Athena

FILE 2024 | Interator – Sound Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Iskarioto Dystopian AI Films – Athena – Spain

Athena is a captivating animation that immerses you in a psychedelic and nostalgic journey, evoking the retro aesthetic of 80s anime with its vibrant visual style. A world full of bright colors, geometric shapes and surreal landscapes that explores the corners of the human mind, providing a unique visual experience.

Bio

Iskarioto Dystopian AI Films is an emerging Spanish artist, empowered with cutting-edge AI tools, a fusion of human creativity with machine potential. He is known as a visual alchemist, pixel manipulator, and graphic, dark, dystopian storyteller. Since its premiere in 2022, it has been shown in art galleries around the world, having won the Artistic Award at the AI ​​Film Festival Montpellier 2023.

Credits

Music: Athena by Karl Casey

Wave Interference
Any image can be made to elicit any emotional response based on the soundtrack that accompanies it. This is a fact that filmmakers have exploited for years; a soundtrack can make an image cheerful, or nostalgic, or (in a minor key) induce feelings of melancholy or dread. Wave Interference combines a beautiful and elegant vision of a wave of light with a gradually changing melancholic soundtrack;

Rigged
A hybrid of consumer associations, ranging from the glossy iconography of the TV commercial and the sterility of video game graphics to the luminosity of the department store poster and the smell of freshly opened cosmetics, create a subconscious lure. Her use of CGI technology in her artistic practice surpasses a simple study of digital textures (think nostalgic glitch-making) to occupy a full-fleshed, hyperreal space, usually reserved to corporate giants in advertising or entertainment.

Spring Summer 2020
Rick Owens’ Bauhaus Aztec priestesses were some kind of bad-asses. Gliding around the Palais de Tokyo fountain, they presided over a ceremony of wands and bubbles while sporting chrome headdresses glinting like car hood ornaments. It was a kick. Owens was feeling nostalgic, as it turns out. Using blasts of Luis Barragán color, folkloric sequins and volumes with the grandiosity of couture, Owens mined his Mixtec heritage. (His mom, Connie, is Mexican, and his dad, John, worked in the public court system as a Spanish-English translator defending farm workers’ rights.)

Vader
Peeping Tom’s dance shoves certain motifs towards the very limits of acrobatics. Yet between bruised, nostalgic people, or people in love, the situations are deeply dramatic and expressed with feeling. This new piece develops the generic persona of the old father, his mythology, his prestige and his ridicule, his pitiable power deleted by gradual disintegration. It is an intensely human portrayal.

Хилари Фэй
Faye has a magical eye for composition and colour, which especially shines through in her photography. Her collages meld objects, people, animals and landscapes together with haphazard cropping and appropriation, and the outcomes are compelling and enigmatic. She dabbles in layering and geometry; her chosen textures and tones are evocative of another era, with use of nostalgic film grains, which is at the forefront of her mixed media mantra. She has a knack of combining a myriad of elements and arranging them into a rich formation of imagery.

安宣美
mobius strip
The young Korean photographer, Ahn Sun Mi lets us discover her through self portraits. She opens up her poetic universe, a world between dream and reality, where nostalgic feelings cradled by childhood fairy tales and the pursuit of her own inaccessible and voluptuous femininity are the essence of her inspiration. Sun Mi envelops in her familiar world of childhood with her sweet self portraits where toys from the past come to reassure her in a friendly way. Soap bubbles, teddy bears, umbrellas and fluorescent wigs seem to travel with her to the Milky Way in her quest to become a mature woman.

安宣美
The young Korean photographer, Ahn Sun Mi lets us discover her through self portraits. She opens up her poetic universe, a world between dream and reality, where nostalgic feelings cradled by childhood fairy tales and the pursuit of her own inaccessible and voluptuous femininity are the essence of her inspiration.

Eyeglasses
Burris likes black—not just the black that contrasts with white backgrounds, human skins and other trappings. He likes black hair, black stripes, black fabric, black hats and boots, and perhaps even a black way of seeing things… It would be less noticeable if his photographs were in color, but that would take away from their nostalgic charm.

Craco

Tobias Stretch channels the beauty and melancholia of Hauschka’s single “Craco” in his uncanny video filmed in Philadelphia’s answer to Brooklyn’s High Line, Reading Viaduct Park. With music videos for Radiohead, Crystal Fighters and Christopher Bono to his name, the Philly-based animator is known for his distinct aesthetic and method, pairing landscape photography with life-size stop-motion puppets. “I thought right from the beginning when I saw Tobias’s work that it has a mixture of analog and handmade elements and a surreal atmosphere. In my music you have similar elements,” says Hauschka himself, aka the German pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann, who headline’s London’s Union Chapel tonight as part of his European tour. Although best known as a 21st-Century protagonist of the prepared piano practice championed by John Cage, Bertelmann “left all the preparations at home” in order to work with a pure sound on this track. Named after the Italian ghost town,“Craco” is taken from his entropy-laced album Abandoned City and played to Stretch’s own fascination with urban decay. “The music was there beforehand, but I had a bowl of music and a bowl of names and I tried to pair them up. I think the music sounded not only like an abandoned place but also like a nostalgic place and that’s why I thought it was a great match.”

Construction N
Often occupying both physical and temporal space, my sculpture has always incorporated both conventional and experimental media, including woodcarving, metalworking, installation, kinetics, microelectronics and video. While it tends to be visually diverse, the friction between object and memory has been at the conceptual core of my sculptural practice since 1994. The images, objects and narratives of a particular place or experience undergo distortions each time they are represented, and it is these forms of abstraction I explore in my sculpture.
Earlier bodies of work have utilized the physical residue of my traveling – the souvenirs, postcards, snapshots and videotapes – as central elements of the sculpture, forcing them to reveal their own inadequacy, disengagement or transformation, to subvert the nostalgic ideal, or to disrupt the usual implications of value and validation in a cultural artifact. In later works I utilize the physicality of scale, motion, and orientation to extend and challenge the conventional representation of landscape. These pieces define specific places as indefinite spatial constructs that complicate the certainty of “being there,” and are part of a larger attempt to relate a fragmented travel narrative through architecture, landscapes and souvenirs.
I have been using IKEA products as raw material for several years, and continue to be interested in extracting conceptual value from it. I am currently exploring the relationship between the Modern avant-garde and contemporary consumer design culture. In my recent work, I attempt to articulate various points of connection and rupture between IKEA and the Bauhaus by constructing scale models of demolished or unrealized buildings by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius using “hacked” IKEA products such as tables, bookshelves and flooring.

La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura

nostalgic