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Daniel Theiler
Top Down Memory
Experimental film | 4k | color | 12:20 | Germany | 2020
The work deals with the manipulation of history in the context of the reconstruction of the Berlin Palace (“Humboldtforum”). Starting from the confusions surrounding an alledged proclamation of a socialist republic from one of its balconies in 1918, the film examines other political events that occurred on balconies. Reenactments of iconic political and cultural events on the original balcony raise questions about authenticity and manipulation. Who is writing our history? How do we deal with our past? How does collective memory work? The balcony is the central motive of the work, representing hierarchies and power politics.
Daniel Theiler is a German-Turkish visual artist, filmmaker and architect. He graduated as Meisterschüler of Nina Fischer in Art and Media at UdK Berlin. Studies of art at Bauhaus University Weimar under Danica Daki? and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA), and architecture at TU Berlin, ETH Zurich, and the University of Strathclyde Glasgow (Dipl.-Ing.). Daniel Theiler works with a variety of media ranging from video, photography and sculpture to public interventions. In his works, he examines the gaps between utopia and reality by challenging conventions and questioning the usual. Theiler lives and works in Berlin.
Aske Thiberg
Ingen Problemer
Fiction | mp4 | color | 23:30 | Sweden, Denmark | 2020
"No Problems" is a film about six characters and their personal relationships. The characters are all 3D scanned people who, while listening to the text of their inner monologue, move around in the "real" world where they don't quite fit in. Their skin reacts differently to the sun, their clothing does not respond to wind and their facial expressions remain the same no matter what is said. They use hand signs, awkward body movements and dance, in an attempt to stage the texts being read. Texts that talk about the feeling of disappointing oneself and one's loved ones.
Aske Thiberg (b.1994) is a Swedish and Danish artist, based in Copenhagen, where he is currently doing his MFA in Fine Arts.
Clarissa Thieme
Was bleibt I Šta ostaje I What remains / Re-visited
Experimental doc. | 4k | color | 70:0 | Germany | 2020
Films end. Biographies end. Life goes on. Can we break this law? Clarissa Thieme takes a stab at it. In "Was bleibt | Šta ostaje | What remains / Re-visited" (2020) she travels to certain cities and villages in Bosnia Herzegovina. She takes a single shot in each of the places where countless people have been raped, tortured, and murdered during the Bosnian War. Ten years ago, Thieme had been there already. "Was bleibt | Šta ostaje | What remains" (2009, 2010 world premiere at Berlinale) showed these places without accompanying words. Each of the images questioned: Does the location give testimony to the horror, or does it stay silent? Ten years later everything is different, or is it? In each of the places Thieme and her film team unfold a life-size transparent with a still from the preceding film from 2010. Sometimes this comparison of ‘now and then’ is simply a silent act of recognition. At other times it sparks conversation. Some are evasive, some full of lived-through memories. Who died where, is one of the questions. Who left to build a new existence elsewhere; who stayed; who returned – are some of the other. Between the lines and between the images it becomes clear: these topics haven’t been processed yet. And, how could they? It is difficult enough to keep on living. At the same time the filmic intervention prompts a reaction: In front of Thieme’s camera momentary public spaces arise. The old images provoke exchange. This exchange takes the form of what the reacting people are giving it. The film does not unravel mysteries – it is doing something mysterious: It dives into a space between remembrance and continuation and interlocks retrospection with the present. The void is everywhere. And Thieme’s film is never finished. On the contrary, it proves that there is a chance to act through film that persists. To be continued. (Jan Verwoert)
Clarissa Thieme is an artist and filmmaker. Working across film, photography, performance, installation and text, she combines documentary and fictional forms focussing on processes of memory, politics of identity and strategies of translation. Her practice is research-based and often takes a collaborative approach. Thieme studied Media Art at the University of the Arts Berlin (UdK), holds a MA in Cultural Studies And Aesthetic Practice, University Hildesheim and is research alumni of the Berlin Center for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences (BAS). Thieme's work has been exhibited and screened internationally and is available at Arsenal Distribution Berlin and sixpackfilm Vienna, as well as part of Video-Forum n.b.k. Berlin, blinkvideo, Hamburg and DES'T / district, Berlin.
