THE PROJECTION ROOM

The conceptual short film HYPER HYPER I-Id. opens debates on neoliberalism, self-management and identity politics. Three protagonists attempt to discover a way together, and within their own space of work/identity. By using trashy materials and overshadowing colours, rhythmic language that shifts between seemingly childish speech and management speech, as well as the ongoing beat of petra und der wolf’s music, the film explores possibilities and difficulties of bringing different struggles together to aim for alliances in a future yet to come.
The main idea of this work was to find conceptual and aesthetic ways of telling a story about characters that are the representation of a discourse rather than individuals but still not failing in the tracks of stereotyping. Moving as a person of color / with dis_ability / queer person we have to constantly negotiate ascriptions from the outside as well as from within ourselves and still seem to have a hard time understanding similar problems in identity constructions from outside our “own” discourse. Now, with the enhancement of the individual, neo-liberal times seem to open a space of freedom of expression to be occupied by the (former) outlaws of society. When at the same time this freedom is reflected back on the individual and the individual only, who is struggling between work, life and the conceptualisation of the self. How can we move out of this circle and build structures of understanding surpassing the boundaries of individuals and discourses? The film does not offer any solutions, but shows a longing for togetherness, which then is constantly disrupted.

Iris Borovčnik studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She is part of CLUB Havera and works in the fields of political film and art production. With her work she is searching for ways of bringing critical theory, poetry, conceptual thinking and humour together. www.clubhavera.weebly.com

The Road To Middle England explores the ideology of social progression from the perspective of someone that is financially insecure and unemployed. The story follows an unnamed job seeker, faced with a mandatory work trial at his local Burger Island fast food outlet in order to continue his entitlement to social welfare. A dystopian nightmare unfolds as humiliation becomes a necessary experience of class progression.

John O’Hare envisions the worker artisan to be navigating a wasteland of discarded appliances and unfashionable ideas as they battle obsolescence by continual self-assessment and reinvention. Recent exhibitions include Florence Centre for Contemporary Art, Water Tower Art Fest, Sofia, and the Royal Art Academy Stockholm. www.freespaceprojects.org

Tom Phipps works as a magazine editor and designer in Bristol. He writes comics and short animated films with a focus on comedy and the surreal. His work has been featured in exhibitions and festivals around the South West of England; most recently at Exeter Animation Festival and Aardman Show and Tell, Bristol.

Working together they have recently participated in screenings at The Bomb Factory, London, CICA Museum, South Korea and Wellington Underground Film Festival.

We Were Waiting For A Train (2016): A club owner, a house pianist, a guest at a restaurant and a waiter are having several conversations, talking about a train they were waiting for. In each of these dialogues, we are told about an incident which both has occured and are yet to occur. These scenes, which are all connected in a non-linear narrative, is bound together by plant symphonies.

Mark Tholander is a contemporary artist who works and lives in Denmark. He has studied in St. Petersburg, Russia, and at The Jutland Art Academy in Denmark. His practice is moving across a variety of different media (installation, video, net art, mail art, sculpture, text and sound) and can be described as a highly interdisciplinary approach in a mixed media field. His work is occupied with what lies beyond the reach of concept-driven language: that the collapse of language does not indicate the border of thinking, but rather indicates where a different kind of thinking begins. He has exhibited his works in various countries, including USA, England, Egypt, Spain, Romania, Australia, Portugal, Brazil, Sweden and Switzerland. www.marktholander.dk

LUCY THE FIRST HUMAN is a short silent film with only one character, Lucy, inspired by the Australopithecus afarensis female skeleton discovered by Donald Johanson and his team in 1974 and named "Lucy" after The Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." The episodic scenes of this little movie show what the first human would do, think, feel, and how it would develop.

Lucy is like an infant who spends most of her time sleeping in a nebulous void. In her waking hours, her primary interest is herself until her environment changes as things suddenly and surrealistically appear in her "cave." She gradually is drawn out of her self-absorption into the real world.

I originally improvised in front of greenscreen in 2013; and the original version of Lucy, the First Human has streamed on Amazon since 2014. I love this character and am happy she has a new life in this version, which was remastered in 2017.

