Paris 2022 programme

Watch out for false artists. They come to you in artists' clothing, but inwardly they are lifeless algorithms.

Igor Štromajer – "le Pavarotti du HTML" (Libération) – researches tactical media art, intimate guerrilla, and traumatic low-tech communication strategies. He has shown his work at more than two hundred fifty exhibitions in more than sixty countries (transmediale, ISEA, EMAF, SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica Futurelab, V2_, IMPAKT, CYNETART, Manifesta, FILE, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Hamburg Kunsthalle, ARCO, Microwave, Banff Centre, Les Rencontres Internationales, The Wrong – New Digital Art Biennale and in numerous other galleries and museums worldwide) and received a number of awards (in Frankfurt, Moscow, Hamburg, Dresden, Belfort, Madrid, Maribor, Podgorica). His projects form part of the permanent collections of the prestigious art institutions, among them Le Centre national d'art et de Culture Georges Pompidou – Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, France; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Computerfinearts – net and media art collection, New York, USA; Maribor Art Gallery, Maribor, Slovenia. As a guest artist he lectures at universities and contemporary art institutes.

The film Genesis (The Other Shapes of Me) is simultaneously a part of the installation rs548049170_1_69869_TT as well as a stand-alone art film. The film documents a year-long performance during which a large piece of fabric that codifies and contains all of my genetic information is woven by my mother on one of the first computers of history, the Jacquard loom. In the tension between the loving gestures of a mother and the automatic movements of a mechanical loom, Genesis gives form to my reflections on technical reproducibility, the materiality of information, and on the interplay between biological, mechanical and computational life. The series The Other Shapes of Me is based on the translation of my genetic code into fabric. This stratified series of interrelated works is the result of my research into the origin and current applications of binary technology: from weaving to programming, algorithms, software, automation processes, up to the complete computerization of a human being.

Emilio Vavarella is an Italian artist working at the intersection of interdisciplinary art practice, theoretical research and media experimentation. His work explores the relationship between subjectivity, nonhuman creativity and technological power. It is informed by the history of conceptual art, digital and network cultures, and new media practices. Vavarella moves seamlessly between old and new media, and exploits technical errors and other unpredictabilities to reveal the logic and the hidden structures of power. Esteemed venues that have exhibited Vavarella’s work include: MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo; KANAL – Centre Pompidou; Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg; MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna; Museum of Contemporary Art – Zagreb; Museu de Ciències Naturals of Barcelona, The Photographer’s Gallery of London, Museo de Arte de Caldas; Museo Nacional Bellas Artes in Santiago; Museu das Comunicações of Lisbon, National Art Center of Tokyo; Eyebeam Art and Technology Center and Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina. His artworks have been exhibited at film festivals such as Toronto’s Images Festival; Torino Film Festival, and the St. Louis International Film Festival, and at many international media art festivals, among which: EMAF – European Media Art Festival; JMAF – Japan Media Arts Festival; Stuttgarter Filmwinter – Festival for Expanded Media; BVAM – Media Art Biennale; and NYEAF – New York Electronic Arts Festival. Vavarella has been awarded numerous art prizes and grants, among which the Exibart Art Prize (2020); Italian Council award (2019); Premio Fattori Contemporaneo (2019); SIAE – Nuove Opere (2019); the NYSCA Electronic Media and Film Finishing Funds grant (2016); the Francesco Fabbri Prize for Contemporary Art (2015) and the Movin’Up Grant (2015). He has been invited to present his work at: Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative; Istituto Italiano di Cultura – New York; ISEA – International Symposium on Electronic Arts; Goldsmiths University of London; the University of East London; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and SIGGRAPH. His academic writings have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Leonardo – The Journal of the International Society of the Arts, Sciences and Technology (MIT Press), Digital Creativity (Routledge), and CITAR Journal – Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts. His writings have also appeared in Behind the Smart World: Saving, Deleting and Resurfacing Data produced by the AMRO Research Lab and in exhibition catalogues like Low Form: Imaginaries and Visions in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (MAXXI and CURA Books); That’s IT! (MAMbo), and Robot Love (Niet Normaal Foundation). His work is regularly discussed in art magazines, academic books and peer-reviewed journals, and has been covered by all major global media outlets. His most recent artist book, published by Mousse, is entitled rs548049170_1_69869_TT. Vavarella is currently working toward a PhD in Film and Visual Studies and Critical Media Practice at Harvard University and is the artist in residence of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He holds an M.A. cum laude in Visual Arts from Iuav University of Venice, with study abroad fellowships at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Tel Aviv and Bilgi University of Istanbul and received a B.A. cum laude in Visual, Cultural, and Media Studies from the University of Bologna.

