Paris Programme 2024

The young Swiss economist Hans travels to Thailand with his mum to visit his grandmother in “Vita Bona”, a care home for European seniors. The facility has changed its name and is hard to find at first. When they finally arrive, it is completely different from what they expected: a perfectly styled wellness retreat for young people. While Hans indulges in the beauty of the place, Daniela wanders through the labyrinthine complex in search of her mother and observes strange occurrences. Where are the senior citizens? What is the manager Mrs. Vasall hiding behind her charming smile? This conceptual VR film is a dystopian parable about the outsourcing of care work, as produced by our neo-colonialist globalized economic system. “Vivo Vision” refers to a way of seeing that Ms. Vasall, the manager of the resort, has invented. Wellness retreat and retirement home are present in the same place, but without interfering with each other. While the young people practice yoga poses by the pool, the seniors and workers have been relocated to another, invisible level. “Vivo Vision” is a view of the world in which everything that is considered unproductive in a capitalist logic has become invisible.

MARLIES POESCHL is an artist, filmmaker, curator and educator. She is currently based in Vienna (AT), where she teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, but has previously worked in France, Iran, Thailand and China. Shifting between artistic, curatorial and educational approaches, Pöschl is interested in art as a form of knowledge production. She understands filmmaking as social practice and often collaborates with actors from outside the art world in search for polyphonic narrations and open-ended dramaturgies. Since 2018 Pöschl has focused on ways in which societies of the global north respond to the ‘care crisis’. Pöschl has received various prizes for her work: in 2022 she was granted the state scholarship for media art, in 2021 the Young Artist’s Award (City of Vienna). Her films and installations have been shown in several solo presentations, a.o. Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, DE (2022), Salzburger Kunstverein, AT (2021), CAC Brétigny, (2018) and MUSA, Vienna, AT (2016). She has participated in biennales and film festivals such as the Vienna Biennale for Change (AT), Antimatter media art festival (CA), Edinburgh International Film Festival (GB), Cinema Verité (IR), Diagonale (AT) and others. Her work is distributed by VTape and The Golden Pixel Cooperative.

“Can we imagine the universe from which we ourselves come as something physical, but at the same time as something virtual?” To portray the social circumstances of our contemporary society, characterised by a hybrid state of physicality and virtuality, choreographer Howool Baek combines body movement with technology. In “BETWEEN_in VR”, an imaginary and deeply 'immersive' universe emerges in which our body parts such as the hands, feet or navel lead us into an unfamiliar world. Using the overwhelming 360° VR spatial experience, we discover a new type of in-between space that merges the solid boundaries between the physical and the virtual, the body and the data, the analog and the digital, and the viewer and the performer.

Choreographer Howool Baek works on discovering individual body fragments without a face and proposing a different perspective of the body by deconstructing and transforming the body. Through breaking stereotypes about the body, she wants the audience to see society from a different perspective. Lately she has expanded her stage concept towards the digital space, carrying out new artistic experiments to transplant her choreographic method to the digital stage. Her first directed film Foreign body (2022) won the Best Film at Minimalen Short Film Festival - Multiplie Dance Film (Norway) in 2024. And VR film BETWEEN (2023) was awarded the Best Virtual Reality at Digital Media Fest (Italy) in 2023.

This video is produced from different VR Painting I produced about Ukraine Cyber war as an ex member of IT Army of Ukraine, by using different AI images produced on the basis of the real Ukraine war one, by using also different logs from my Hacktivism with IT Army to support Ukraine. The point is to define a kind of mental cage, because a cyber war is mostly a mental war than a physical one.

Born in 1967, Valéry Grancher is a French-born artist, theorist, curator and lecturer, living and working in Paris and Hong Kong since 2014. He first became well known in the mid-1990s for being one the first net artists (online art) and for his ‘Google paintings’ but his artistic practice is vast and covers internet art, video, photography, painting, AI painting and VR installation. Valéry Grancher is an explorer. His curiosity leads him to investigate all kinds of territories such as the different media and new technology to define new forms and concepts. On 2014, the French public collection National Fund for Contemporary Art, National Centre for Visual Arts (FNAC) acquired his video installations Geopol (a 24-hour tracking shot of the horizon at the North Pole) and Tanguntsa (a 6-hour shot in deep Amazonia). His productions are included in several public collections such like Cartier Foundation for contemporary arts (Paris), Maison Européenne de la photographie (Paris), Carillo Gil Museum (Mexico), Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Bandjoune Station (Cameroon), VMAC (Hong Kong) and many others…

Garden of No Return is a new hand-tracked VR experience by Sim Chi Yin and Dan Archer which chronicles the depletion of sand from Vietnam’s Mekong Delta and across Asia. The world is running out of sand. The insatiable demand for this non-renewable resource has led to large-scale environmental impact driven by rapid urbanisation and land reclamation. In Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, land about the size of a football field is melting away into the river every day. For local residents, the land snaps off suddenly, sometimes in the dark of night, and robs them of their homes, shops and ancestral shrines. This work weaves together lullabies, laments, and poetry narrated by Vietnamese writer Kh?i ??n to speak about the erosion of both memory and site as the consequence of large-scale global sand mining. It combines reconstructed 3D terrain using photogrammetry and filmed sequences to allude to communal losses and extreme precarity in the global business flows of sand mining. It brings viewers to the site of the landslides and see, hear, and feel firsthand the landscape of the Mekong Delta where large-scale erosion is taking place, and convey the human cost of sand mining in a visceral and experiential manner.

