly suggests they split Gitón in half. Encolpius is driven to suicidal despair, however, when Gitón decides to leave with Ascyltus. At that moment, an earthquake destroys the tenement.

Commune
David Rosetzky works predominantly in video and photographic formats, creating scenarios in which human behaviour, identity, subjectivity, contemporary culture and community come under intimate observation. He has been making portraits since the early 1990s, using the format to explore relationships between interiority and exteriority, reality and fantasy, authenticity and artificiality. Technically and aesthetically precise, Rosetzky’s work is stylised, moody and strikingly beautiful, and resembles the idealised images found in high-end advertising and screen culture.

“Sophie Delaporte is a French photographer who is on permanently good terms with fantasy and a cheerfully offbeat approach. She has a distinctive sense of color, a fabulist’s imagination, an edge of surrealism, and a knack for ambiguous narrative”.

Re-projection: Hoosac

Influenced by the utopian projects — and notable failures — of innovative artists and designers such as Buckminster Fuller, Frederick Kiesler, and Charles Eames, Tobias Putrih likens his works to experiments, or design prototypes. His use of cheap materials, including egg crates, cardboard, and plywood signify both a sense of potential and impending collapse. Many of the artist’s works reference the architecture and spectacle of the cinema: a space suspended between fantasy and reality, image and environment. With Re-projection: Hoosac Putrih distills the cinema to its most basic element: fishing line stretched across the gallery mimics the conical trajectory of a beam of light. A spotlight hits the strands of monofilament which in turn become a screen, reflecting an image in illuminated dots. Inspired by the Hoosac Tunnel just east of North Adams — a storied, engineering marvel that draws ghost-hunters to the area — Putrih’s tunnel is, likewise, both real and a representation, an optical trick that invites both wonder and investigation.

Augmented Shadow
File Festival

Augmented Shadow is a design experiment producing an artificial shadow effect through the use of tangible objects, blocks, on a displayable tabletop interface. Its goal is to offer a new type of user-experience. The project plays on the fact that shadows present distorted silhouettes depending on the light. Augmented Shadows take the distortion effect into the realm of fantasy. Shadows display below the objects according to the physics of the real world. However, the shadows themselves transform the objects into houses, occupied by shadow creatures. By moving the blocks around the table the user sets off series of reactions within this new fantasy ecosystem. In this installation, the shadows exist both in a real and a virtual environment simultaneously. It thus brings augmented reality to the tabletop by way of a tangible interface. The shadow is an interface metaphor connecting the virtual world and users. Second, the unexpected user experience results from manipulating the users’ visual perceptions, expectations, and imagination to inspire re-perception and new understanding. Therefore, users can play with the shadows lying on the boundary between the real, virtual, and fantasy. Augmented Shadow utilizes this unique interface metaphor for interactive storytelling. Maximizing the magical amusement of AR, it is embedding an ecosystem where imaginary objects and organic beings co-exist while each of them influences on each other’s life-cycle, even though it is not in use by users. Light and shadow play critical roles in this world’s functions causing chain reactions between virtual people, trees, birds, and houses. A set of tangible blocks allows users to participate in the ecosystem. Users can influence on the system by playing with the blocks or observe the changes of the shadows as if kids were playing with an ant farm.

The Creator

Decades ago, Turing famously asked, ‘Can machines think?’ and ever since, the notion of computers exceeding human intelligence has transfixed researchers and popular culture alike. For their fantastical Turing interpretation, the directors conjoin Lynchian nightmare with the prophetic themes of J.G. Ballard. Audiences will enter the haunting dream world of the legendary scientist, who gave birth to the computer age. Turing’s binary children embark upon a mystical odyssey to explore their creator’s dream diaries in a quest to discover their origins and destiny in the universe.
Probing the infinite possibilities of technology, AL and AL investigate the shaping forces of fantasy and reality. Having established themselves as pioneering artist filmmakers, they combine performance with computer-generated 3D environments to create dream worlds.