The installation consists of two black and white video images, one video projector and two thin (2 mm) illuminated fibre lines. A large projection shows images of moving objects or people that are fixed in one place on the wall by means of a sophisticated tracking technique. This technique continuously shifts the frame of the video image in a way that the chosen object stays in one place. Thus, all movements are neutralized. Directly behind the projector a very small 4,7 inch screen shows a close-up of a moving eyeball, of which the pupil is fixed in the middle of the screen. A luminous wire is stretched across the exhibition room, between the fixed point of the projected image and the centre of the small eye pupil. The wire is a physical and stationary element in the exhibition room.

Peter Bogers’ (Netherlands, 1956) work engages the interplay of sound and image to create installation works dealing with questions around the understanding and perception of sound. Working with the themes of music, speech and sound Bogers questions the boundaries of these fields and their limits and access to communication. Through his constant interaction with sound, Bogers also examines the visual, spatial and conceptual understanding of the human body and its place within the moving image and experiential installation. Bogers was one of the first artists in the Netherlands to integrate moving image into his work. He began working with video in the 1980’s as a methodology to accompany and assist his performance work and has since developed a keen approach to the medium that functions as a tool to illuminate the otherwise imperceptible. Peter Bogers studied at the sculpture department at St. Joost Academy, Breda. He has exhibited widely and had solo exhibitions both in The Netherlands (at the Netherlands Media Art Institute and the Central Museum Utrecht, among other places) and internationally (including solo shows in Bremen, Marseille, Osnabrück, Pittsburgh and Stuttgart).

An invisible audience of software robots continually analyze content on the Internet. Political trolls and YouTube celebrities gain visibility because social media ranking algorithms promote addictive videos to the top of search and recommendation rankings. What the Robot Saw is a continuously-generated livestream film that uses contrarian algorithms to constantly curate some of the least attention-grabbing videos recently uploaded to YouTube. These videos, and their creators, are rendered largely invisible by social media algorithms. Their primary audience may be the robots that rank them. What the Robot Saw uses computer vision algorithms to curate videos and study their subjects. It focuses on first-person, camera facing narrators. The robot continually assembles its film and labels its “talking head” performers in a robo-fantastical cinematic style. The Robot titles its human subjects according to the demographically-focused feature set of Amazon Rekognition, a popular facial analysis system. In a robot-centric world, attributes like presumed age, gender, and emotion might better identify us than our names. The title is a reference to early 1900s What the Butler Saw “peep show” films. Both the butlers and the Robot got a superficial glimpse of a seductive “show;” they could not really understand the objects of their obsession.

Amy Alexander is a professor and hackernaut who has been making computationally-based art projects since the 1990s. Amy is a Professor of Computing in the Arts in the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego. She is an algorithmic filmmaker and performer who has focused throughout her career on the fuzzy borders between media and the world. Amy’s work has frequently addressed algorithmic subjectivity in digital culture by creating transparently biased, sometimes funny alternatives. Her latest project returns to this theme — this time taking on the attention economy and social influence of algorithms used for social media rankings and facial classification. Using computer vision and machine learning-based methods of curation and production, What the Robot Saw, is a perpetual live stream that depicts the cinematic fantasy of the surveillant AI robots who “see” the social media content few humans get to experience. Amy’s art practice has spanned net art, software art, computationally-based installation, audiovisual performance, and film. Her research and practice over the years has focused on how contemporary media – from performative cinema to social media – changes along with cultural and technological shifts. Amy’s projects have been presented on the Internet, in clubs and on the street as well as in festivals and museums. She has written and lectured on software art, software as culture, and historical and contemporary audiovisual performance. She has served as a reviewer for festivals and commissions for new media art and computer music.Her recent lectures span topics including algorithmic bias and subjectivity, cultural anthropologies of gender roles in 20th and 21st century computing, and systems and disruption in 20th and 21st century media.

