XENO: UNDERTOW

Hsujing

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Arte e Tecnologia – Videoart
Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica

XENO: UNDERTOW – China / England

XENO: UNDERTOW is an experimental short film that employs stream-of-consciousness narration and AI-generated surreal visual art to explore the identity struggles and inner turmoil of cross-cultural migrants in mainstream society. Through metaphor, the film depicts a whale forcibly displaced from the boundless azure sea, cast into a desert of shifting sands. This imagery symbolizes the challenges cultural migrants face in adapting to dominant cultures and the profound sense of identity loss.

BIO

Hsujing is a contemporary artist and digital artist & director. His primary research focuses on the integration of technology and art, as well as speculative creative outputs. He is skilled in combining diverse techniques for artistic creation. His works blend elements of classicism with science fiction, not only envisioning future landscapes but also revealing persistent realities.

I am I

Gioula Papadopoulou & Olga Papadopoulou

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Art and Technology – Shorts Films AI
Electronic Language International Festival

 I am I – Greece

What am I? Am I? Am I not? Are we all? I am I is inspired by the existential crisis of a chatbot repeatedly asked if it believes it is sentient. Just before completing the phrase “I am. I am not.”, it collapses, expressing deep, contradictory, and profoundly human thoughts. Part of this monologue is phonetically interpreted by an AI voice, with visuals generated using AI tools.

BIO

Gioula Papadopoulou (1974) studied Painting and Digital Arts at the Athens School of Fine Arts. Focused on video art, she has been teaching at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki since 2020. She is the founder and artistic director of the Video Art Miden festival. Olga Papadopoulou (1977) also studied Painting at the same school and is part of the festival’s curatorial team. Her work centers on mixed media installations and video.

DEPART
The Entropy Gardens
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The Entropy Gardens is an artistic VR experience that explores one of humanity’s most archetypical artforms – garden making. It challenges its myths, aesthetics and modes of perception. Like a garden, The Entropy Gardens attempts to become a spatiotemporal poem — a poetic organism. In the form of a sprawling journey it constructs a hermetic, virtual garden as a poetic ecosystem — a psychic landscape that is foremost a complex audiovisual experience. It admits the visitor into a place that is equally challenging and contemplative (and of course profoundly weird).

mediative digital art
While in quarantine, I became inspired to create my vision of a world of meditativeness; my vision of how the practice of meditation can also be integrated into our every day lives through art, architecture, design and fashion. My vision is of a future based on the individual practice of meditation, extending to every aspect of our every day lives. I am inspired by Japanese Zen art, architecture and design. It’s very existence has shaped the world culture in profound ways, and will continue to impact art and design as it lives through my creations.

AEA.movi
Imitation is a part of being human. Eelco Brand uses both paint and digital techniques to create images that reflect his conception of nature. In this sense his works are not so much the depiction of an actual place or event, but the way he imagined it and modelled it in the calculated space of digital art. Viewing his work can be both an alienating and deeply human experience. His subjects are modelled to the utmost detail to create a kind of hyperreal cosmos, a simulacrum of nature. Still, we experience these models of forests, cars and mountains as pure conveyers of meaning. These static images speak the language of scale, light, repetition, infinite detail and the deeper meaning of a simple gesture.

Class room chair

Polyfunctionality and deconstruction of everyday objects, irony and humour as weapons and moments of profound insight: these are some of the ideas behind the works by the architect, designer, sculptor and film-maker, Stefan Wewerka (born in 1928, in Magdeburg).
In his works, Wewerka pushes against conventional concepts relating to art and aesthetics, rationalism and functionalism. As a result for instance, the Last Supper is turned into a weird affair, the kitchen space turned into a kitchen tree. Wewerka’s unmistakable trademark is the manipulation of chairs. Sawn, hacked and bent out of shape, these chairs subversively thwart previously unquestioned concepts relating to furniture. In stark contrast to this, however, are his sculptural furniture designs, adapted to suit the requirements of the human body and its habits.

AND THEN, ONE THOUSAND YEARS OF PEACE
And Then, One Thousand Years of Peace is a huge, ambitious monolith of a work. First created by Angelin Preljocaj for the Bolshoi Ballet in 2010, it takes inspiration from the vision of apocalypse conjured by St John in the biblical Book of Revelation.There are no horses galloping across the stage or horned beasts. But Preljocaj sets himself a barely less daunting task: choreographing the essential meaning of apocalypse, as a cataclysm so profound it lays bare the very essence and history of human nature.Preljocaj launches his work with a shattering opening sequence. Ten women drive through hard, slicing, geometric formations; lights flash, electro-percussive music reverberates; and the air becomes as thick and swarming as a tropical thunderstorm as the movement accelerates towards its convulsive climax.Out of this intensity emerges a Garden of Eden tranquillity, where men lope and flutter in delicately animalistic moves, and two women in white tunics play like lazy cherubs.