Clarissa Thieme
Can't You See Them? - Repeat
Video | 4k | color | 8:30 | Germany | 2019
Trauma prevents realities from aligning with themselves. Pain stops the puzzle pieces from fitting and forming a full picture, so the soul returns to the scene of its scarring over and over. Clarissa Thieme enters these loops of troubled remembrance: There is a video she found in the Hamdija Kresevljakovic Video Archive that collects footage of the siege of Sarajevo, filmed by Nedim Alikadic. It shows militia men by a river in a residential area. “Film them,” Alikadic is being urged by his companion. Handheld, the camera nervously moves, pans, and stutters as it seeks to connect to the threat before it. It is this particular camera movement that Thieme tracked with advanced digital image processing technology. The resultant meta-data now control an automatic arm and make it move a ray of light in exactly the same way the hand shifted the camera. Exactitude and ephemerality: extremes meet. The closer ones gets to the traumatic real, it seems, the more strongly it fractures and disperses over different planes of representation. Thieme enters the gap between them, widening it, while simultaneously pulling the fragments of reality together into one unsettling force-field. (Jan Verwoert)
clarissa thieme is an artist and filmmaker. working across film, photography, performance, installation and text, she combines documentary and fictional forms focussing on processes of memory, politics of identity and strategies of translation. her practice is research-based and often takes a collaborative approach. thieme studied Media Art at the University of the Arts Berlin (UdK), holds a MA in Cultural Studies And Aesthetic Practice, University Hildesheim and is research alumni of the Berlin Center for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences (BAS). she is based in berlin.
Søren Thilo Funder
Swerve (You’re Gonna Die Up There)
Video | hdv | | 10:0 | Denmark | 2017
Swerve (You're Gonna Die Up There) sets out to reconstruct the illusion and history of cinema with an undertow of Cold War symbolism. It is only moments since the girl Regan Theresa MacNeil interrupted the party, addressing Captain Billy Cutshaw with the eerie forewarning: "You're gonna die up there". Now, the astronaut Billy Cutshaw who first appeared in The Exorcist (1973) prior to a space mission, and later as mental patient in The Ninth Configuration (1980) is driving through the dark streets of Washington DC. During this drive, he will meet his future self, who will convince him not to go to the moon. Against the background of this meeting, the work reflects on the psychological and also social and societal implications of space travel
Soren Thilo Funder’s works are carefully crafted cinematic mash-ups of diverse cultural fields and social histories. They serve as formal investigations into the power relations of modern day society and the truisms of written and unwritten history. Proposing new connections between historical, cultural and political matter, they open up new potential spaces ? third places ? for political contemplation and counter-memory.
Laurie Thinot
Xpression
Animation | dv | color | 3:20 | France | 2007
Tracks of a thought for a face to face explosion..
- Student in animation at the Ensad (National Superior School of Decorative Arts, Paris) since the year 2002
Jennet Thomas
THE TRUTH AND THE PLEASURE
0 | dv | color | 4:50 | United Kingdom | 2007
" I`m intsalling a personal toolkit for thinking specially customised only for you You enable it just by teh action of blinking From now on your thoughts will be focussed and true"
I live and work in London, and am a founder member of the Exploding Cinema Collective ( ww.explodingcinema.org) I am pathway leader of the Fine Art Time Based Media course at the University of the Arts London. My single screen work is distributed internationally by Video Data Bank www.vdb.org
Jennet Thomas
Because of the war
0 | dv | color | 13:40 | United Kingdom | 2005
Because of the War things were changing. Very few toys or games were left, and music was almost over. Tap water tasted female-like and the television came on in nasty spasms...
Jennet Thomas' work is her own hybrid collision of pop culture, experimental, and storytelling forms. She has recently had solo shows at: Anthology Film Archives, New York; Centre d?Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie, France; and The Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago USA. She is a founding member of the London based 'Exploding Cinema Collective'. Her work grew from the lively Underground artists-run film club scene in London in the 1990s. Her single screen work is distributed internationally by Video Data Bank. She is a senior Lecturer at the Wimbledon College of Art, at the University of the Arts, London.