"I am grateful to live in a time when social diversity is mostly acceptable. I am a 65 year old African American (30% non-African) who strives for universality in her work, even for Lucy Australopithicene who originated in Africa. We all, ultimately, have the same mama. My sympathies toward anyone who emotionally and or intellectually cannot move past that scientific fact. I am an actor, a performance and an experimental filmmaker who has received recognition from LA Neo Noir Film Fest, LA Underground Film Fest, and Creative Arts Film Fest. I was a professional theatre artist from 1985-2007 and I was a professional sculptor from 1985-2010. The best thing that ever happened to me was buying my first videocamera after feeling inadequate as a storyteller in spite of having studied playwriting for ten years. What the camera told me really was all I had never really needed to know." Sylvia Toy

Sylvia Toy's Blog: kitchenscenesstudio.wordpress.com

Read Sylvia's text 'Artist's Life 2.0' in our #Strategies project

"Looking at the video Almadraba 38.17° N 13.24° E after I have made it, it seems to be shot through with ghosts: Don Fabrizio Corbera, Muhammad al-Idrisi, William Kingdon Clifford... For some time, I had the intention of making an image essay, relying primarily on my own photographic archive of Sicily. My engagement with the island started in the mid-1990s in New York’s Chelsea, where I used to hang out with a bunch of artists from Catania. Over drinks at the disco-gallery Passerby, they would tell tales, bitter laments really, of their island: Holy Roman emperors thrice-excommunicated; lions and peacocks frolicking in fragrant orange groves; the Vatican’s own banker, hanging from a London bridge in shoes of concrete. And, of course, they talked of Capaci and The Kiss.

In 2003, I got to Palermo to look for myself, and over the subsequent decade and some six trips, have formed both a photographic collection and a mental picture. Three millennia of events have kept Sicily at the omphalos, the centre of the Middle Sea. Indeed, I see her as both metaphor and site for globalisation: shipping routes, petrochemicals, ecological collapse, the muezzin’s call against peal of bells, criminality metastasised into the state’s power and capital structures." U. Kanad Chakrabarti

My artistic practice originates in subjective interests outside art: principally the action of globalised markets, both today and throughout history. I am intrigued by how globalisation affects individuals, such as immigrants, as well as ‘knowledge-workers’ who are increasingly following the ‘blue-collar’ workers of yesterday into obsolescence. My own background as an itinerant banker and engineer inform my visual language, and provide, I believe, a valuable and unusual contribution to the contemporary conversation around these topics. In addressing issues, I seek to emphasise ambiguity and nuance, and while there is a political element to my practice, I do not seek to ‘shout’ or prescribe a specific political stance on the viewer.

I am a UK citizen, born in India and raised in the United States, who spent 20 years as a derivatives trader in London, Moscow and Istanbul. My undergraduate was at MIT in Computer Science (1994), and I took a MA (Painting) at the Slade School (2015).

Kanad's Chakrabarti's Website: www.ukc10014.org

Participation at The Unstitute grew from our online Projection Room - which amongst other things constitutes a visual manifesto for a nomad cinema. We are suitably delighted that our 4th Anniversary feature screening is the outstanding video Haunting Sound by Chinese artist Kai Wang. Expressed through the medium of an almost painful stillness, Wang's video hints at a richness within digital experience unseen and as yet barely explored.

"Haunting sound is my debut movie which I produced last year. The project started with my research related to visual culture and family values. The narrative is about the relation between memory and truth. In the movie, I created some subtle ways of conversation and meetings among the living, the dead and the strangers. I was curious if people's emotion of love and loss may be a game of time and space, and wanted to find out what is the meaning of physical representation of memory for people.
I utilized many documentary sources in this movie: daily recordings and photographs including Chinese rural folk, religion scenes, ruins and strange atmospheres. I tried to show a specific view and experience of time and space for people in the context of international environment. I think the possibility of the transformation between time and space may be the most attractive part." Kai Wang

Ingtegrative Ontological Practices by Beta Plus Systems (IOP B+), the leading self-help + healing system for modern cyborgs. IOP B+ uses the principle of Tertiary Natural Consciousness to help our members integrate the terrestrial, human-made, and digital parts of their worlds and themselves. Once you've received an introductory understanding of the Practices, please contact your IOP B+ representative for a complimentary diagnostic test and to receive personalized audio-visual healers.