3050 K is an AI/Neural Net project which utilizes imagery of stage lighting (floods, spots, footlights, gels) sourced from 70 concerts and performances of rock music from the 1970’s. These images are in turn used as primary material for a Neural Net and provide the training model for the resultant imagery. The images which are generated from this process are visualizations of emergent forms and tableau which are the offspring of the original material. These images are then re-processed and provide the individual frames for a video representation of the GAN’s procedural and generative algorithmic creation. The hypnotic and somnambulant visuals are accompanied by a score I created, composed of a number of heavily processed aural artifacts from the era. The title ’3050 K’ is in reference to the average number of Kelvins used in stage and theatrical lighting.

Brad Todd is an artist whose works span several fields of inquiry, principally involving the research/creation of responsive environments which implicate technology as a mirror, filter and catalyst for experience writ large in both an individually embodied sense and its attendant broader socio-political context. Recent and past projects have focused on issues of visualizing and conditioning invisible, abstract and liminal material such as EMF, infrasonics, aggregate data and microclimates, while in other works the content is more explicit and political. Having received an M.F.A. from Concordia University (Montréal), he began playing music in the post-punk band Sofa, which released the inaugural album and single on the Constellation Records label. From the generative and reactive to the composed and performative, audio and sound design continues to play a key role in his works. Brad has received numerous grants and awards and has exhibited his works in galleries and media festivals in North America, South and Central America, Asia and Europe. Presently he is an instructor in the Design and Computation Arts program at Concordia University in Montréal.

In GAME Engine (Orange Bulletproof Kids) we are invited to an exclusive press meeting at an undisclosed location. Here, the spokesperson of a notorious game developer, presents a brand new game engine. A game engine that promises revolutionary in-game experiences, the layout of which are never fully disclosed in protection of its intellectual property value. This oral evasive manoeuvre leads the spokesperson into complex landscapes in which game and reality, body and avatar, the sensorial and the informational, blend together. Parallel to this fiction scenario, a group of CS:GO athletes are recreating their game experiences, using their bodies as vehicles for motoric and visual memory.

Soren Thilo Funder is a visual artist working primarily with video and installation. His works are mash-ups of popular fictions, cultural tropes and socio-political situations, projections and histories. They are narrative constructions insisting on new meaning forming in the thin membrane negotiating fictions from realities. Invested in written and unwritten histories, the paradoxes of societal engagement, temporal displacements and a need for new nonlinear narratives, Thilo Funder proposes spaces for awry temporal, political and recollective encounters. Soren Thilo Funder’s previous exhibitions include solo presentations at Turku Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Tranen Contemporary Art Center, Overgaden – Institute for Contemporary Art and Den Frie - Centre for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen. He was furthermore represented at the 19th Biennale of Sydney, eva International Biennial of Visual Art - “After The Future”, 12th Istanbul Biennial, Manifesta 8 – Parallel Events and 6th International Liverpool Biennial. He is currently doing a PhD in Artistic Research at The Art Academy - Department of Contemporary Art, University of Bergen.

A bed-bound woman's year passes as a day: her time is no longer measured by the increments of a clock but by the quality of weather outside her window. Objects emerge and merge in the gloom; the woman dissolves and reforms. Her muteness, her glaucomas and her inactivity render things indeterminate. By naming objects, animal and phenomena we reduce and delineate them, and so separate ourselves from the world around us - she cannot do this.