Guillaume Thomas
Life damages the living
Documentary | hdv | color | 58:56 | France, USA | 2021
Valerie von Sobel, 80, draped in Haute Couture and mystery. Locked up in California mountains during a global pandemic, a prodigal son tries to portray his spiritual mother.
As a child, Guillaume THOMAS wanted to be a magician « Magic does not exist, » said the grown ups. Determined to prove them wrong, he took up a camera. His quest has taken him on a journey to document those brave and enchanted souls who are unafraid to express the multiplicity of beings, their infinite selves. Trained in photography and video at l’École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, as well as the School of Visual Arts in New York, he directed his first movie « Life damages the living » in 2021 during his residency at Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains.
Guillaume Thomas, Gianluca Matarrese
Pinned into a dress
Documentary | digital | color | 20:4 | France | 2022
Growing up silently Queer, within a broken family, Kurtis faced abuse, trauma and addiction. As an escape, he discovered Beauty within his rural upbringing. Eventually unveiling places beyond his wildest dreams, he created his alter-ego, Miss Fame, becoming one of the world’s most iconic drag supermodel. A hypnosis session takes us on Kurtis/Miss Fame’s journey into their mind, exploring their salvatory yet torturous relationship to Pain and Beauty.
Guillaume Thomas I delve into the intimate and the power of representation, exploring the role of images in self-discovery. My creative spectrum encompasses photography, film, video, installation, sculpture, and silkscreen techniques. My work uncovers the creation of icons and myths while revealing the intricate processes behind them. This pursuit was embodied in my debut documentary, "Life Damages the Living," produced by Le Fresnoy in 2021, and showcased at Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin in 2022. The film traces Valerie von Sobel's journey from Nazi Budapest to Hollywood, presenting the wisdom of a liberated woman spanning eight decades. Trained at l’École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the School of Visual Arts in New York, I am constantly drawn to characters reinventing themselves, as evidenced in my art exploring beauty's future, the Queer community, and body expression. Transformation, the search for the absolute, and our origins captivate me. In collaboration with Le Fresnoy, my digital art installation "Ad Astra" (2022) captures moving light as a dynamic portrait, merging centuries-old techniques with modern tools like 3D scanning and NASA imagery. This hybrid installation juxtaposes human luminance and starlight, prompting contemplation of our cosmic connection. I am driven to portray individuals and phenomena from fresh angles. On September 1, 2022, "Pinned into a Dress," co-directed with Gianluca Matarrese, starring drag artist and supermodel Miss Fame, opened the Venice International Film Critics' Week. This film redefines identity exploration through the lens of a chameleon artist. Cross-pollination of universes, hybridization, and diverse techniques are my artistic lifeblood. ----------------- Gianluca Matarrese (1980) was born in Torino and moved to Paris in 2002 to study cinema and theater. He graduated in History and Critics of North American Cinema at the University of Torino and Paris VIII, also graduating at the Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. In 2008 he started working in French television, as a writer and director for a comedy series on OCS networks broadcast until 2012. Then he continued as writer, director and segment producer in entertainment department for moreover than 25 programs and all French networks. In 2019 his documentary “Fuori Tutto” (Rossofuoco Films, Agat Films, France Télévisions) won the award for Best Italian Documentary at the Torino Film Festival. His film “La dernière séance” (“The Last Chapter”) had its world premiere at the last Venice International Film Critics’ Week, winning the Queer Lion Award. The film has been selected at IDFA, Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, and keeps touring in other international festivals. The film has recently been broadcast on SKY Italy networks. He directed, for France Télévisions, the musical documentary on the singer Barbara Pravi, representative of the Eurovision Contest 2020. His film “Fashion Babylon” (Bellota Films & France Télévisions) premiered at CPH:DOX and Hot Docs and more than 20 festivals around the world. It has been broadcast in 10 countries. His film “Il Posto” (“A Steady Job”) (Altara Films, Bocalupo Films & ARTE / NDR), co-directed with Mattia Colombo premiered in Vision du Réel and Hot Docs, and it’s currently touring in several international festivals. In 2023, Gianluca premiered his latest films “Les Beaux Parleurs” at Biografilm Festival & “L’expérience Zola” at Giornate degli Autori of the 8oth Venice International Film Festival.