IOP B+ founder & leader Selden Paterson is a new media artist based in Chicago. Her practice involves the operation of several 'corporations,' including the aforementioned self-help system, the first all-amenities included colony on the moon, and a lifestyle improvement products company. You can see some more of these projects at www.selden.website

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Inspired by Chris Lehmann’s book The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of The American Dream, The Eucharist Machine addresses language, perception, and belief. In The Eucharist Machine, information is skewed by a presentation of jumbled non-linear facts and fiction, science, pseudoscience, and science fiction. Inaccurate grammar and linguistics push the concept even further by incorporating the cockamayme Thai / English subtitles and voice-overs produced by Google Translate and Apple’s Text To Speech system preference in a process that reverse-legitimizes the information. The Eucharist Machine is what happens when the under informed articulate with high-tech features. Information lost in translation becomes a sort of up-cycled spirituality; a futuristic projection of possible renewal of the crumbling dialogue between spirituality, commodity, and financial value. The Eucharist Machine takes a serious, culturally backwards, multigenerational look at what it means to be sanctified.

Nina Isabelle is a multidisciplinary artist working with video, performance art, photography, painting, and sculpture. "My background includes alternative process photography and modern dance. I identify with Maximalism and Action Art and work to push materials and information past the point of recognition in a way that forces a shift in meaning, revealing new information that can transform and challenge the limits of material, perception, and belief. Through my work, sensory input is deconstructed to the point where meaning becomes shifted and interpretations can become a phenomena of psychic imprint. My work often references the inability of communication which is used to visualize reality, the failure of dialogue, the dissonance between form and content, as well as the shortcomings of literal language." www.ninaisabelle.com

Furen Dai's video work begin with her research on a Secret Women Language called NüShu, which was originated and developed as a secret code among women in Hunan Province, China. Through research she discovered that though the language has lost its functionality, women who know the language have been pressured into performing their cultural activities as entertainment for tourists for menial wages. She has presented a language factory in her video and the act of producing secret women language as art object to sell to people who don't have access to the meaning of the language.

Furen Dai is a Chinese interdisciplinary artist, currently living in Boston, MA, United States. Dai graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University with an undergraduate degree in Russian and from SMFA/Tufts University with an MFA in studio art. She addresses language and literature associated with traditional Chinese culture in her work and is also engaged in a discourse around the position of being between two cultures and a cross-cultural exchange.

INTERVIEW WITH FUREN DAI

What compelled you to explore the 'Women's Script', or NüShu, and what effected you most about their story?

I worked as a Russian-English-Chinese translator before I started studying art, and I've always been very interested in language. I was researching about which type of culture gets destroyed through a cultural revolution, and I found out about this language which I never heard about when I was in China. The town where this language originated was very close to my hometown. I read a lot of books about this language before I visited, and all the books depicted powerful women who created this language to understand the world. To my surprise when I visited, women were not happy that they know this language and don't want to teach it to the next generation, so they don't need to be trapped there. This made me learn more about the role of the women behind all the cultural activities and their true feeling toward this "career", and it also made me question all the other cultural tourism activities in China.

In 'Language Product', a metamorphosis occurs whereby a strategy employed by women to ensure secret communication has become, in essence, a new form of chattel bondage into which they are becoming slowly entombed. In your opinion, what changed in the Chinese political narrative to allow this terrible irony to occur?

While I was walking in that town, there were a lot of old houses from hundreds of years ago with leaking roofs and no electricity. Once, when I was walking down a small alley there, I poked my head into one of the houses, "the grandma" was very unhappy and yelled at me saying "what are you looking at, this whole place is falling apart." Later on I found out why these people are not happy: because the government wants to keep the old houses and wouldn't want to give them new land to build new houses. Local residents are stuck with these old houses and forced to live inside the history for visitors to see. After this visit, I started researching and found out that China is one of the countries that mostly applies heritage status for it's own culture. Even though people would think it's to preserve the culture, but it's really hard not to think about all the benefits of cultural heritage status, the funding from government, the income from tourism, etc. It is a very complicated story in which there are many factors, I'm planning to make another video and a research field trip with a deeper focus on the cultural tourism in China.

The women utilizing the NüShu language found a way to collaborate through a form of encryption. How do you see future strategies unfolding through which people may be able to produce their own narrative against oppressive political and economic forces?