Peter Treherne is a moving image artist working in the South East of England. His films explore the affects of the environment, particularly weather, on agricultural and creative labour. His work is distributed by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre and Kinoscope, has been funded by Arts Council England, and has screened internationally at festivals and galleries including Festival ECRA, Whitechapel Gallery and London Institute of Contemporary Arts. Peter is also director of the Slow Film Festival, an organisation that shares moving image art with the British public in rural areas. The festival has collaborated on programmes with institutions including Close-Up Film Centre, MUBI and the British Council, and has screened work from artists including Ben Rivers, Kevin Jerome Everson, Babette Mangolte and James Benning. Peter also holds a master’s degree in Film Aesthetics from the University of Oxford.

Following the disappearance of a man in Scotland, his daughter recalls words chanted before nightfall.

From Haitian descent, Miryam Charles is a director, producer and cinematographer living in Montreal. She has produced several short and feature films. She is also the director of several short films. Her films have been presented in various festivals in Quebec and internationally. She has just completed the direction of her first feature film This House. Her work explores themes related to exile and the legacies of colonization.

From the diary of Christopher Columbus, October 15, 1492: "And deviated from the land by two lombard shots, there is in all these islands so much depth that one cannot reach it. These islands are very green and fertile and have very sweet airs, and there may be many things that I do not know, because I do not want to stop to go through many islands to find gold". They had only been on land for four days. The gold never existed. It is only possible to suppose the sweetness of the air. The islands are still green.

Felipe Esparza’s work creates dynamic links and tensions between film, visual arts and video creation. In his projects there is an interest in social content coexisting with an exploration of themes such as nature, the sacred, non-verbal communication, its symbolic derivations, and the relationship between image and time, image and history, and image and truth. He approaches the complex representation of these themes by developing visual narratives in which the contemporary visual imagination cohabits with archives and with local and universal cultural codes, to the point of creating pieces of metalanguage. He is currently focusing on rituals, focusing on themes such as post-colonial remains around the sacred and the raw material with which cities are built as a sensitive archaeological gesture. His videos and video installations have been shown in national art centers such as: MALI, Luis Miró Quesada, Lugar de la Memoria, Ministerio de Cultura (Lima), Festival de Lima Independiente, Festival Lima Alterna, and international ones such as: Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin - New Cinema and Contemporary Art, Guangzhou Image Triennial (China), Shangyuang Museum of Contemporary Art (Beijing), Videobrasil Festival (Sao Paulo), Cámara Municipal de Lisboa (Portugal), Los Angeles Film Forum, HANGAR Art Production Center (Madrid), Buenos Aires Video Art Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Uppsala, Molodist, Curtocircuíto, among others. Graduated from the Master of Mal de Foco at the Centro de la Imagen (Peru), Director at the Berlinale Talent Campus and selected artist at Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains, France.

Au coeur de Saint-Désir l'Exil se trouve une piscine. Au coeur de la piscine se trouvent les corps nocifs. A côté de la piscine, ma maman vit ses derniers instants sous le soleil.

L'epoca geniale (The Age of Genius) is a film that enters a place where form is mixed with lyricism and the magic of body movements and gazes. The eyes are filled with wonder and reveal themselves as a metaphor for a society that wishes to become children again. The protagonists' exercises have nothing of realistic, but lean towards theatricality and imagination. The walls of this universal space thus become silent witnesses of these complicated gestures, of these endlessly repeated attempts to finally reach maturity.

Tommaso Donati (Lugano, 1988). His work combines a narrative approach with documentary cinema and is structured around the theme of marginality. His films have been presented at various national and international festivals. He currently lives and works in Lugano

In 1924, a marine crinoid fossil is unearthed near the summit of Mount Everest, a famous British mountaineer disappears and a Soviet leader dies. This simultaneity is the starting point of a narrative on the transformation of matter. In a vast movement, substances metamorphose, scales and temporalities overlap and human bodies nestle in the depths of great terrestrial processes.