Jennet Thomas
Double Dummy
Experimental video | dv | color | 6:40 | United Kingdom | 2004
Four Dummies, two cats, and a portal to bliss inside their attempts at symmetry. A hairball, and a mess of twigs, whose love has died and who are sad.
My work has grown out from the lively artists-run underground media scene in London of the 1990?s. A founder member of the London based collective Exploding Cinema, I?ve been screening and touring Film, Video and Installation work on the International Experimental Media Festival circuit for the past 9 years. I live in South London with film maker Paul Tarrago and Olive the cat. I?m a senior lecturer at Wimbledon College of Art, at The University of the Arts London. My video work is distributed by Video Data Bank, Chicago. I?ve recently had solo retrospectives of my work at : Anthology Film Archives , New York, the Centre d?Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie, France and The Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago USA and toured work to the National Review of Live Art, Glasgow.
Jennet Thomas
The man who went outside
Video installation | dv | color | 10:0 | United Kingdom | 2008
A distinguished looking man (performance artist Richard Layzell) is apparently trapped in an ever changing void of colour, locked in a power play with a perversely operated camera. A mute, caged, charismatic TV presenter he is by turns charming, menacing, educational, confused. At times he appears to have great powers. A voice over tells us extraordinary things- how this man is special- the first man to ?have a baby?. Hallucinogenic flash- frames punctuate the colour field to give us a view of his world?s disturbing and alien futuristic logic. A retro Sci- fi critique of representation. A playful meditation on the idiocy of making sense.
Jennet Thomas`s work emerged from the anarchistic, experimental culture of London`s underground film and live art club scene in the 1990?s, where she was a co founder of the Exploding Cinema Collective. It now screens extensively in the international Film festival arena, with recent retrospectives at Anthology Film Archives in NYC and Rencontres Video Art Plastique in France. More recently her work has been appearing in the form of video installations in Galleries in London, Europe and North America. With a recent solo show at PEER ( www.peeruk.org) and forthcoming major show at Matt?s Gallery( www.mattsgallery.org) in London. Her work began as hybrid spoken word performance and projections for a live audience, it now combines a variety of filmic languages- ranging from soap operas to experimental and underground filmmaking, from sci-fi to musicals. Her work tackles very human content and is often bleakly comic.
Marina Thomé, -
Céu Vermelho
Video installation | mov | color | 70:0 | Portugal | 2024
The imagery archival of breast cancer became subject to a critical examination and reevaluation in an artistic approach. On the one hand, the personal experience, on the other, the volcanos, a powerful allegory. They encounter each other in a provocative feminist reread of archival medical images. By remixing these images and juxtaposing them with personal and contemporary experiences, the film subverts their original messages bringing embodiment back to patients. Merging artistic practice and social activism, Red Skies brings together aesthetics and political investigation. It conveys the relationship between archival scientific media and personal breast cancer experience engaging with a wide variety of issues related to women’s health.
www.marinathome.com.br Marina holds a master degree in Creative Documentary (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and studied photojournalism at International Center of Photography (NYC). Her work took part in festivals in France, Portugal, Spain, and elsewhere, including BAFICI (AR), Biarritz Amérique Latine (FR), and Krakow Film Festival (PL). She directed 2 award-winning documentary films. "What I've never lost", premiered in 2021 at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (BAFICI), was released theatrically in Brazil and Portugal, broadcasted in public TV, and holds 2 nominations for the Brazilian Society of Cinematographers Award (ABC). “The sound of bells” (2016), was broadcasted in public TV and is distributed internationally by Boston-based Documentary Educational Resources (USA). In 2021, she was honored as part of the Santiago International Film Festival, in the “Directoras en Foco” session at Chile. Currently Head of Industry and Development at DocLisboa International Film Festival, she co-directs ESTUDIO CRUA, a documentary production company based in Lisbon and São Paulo.
Nicolas Thomé Zetune, Felipe André Silva
Minhas férias
Experimental fiction | 0 | color | 16:36 | Brazil | 2025
"I just arrived from the future, and there people still go to the movies. On second thought, maybe it's better to start like this: I just arrived from the future, and there people still go to the movies."