I feel that in a way these women would willingly tell me their story and feelings as a method of passing their narrative; people who hear this story will choose their own way of retelling it to audiences, some will abstract it and tell through a form of art, some through music, film or through a straightforward documentary. There are a lot of restrictions in many countries for film industry or sensoring information in general. Creative people can still figure out a way to speak up and say exactly what they want to say in a subtle and abstract way, or in a bold and aggressive way. There are still a lot of oppressive and nontransparent moments and places in the contemporary society just like hundreds of years ago when women in China didn't have access to education; history always repeated itself but people would find a new way of engaging with new technology in order to speak up for themselves.

www.furendai.squarespace.com

"Thank you for helping us define the borders of Liberland" shouts the man to the border patrol boat approaching the shore. Vit Jedlicka is the president of one the newest nation on earth, but he is still unable to access his territory, on the Croatian side of the Danube. Since the proclamation of Liberland on the 13th of April 2015, 460 000 requests for citizenship have been recorded on Liberland's website. Liberland, which motto is "To live and let live" is based on Libertarian principles and is attracting a lot of interest and money...

"During the summer of 2015, we spent a lot of time on the Serbian/Croatian border, by the Danube, to film, photograph and write about the creation of Liberland, the latest micro-nation on earth, which had just being claimed by a Czech politician named Vit Jedlicka. During the summer, supported by a team of Libertarian Danish activists -LSA-, Liberland took another more dynamic dimension, while several missions were launched from the Serbian Danube side to the territory in order to set foot on the land and settle on it. All attempts were met by arrests, abuse and opposition by the Croatian border patrols. Most of the cases are still fought in Croatian courts, as the reasoning behind the prosecution of Liberlanders for illegal border crossing, were unfounded; the territory, as some other pockets of land along the river, is a terra nullius. It means it is unclaimed land. At the end of the warin 1991, Serbs and Croates never sorted some pockets of land on both sides of the Danube which is now their border, and also, more importantly the border of EU."

Elisabeth Blanchet is a photographer, film maker and mixed media artist based in London and Marseille. She is interested in life, people and in documenting communities. Through her different projects - such as Romania, 20 years on, Prefabs, Gypsies and Travellers, she explores emotions, relationships, attachment, memory and nostalgia. She sees her camera as a passport to meet people and discover their homes, their territories, the way they live and a tool to tell human stories. She has regular publications in the press, is the author of the book Prefab Homes, had solo shows like Palaces For The People at Photofusion, London, and is the founder of The Prefab Museum. Website

Agnès Villette is a French journalist and photographer, based in London. She has been a contributor to Citizen K magazine for the past 16 years, she is also freelancing for various French and British magazines, such as Le Monde, Wedemain, Fisheye. She has published and exhibited several photo projects and is currently studying for a Master in Photography and developing projects on dark ecology. Website

To find out more about Liberland, visit the official Website, or read the Wikipedia article

Throughout the centuries dreams have been to many cultures around the world the images that speak of the future. In modern times dreams were seen as a connection to the unconscious. Today these morbid and extremely disturbing dreams are associated with the symptoms of a mental illness. This video is a free version of The Labyrinth of Crete in which the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur are reflected in a single character.

Mauricio Sanhueza: When I was still in art school, I experimented with as many different types of mediums as possible so that I could get a good idea of what interested me most. In 2003, after a year of attending a visual arts school, the frontman of a Peruvian punk rock band named “Futuro Incierto” (Uncertain Future) noticed a cardboard robot suit I had made for that year’s annual exhibit and asked me if I wanted to do a video clip for one of his songs, using that same robot suit. The video was shown on the MTVLA channel for many months. During the next four years at school, I started to make more videos including short films in SD until new technologies gave me the opportunity to make them in Full HD quality with no budget at all. My works have always included images of the surreal and the bizarre, within a nightmare-ish context. I have realized that the audiovisual medium is the best way for me to share my visions. The viewer can enjoy the works regardless of their background because dreaming is a universal experience. I use live stop motion techniques with photographs to represent imaginary odd worlds.

INTERVIEW WITH MAURICIO SANHUEZA

'Parasite' feels like an unconscious narrative unfolded from a dream, and yet within this dream there is an undeniable logic which permits the photographic sequence to discharge along a line of flight into a reality entirely it's own. Could you explain a little how 'Parasite' was born?

This work is part of a series of videos in which I start from my own experience, like a personal diary, about my dreams and nightmares. At first these images appear in my mind without any apparent order. Then I put them together and create a narrative that at first glance seems to have no meaning. But as you say, they form a reality of their own.