Astrid de la Chapelle is a French filmmaker and artist. In her films she experiments with storytelling, particularly in relation to geology and the economic circuits of the Earth's resources, as well as science fiction. She also plays in the group Shrouded and the Dinner with four other artists since 2012. Astrid’s films were shown at Cinéma du Réel (FR), Oberhausen festival (DE), ECRA Experimental Festival (BR), FID Marseille (FR), Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (FR/DE), Museum of natural history (FR), Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (FR)…

One day Arthur Rimbaud left the world of culture, tired, disappointed and angry. He does not understand, he does not admit the conventions, the lack of courage, the lack of investment of the art world. "Real life is absent," said Arthur Rimbaud. So he leaves, he leaves for an elsewhere that is less a place than an anarchic tension. He looks for chance, the unknown, the encounter, the unexpected. He now wants to practice poetry since nobody can understand his poetry. Arthur Rimbaud lived the last ten years of his life in Harar, a holy city in Ethiopia (1880-1891). In 2005, I left for Harar. Every day I walk, I get lost. I don't look for anything because there is nothing to look for. I film a contemporary Harar. In 2020, I decided to make a film out of these sequences.

Christian Barani's work takes the form of a committed realist poetry. Engaged in an improvised otherness, never sought after. His body, often lost in space, allows him to show a certain state of the world. He walks, crosses, observes, feels, analyses, meets, films. He loses himself, he drifts to find, to provoke and to create a necessary and essential link to the production of an image. He walks for long hours until he is exhausted, until he reaches the end of himself. Drifting puts him in danger. A physical and mental danger that allows, that authorises the filming of the other in his difficulty of life, in his quest for survival, in his struggle. Only at this price is it possible to welcome them. The image comes as a consequence. The forms that emerge from these experiences have no a priori. They are often diverse and take the form of film, film installation, reading projection, photographic notes and texts. They are created from the material captured and are often conceived according to the spaces in which they are exhibited.

The first sentences could make us think of snippets of conversations gleened from a cocktail party, we recognise the contemporary all-entrepreneurship mixed with an ideology of ideal management. Behind thedialogues are reflections on work, its constraints and the space for freedom that everyone is looking for within the framework that they create or are subject to. And what about these people who work? Do they talk about work or activity, passion or flexible hours? Are we capable of living at full speed and feeling sensations in the same way? How is our self-awareness evolving in the face of this ambition for complete control of our lives, when chance and the vagaries of life often give it flavour?

Ariane Loze, Belgium 1988. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium Since 2008 Ariane Loze researches the coming to life of a story out of seemingly unrelated images with her camera. In these series of videos she takes on all the parts: she is at the same time the actress, the camerawoman and the director. Through the editing of the images she develops a relation between two (or more) characters and the architecture. The videos of Ariane Loze put the spectator in the active role of creating his/her own story out of the basic principles of film editing: shot and counter-shot, the presumed continuity of movement, and the psychological suggestion of a narrative. The filming of these videos has been made public as a ongoing performance. Ariane Loze studied theatre direction at the RITCS Brussels, and took part in a.pass (Advanced Performance And Scenography Studies) in Antwerp. She is laureate of the HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts) Ghent 2016-17. The videos of Ariane Loze will be presented at the Salon de Montrouge Paris (May 2018) and in the new museum for contemporary art KANAL Centre Pompidou in Brussels (May 2018). Recent exhibition projects include Videoformes Clermont-Ferrand (2015), Traverse Vidéo Toulouse FRAC Midi-Pyrénées (2015), Medienwerkstatt Berlin (2016), S.M.A.K. Etcetera Ghent (2016), Boghossian Fondation Brussels (2016), De Appel "You are such a curator" Amsterdam (2016), "Kunst om de lijf" Emergent Veurne, New York Anthology Film Archive AXW screening (2017), Watch this Space Biennale #9 Lille Brussels (2017), Gemischte Gefühle Tempelhof Berlin (2017). Ariane Loze’s videos got selected for the Movimenta Video Art prize in Nice (2017), and the Prix Médiatine Brussels (2016) and got awarded at the Art Contest Brussels (2015), by the Art For All Society of Macau (2016) and Côté Court Festival Pantin (2017).