Nicolas THOMÉ ZETUNE (1993, Brazil) is a film director based in São Paulo. In 2012, he founded the production company FILMES DE AMOR. Nicolas' short films have been screened at some of the biggest film festivals, such as the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Nicolas' first feature film, “O Pequeno Mal”, was presented at FID Marseille in 2018. The second film, “O Tubérculo”, had its world premiere at the 27th Tiradentes Film Festival. In 2025, Nicolas was one of the selected participants for Berlinale Talents Buenos Aires, an international forum for discussion and project development organized in partnership with the Berlin Film Festival and BAFICI – Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival. He is currently preparing his third feature film, "Invisible Tunnel," a project selected for FIDLab (Marseille, France). Filming is scheduled for November 2026. Felipe ANDRÉ SILVA (1991, Recife) is a filmmaker and poet. His film credits include the features Santa Mônica (2015) and Passado (2020), and the short Cinema Contemporâneo (2019). He regularly works as a curator for the Janela Internacional de Cinema do Recife festival. In literature, he has published the chapbooks o escritor Xerxenesky and o autocad de Britney Spears, and currently runs &legal edições, a digital micro-publishing house dedicated to contemporary poetry.
Christopher Thompson
Foot To Ground
Experimental film | 16mm | black and white | 8:11 | USA | 2024
Minimalist frontiers proliferate from acquisition. Larping utopia, shedding skins, forging new luxury amidst shards of past lives. Embracing shadows, sculpting stagnant futures in the flicker of ancient flames.
Christopher Thompson (1990) is a contemporary American artist and filmmaker whose work examines desire, capital, and the seemingly supernatural forces that govern its acceleration. His films and video works have been featured in film festivals and exhibitions worldwide, including San Francisco Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS, London Short Film Festival at ICA London, Prismatic Ground, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Brooklyn Film Festival, San Diego Underground Film Festival, and Iowa City International Documentary Film. He holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied video art and experimental film. Thompson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Justin Randolph Thompson
From the Campidoglio to the Zoo
Experimental film | super8 | color | 26:0 | Italy | 2023
From the Campidoglio to the Zoo is a film and sound work that examines the bridging of coloniality into a postwar Italy drawing upon the Ponte Flaminio, a bridge projected to celebrate fascist aspirations and to provide a ceremonious entry to the city, constructed based on the original proposal of Armando Brasini after WWII. The work borrows its title from an unpublished essay by author William Demby, written as a critique of the 1959 Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers which he attended. The congress, dedicated to the development of vision and solidarity amongst Afro-diasporic cultural producers existed in contrast to its hosting by the Istituto Italiano per l’Africa. The film is activated through a live sound performance recorded inside the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome, by Dudu Kouate and Justin Randolph Thompson drawing upon the essence of negritude advanced in relation to the congress and the fragmentary nature of global Black unity. The sound was performed using a range of instruments that are part of the ethnographic collection of the Pigorini Museum in Rome housed by the Museo delle Civiltà. This was the first time that these instruments have been played since their placement in the collection in some cases over one hundred years ago. The work was supported by the British School at Rome and the Museo delle Civiltà.
Justin Randolph Thompson is an artist, cultural facilitator and educator born in Peekskill, NY in ’79. Based between Italy and the US since 1999. Thompson is a recipient of a 2024 MAP Fund Award, a 2022 Creative Capital Award, a 2020 Italian Council Research Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, a Franklin Furnace Fund Award, a Visual Artist Grant from the Fundacion Marcelino Botin and an Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park amongst others. His work and performances have been exhibited widely in institutions including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and The American Academy in Rome and are part of numerous collections including The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museo MADRE. His life and work seek to deepen the discussions around socio-cultural stratification and the arrogance of permanence by employing fleeting temporary communities as monuments and fostering projects that connect academic discourse, social activism and DIY networking strategies in annual and biennial gathering, sharing and gestures of collectivity.