Sim Chi Yin (b. 1978, Singapore) is an artist whose research-based practice uses artistic and archival interventions to contest and complicate historiographies and colonial narratives. She works across photography, film, installation, performance and book-making. She is participating in the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) and has exhibited at the Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023); the Barbican, London (2023); Harvard Art Museums, Boston, USA (2021); Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2021); Nobel Peace Museum, Oslo (2017), Arko Art Centre, Seoul (2016); Zilberman Gallery Berlin (2021); Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2019). She has also participated in the Istanbul Biennale (2022, 2017) and the Guangzhou Image Triennial ( 2021). Her work is in the collections of Harvard Art Museums, The J. Paul Getty Museum, M+ Hong Kong, Singapore Art Museum, and the National Museum Singapore. She was an artist fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (2022-3) and is completing a PhD at King’s College London. Dan Archer is a creative technologist, computer scientist and immersive storyteller who co-founded Empathetic Media, an XR production studio, in 2014. EM leverages augmented, mixed and virtual reality to foster stronger connections and perspective-taking between the subjects in its stories and its audiences. A leading thinker and practitioner in the immersive space, Archer has researched and written about the link between empathy, impact and immersive story-telling. He was a 2016 fellow at the Tow Center at Columbia University, a Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow (University of Missouri, 2014) and a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University (2011). He is currently completing a PhD at UCL focusing on evaluating embodiment and performance using biological signals in virtual reality environments, and exploring persuasive immersive technologies as a researcher at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Das VR-Projekt Olympic Vertigo läßt uns in eine Parallelwelt eintauchen, welche der realen Situation im Münchener Olympiapark nachempfunden ist, diese aber musikalisch wie narrativ erweitert. Die Besucher:innen werden überrascht von einer eigentümlichen Atmosphäre und bizarren virtuellen Gästen, menschengroße Gottesanbeterinnen. Der User hat durch seine Bewegungen die Möglichkeit dieses belebte Panorama und dabei fünf musikalische Zeitphasen der letzten 5 Jahrzehnte ausgiebig zu erforschen. Olympic Vertigo trägt gleichermaßen Züge einer halluzinatorischen Erinnerung und einer Zukunftsvision. Innerhalb ihrer musikalischen Ebenen, aber auch in einer unerklärlichen Bedrohung schwingt die Geschichte des Olympiaparks mit. Dieser Ort ist durch Ausgelassenheit bei Sportereignissen und Konzerten geprägt, aber auch durch eine unterschwellige Angst vor einer Zäsur der Gewalt, wie sie sich durch das terroristische Attentat von 1972 in unser kollektives Gedächtnis eingeschrieben hat.

M+M steht für die film-künstlerische Zusammenarbeit von Marc Weis und Martin De Mattia seit 1994. Das Duo lebt und arbeitet in München, Deutschland. Der künstlerische Schwerpunkt von M+M liegt auf narrativen Mehrkanal-Filminstallationen, die durch die Aufhebung linearer Erzählung ein komplett neues Zeitgefühl entstehen lassen. Diese Installationen wurden in einer Vielzahl internationaler Ausstellungen gezeigt. Aktuell arbeiten die Künstler an einer Makro-3D-Trilogie, in denen die Protagonistinnen von Gottesanbeterinnen und Stabheuschrecken dargestellt werden. Teilweise stößt das deutsch-luxemburgische Duo auch kooperative Prozesse an und lädt KünstlerInnen ein, auf aktuelle Fragestellungen zu reagieren. So entstand mit dem kollektiven Filmprojekt „The Scorpion’s Sting“ eine Neuinterpretation des politisch motivierten Buñuel Films „L’Âge d’Or“ (1930).

Inspired by the story of British serial killer Dennis Nilsen, Loverboy operates as a meditation on the dark side of human intimacy. The project’s approach rejects moral simplifications, offering a narrative that is less a linear story than an immersive dissection of isolation and obsession. Recurring dialogues, eerie distortions, and environmental shifts that envelope the viewer in a claustrophobic cycle of increasingly fractured reality. Designed to linger like an emotional imprint, Loverboy challenges viewers to exit the refuge of orderly modern life and confront the fragility of human empathy and connection.

Nicholas Baldas is a writer, director, and producer whose creative work utilises cutting-edge technology to explore the prohibited boundaries of human experience through psychological immersion. The Heraclitian principle "life is flux" is the only constant in his creative pursuits, his collaborator Michael Plumb is a writer, filmmaker and performer. He has a Phd in Econometrics from University of Oxford. His creative focus is on the art of storytelling, drawing on his background in academia and public policy to explore questions about society and humankind. Michael is fascinated by exploring different media - old and new - to bring stories to life and reach new audiences.