The future could take a variety of forms. Perhaps we’ll find indisputable proof of the fact that the world is a hologram but we will not be able to disprove the possible futures imagined by artists. Everything can become a reality. Our cities would be built on the principle of RAM being rapidly filled by loads of digital information surrounding them. Life afloat will become more attractive than life ashore. Involvement in the existence of an unknown organic form and the microcosm would drive out our interest in the world around us. People would live their lives immersed in the digital world of friend tablets preparing the field for the life of the wetware media.
RAM_City (1000 screens) (2014) | claRa apaRicio yoldi | UK | 06:20 min
Video based on a text by José Luis Brea: RAM_city (1000 screens), part of the book Cultura RAM.
Mutations of culture in the age of electronic distribution. It is the transition from a city with “Read-only memory” (ROM) to a city with “Random-access memory”: RAM_city. From a “file-based memory” to a “network memory”. In this new city, there are no monuments or heroes to commemorate. Here, nothing crystallizes as a fixed memory. Culture is not marked by tradition and inheritance rules. In RAM_city everything is disagreement, there is nothing to be concluded as real.
Modus Operandi / Afloat (2016) | Marina Fomenko | RU | 08:19 min
Life afloat in the South China Sea. This video was shot on the embankment of Shenzhen, one of the most technologically advanced cities around the world and the center of China’s electronics industry. At this point, the new digital world meets the old one. It seems as if time stood still there forever and nothing will change in future: unhurried travels with all belonging, routine life afloat, old-time houseboats and their inhabitants with mobile phones and everything necessary for living in electronic reality.
Dust Matter 1 (2013) | Lucie Libotte | UK | 03:10 min
The video is a commutation tool that will invite the audience, to embrace the material visualization of a narrative about dust, through a series of bespoke vessels that display different sampled of environment, and ultimately tell the story of a matter’s origins. You may realize that something usually gross and dirty, being suddenly highlighted and transformed, can become at once unpredictable and possibly beautiful.
… to my plastic brothers … (2017) | Pedro Matias | NL | 10:28 min
“…to my plastic brothers…” aimed to present personal theory around the current capitalistic mentality and its repercussions in contemporary bodies, sexuality, and our surroundings. The ‘spectacle’ of pop culture created a boom of successful, referential, and to the eyes of some, perfect envied bodies. These perfect bodies become the idol of millions, but aren’t we aiming the virtual rather than the real? Under a sleeping pill, our bodies became silicone and fat; they live in a plastic dystopian reality. This work is about objectification, an ode to all the plastic brothers that now start to awake.
Face Book, Russia (2016-17) | Alexandra Mitlyanskaya | RU | 05:00 min
The light emanated by the screens and reflected by our faces transfers us from the virtual world into the space of the universe whose flickering stars became the main motive for creating the work called “Face Book”.
Enaction (2013) | Carlotta Piccinini & Luigi Mastandrea | IT | 10:00 min
Enaction is an audiovisual narration, the staging of an organic form that produces its own world through the perception of his own body. Enaction’s sequencing of selected colors represents the different ages of the form, which regenerates constantly. The fragments of liquid bodies narrate the form’s life experience; its own changes define the sound field and become sound themselves – the result of long field recordings, recordings of organ, digital synthesis. Enaction is an experimental project tending to rediscover and re-act the beginnings of motion graphics, adapting it to the technology models produced by the digital revolution.
The Stream VII (2016) | Hiroya Sakurai | JP | 06:00 min
n the man-made waterways of rice paddies, the water in nature must follow artificial rules. In that way, nature is made abstract, giving rise to a new form of beauty distinct from the natural state. The theme of this work is the liveliness of the water as it follows the man-made course.
ADR/ARD (2016) | Anna Studinovskaya | RU | 06:12 min
Video installation examines the situation when longevity tests are being applied not only to objects of daily consumption, but to the very concept of human being. In the posthuman era, there are no individuals, only the semihumans that are being mutually attracted and repelled: the “sparse” remains of the arch fossil. Carriers of wetware, deduced in medical labs, appear as the first automaton – τὐ αότόματον, stating that the necessary condition of future harmony is the commutation of the human and the object.
Curated by Marina Fomenko
Marina Fomenko is an artist and curator based in Moscow, Russia. She has participated in numerous exhibitions and festivals worldwide. Since 2011 Marina runs in Moscow International Video Art Festival Now&After. She is Festival’s founding director and curator. She curated special projects at 4th and 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2nd Moscow Biennale of Young Art, Moscow Photobiennale, PhotoVisa Festival (Krasnodar), Osmosis Media Festival (Taipei, Taiwan), VideoBardo Festival (Argentina) as well as exhibitions at Moscow Museum of Modern Art, CCI Fabrika (Moscow), the State Museum of GULAG History (Moscow), Schusev State Museum of Architecture (Moscow), Darwin State Museum, Artplay Center, etc.