Jon Thomson, Craighead, Alison
A short film about war
Video installation | hdcam | color | 9:39 | United Kingdom | 2010
A Short film about War is a narrative documentary artwork made entirely from information found on the worldwide web. In ten minutes this two-screen gallery installation takes viewers around the world to a variety of war zones as seen through the collective eyes of the online photo sharing community Flickr, and as witnessed by a variety of existing military and civilian bloggers. As the ostensibly documentary `film` plays itself out, a second screen logs the provenance of images, blog fragments and gps locations of each element comprising the work, so that the same information is simultaneously communicated to the viewer in two parallel formats -on one hand as a dramatised reportage and on the other hand as a text log. In offering this tautology, we are attempting to explore and highlight the way in which information changes as it is gathered, edited and then mediated through networked communications technologies or broadcast media, and how that changes and distorts meaning -especially for (the generally wealthy minority of) the world`s users of high speed broadband networks, who have become used to the treacherously persuasive panoptic view that google earth (and the worldwide web) appears to give us.
Jon Thomson (b. London) and Alison Craighead (b. Aberdeen) are fascinated how globalisation and networked global communications have been re-shaping the way we all perceive and understand the world around us. They live and work in London and Kingussie in the highlands of Scotland making artworks and installations for galleries, museums and site-specific locations that include the worldwide web. Recent exhibitions include; Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn; Berkeley Art Museum, California; Highland Institute of Contemporary Art, Scotland; Artists Space, New York; Tang Contemporary, Beijing; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Dundee Contemporary Arts. Jon is Reader in Fine Art at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, while Alison is Reader in contemporary art and visual culture at University of Westminster and lectures in fine art at Goldsmiths University, London. For information on forthcoming, current and previous work, you can follow their blogat http://thomson-craighead.blogspot.com and explore their archive website at http://www.thomson-craighead.net
John Thomson
Electronic Art Intermix
0 | 0 | | 0:0 | USA | 2007
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is one of the most important world centres of resources and research on video art and new medias. Founded in 1971 by the New York gallery owner Howard Wise, whose eponymous gallery on 57th was the epicentre of cinema art and multimedia works at the time, the EAI's objective was to assert the role of video as a medium of artistic communication and expression. in its 36 years of existence, the EAI has concentrated on the distribution and preservation of its phenomenal collection of works. A collection groups together historic works by the pioneers of video as well as the works of emerging contemporary artists. A collection, a genuine storage of video and new arts, which is partly available and consultable on-line. But if the EAI supports artists by notably putting digital and analogical tools of editing at their disposition, and if the EAI distributes and preserves its catalogue, the organization is still before anything else a cultural body supporting promotion of new arts and their popularization. It offers a visionary room to the public, where the catalogue can be consulted in its entirety. It also organizes exhibitions and public programs.
John Thomson has been the Director of Distribution at the Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) since 2000. He is also co-director and founder of Foxy Production, an important New York contemporary art gallery. Since the 1980s he has been internationally active in new arts. Before moving to New York in 2000, he carried out research on the digitalization and distribution of multimedia arts at the Lux Centre in London. In 1998 he was the co-ordinator of the Pandemonium Festival in London and, in 1997, he co-prepared the premiere exhibition of the Lux Centre's 'Image in Mouvement'. He has also organized new arts programs and exhibitions for the Pacific Film Archive of Berkeley in California; the Staatsgalerie of Stuttgart, the Tate Britain in London; the London Institute of Contemporary Art; Exit Art in New York; and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn. He has given conferences on new arts at the London Institute and at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and has written for magazines - Mesh, Melbourne, and Art in Culture, Seoul - and for the preservation of new arts: Art Between Zero and One: A Manual of Digital Art, Basel.
Jol Thomson
Deep Time Machine Learning
Experimental doc. | hdv | color | 5:59 | Canada, Germany | 2017
What can structuralist film techniques contribute in the age of machine vision? In the experimental film, a robot arm investigates a 200,000 year old hand axe and an 17th century mechanical calculator (the first fully functional four stage computation device), each are placed on an octagonal mirror. The robotic arm passes through interfaces of geology, archaeology, mechanics and computation and intimately explores its own coming into being as a product of human engineering. Excerpts from the latest EU Report to the Commission on Civil Law and Robotics, published in January 2017, punctuate the video, describing the need to define the subjectivity of intelligent machines, as well as their legal status and the liabilities that derive from their implementation. The critical, uncertain and undetermined state of intelligent machines’ subjecthood emerges through the eyes of a human society themselves struggling with this ecotechnical revolution, “that leaves no aspect of society untouched”. Crucially, the set is observed by an Artificial Intelligence object recognition device, or LiDAR - a form of sense which AI systems use to perceive their haptic environment. Deep Time Machine Learning was developed collaboratively with the laboratories of robotics and surface analytics at the Bosch Corporate Research and Advanced Engineering Campus and received support from the Natural History Museum, Stuttgart and the Phillip Matthäus-Hahn Museum, Kornwestheim. Jol Thomson’s experimental film elaborates a deep history of tool use from the Paleolithic era with a trajectory to the not-too distant future of algorithmic, AI governance. The explorations of this work contribute to a contemporary media ecology, a history and philosophy of technology in machine vision, and underpins the symbiotic relationship between agential forms of geology, technology, and “intelligent beings”.
Jol Thomson is an artist, sound designer, and researcher working in the interstices between critical theory, particle physics, environmental humanities, STS, and experimental music and moving image. He is currently pursuing a practice-led Phd at the University of Westminster, London. He received his meisterschüler in Fine Art from the Städelschule, Frankfurt in 2013. In 2016 he won the MERU Art*Science Award for his a/v composition G24|0v, a collaboration with the “coldest object in the observable universe”. He has participated in a number of international residencies, and in 2016-2017 he was a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. Recent exhibitions include: Blind Faith: Between the Cognitive and the Visceral in Contemporary Art at the Haus Der Kunst, Munich (2018); Open Codes: Living in Digital Worlds, ZKM (Center for Art and Technology), Karlsruhe (2017-2018); and Quantum Real: Spectral Exchange at Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool (2019).
Matthew Thorne, Derik Lynch
Marungka Tjalatjunu (Dipped in Black)
Experimental doc. | 16mm | color | 24:0 | Australia | 2022
Marungka Tjalatjunu (Dipped in Black) follows Yankunytjatjara man Derik Lynch's road trip back to Country for spiritual healing, as memories from his childhood return. A journey from the oppression of white city life in Adelaide, back home to his remote Anangu Community (Aputula) to perform on sacred Inma ground. Inma is a traditional form of storytelling using the visual, verbal, and physical. It is how Anangu Tjukurpa (story connected to country / dreaming / myth / lore) have been passed down for over 60,000+ years from generation to generation.
Matthew Thorne is a South Australian filmmaker and artist whose work explores contemporary 'Australian' identity, spirituality, relationship to land, and masculinity through film, photography, and reenactment. His recent docufiction short film, Marungka Tjalatjunu (2023), made with Yankunytjatjara man Derik Lynch, won the Silver Bear Jury prize at Berlinale. Matthew also contributed photography to Nick Cave and The Badseed's album Ghosteen (2019), Justin Kurzel's True History of the Kelly Gang (2019), and Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant. In 2022, Matthew received the Adelaide Film Festival & Samstag Gallery of Art Commission. - Derik Lynch is an initiated Yankunytjatjara man. He is a performer, filmmaker, and artist who grew up between Alice Springs and remote Communities in the Northern Territory and South Australia. He has worked both nationally and internationally in theatre, film and TV. Marungka Tjalatjunu is Derik’s debut as a writer/director for screen telling part of his own story.
Joshua Thorson
Horizon
Experimental fiction | hdv | color | 13:0 | USA | 2011
In 1982 Walt Disney World?s EPCOT Center, or, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, opened to the public, a little late for an utopic modernist project. The original park featured an ?infotainment? ride called Horizons, which was sponsored by G.E. It showed a future in which technology and innovation coupled with the family unit would evolve into exciting and previously unimaginable territories?with colonies in outer space and under the Earth?s oceans. In 2000, the ride was demolished to make way for an immersive thrill-ride called ?Mission: Space.? The story in this video, about a family doing research on a colony in the Chamaleon Complex whose supplies and funding inexplicably stop arriving, and who are determined to survive however they can, accompany archival Hi-8 video footage of the ride.
Joshua Thorson is a video-maker and writer based in New York. He works with narrative conceptually, exploring and exploiting the narrative exchange through the themes of science, religion, transcendence, authenticity, idealism, and trauma. Using tonal shifts and stringent economy, this work seeks to both cater to and usurp expectations, opening up the ?story? to ontology. Thorson?s work has been presented at museums, galleries, and theaters internationally.