Your video progresses through a sequence of still-frames - a technique which both allows the logic of the dream to play-out and gives you the flexibility to break from a continuous sequence and attach to a completely new thread - much like the memory of a dream. What advantages have you found in this process?

At first these series of works (Parasite is the fifth) were thought to be made with an HD video camera, but due to the low budget I was forced to do it with photographs. Using the Stop Motion technique I discovered that I had endless possibilities that fit the type of surreal images I wanted to represent in a video, because at the same time the pictures can be easily altered, allowing me to create a parallel universe.

There is a dark, surreal humour to 'Parasite', a kind of excitement from following the train of thought which develops through the video. How does humour enter your work and what effect does it have over your practise?

I think that humor is present in all my work, sometimes unconsciously. I can't help it, I've always been a joker. I can’t imagine my videos in a solemn or serious way. I believe that without humor, our lives, and our works, would be boring and sometimes very sad. It seems to me that the best antidote to a harsh reality is to laugh at oneself.

Wayshrines I, II, & III (an avatar manifesto) is a combination of appropriated media, screen recordings, and performance in digital environments in which the avatar exists as a replacement for the physical being. Wayshrines attempts to overturn power structures that exist within a web-based reality by appropriating and reinterpreting virtual representations. The work calls into question the alternative moral code that exists when confronting the immortal digital body.

INTERVIEW WITH KARA GUT

Your video 'Wayshrines I, II, & III (an avatar manifesto)' frequently contrasts familiar digital appearances or 'avatars' with cyborg theory, emotional intelligence and even hints at techno-romanticism, all of which suggest a conflict, a deepening of the feeling of the digital self as opposed to a flattening of experience or a simplification of reality. Could you say something about the sort of conflicts you have encountered through your research and development of the Manifesto and how the 'user' or 'player' - if that is the Self - finds itself adapting under these conditions of conflict?

As I researched and constructed the skeleton for Wayshrines, I found constant contradiction. If the digital world is truly a smaller mirror of the real, it contains all of the same issues of human nature, however, with infinite bounds.
Wayshrines begins by imagining a dystopian future in which humans have lost all instinct, fear, and knowledge of a physical world. It alludes to the banality of violence within a virtual space, where death is imitated as a canned experience or an absurd exercise.
In a space where there is no death—a space where narrative has no merit without the passage of time and time has no urgency without the eventuality of death—we must recreate death to instill meaning into our virtual experiences. This death-dilemma continually arose in each field of my digital research. I noticed that there is a constant play between the knowledge of immortality of an avatar, that it will always respawn, but also an element of immersion, or a suspension of disbelief: a sense of loss, and perhaps a processing of one’s own eventual demise.

Wayshrines features the newest iteration of Lara Croft of the Tomb Raider series. She has typically stood as the idol of male sexuality within video game culture since its inception. She represents a fissure between feminism and the patriarchal appropriation of feminism into entertainment and commodity. This was the basis of the final section of Wayshrines. The stark white background suggests a nirvana or heaven the female avatar has reached but cannot leave. One woman asks, "How can I feel despair when I'm in such a beautiful place?” The woman-as-adventurer, scientist, and action hero would at first seem a triumph for feminism, however, she has of course been fetishized. Her power has become an object of sexual fantasy just the same, which begs the question: are women and femme persons accepted by mainstream patriarchy only when they’ve been successfully fetishized to the point of acceptability?
It seems that human nature will always be at odds with the environment of the virtual, as we compulsively invent more realities to further complicate with human emotion. However, the avatar serves as our digital counterpart, a successful survivor of each digital trend. It’s no wonder that the avatar has persisted through years of technological innovation. It is now the phoenix rising from a world of gimmickry, duplicity, and heteronormative fantasy, using transmutation as survival strategy.

The Wayshrines world is peppered with references to the chauvinist and colonial constructions in which online gaming and social encounters take place; from the appropriation of the Wild West myth into numerous virtual sites of permanent online violence and adventure, to the manga party girls who exist for the up-skirt photograph opportunity and are consigned to repeat mono-roles ad infinitum as virtual sex servants in a male playground. Would a feminist gaming experience consist in hacking the pre-existent chauvinist amphitheatres of online gaming, or in the construction of different environments which challenge or escape this baggage?

I find that appropriating as a tool is still underutilized, that there is already too much information we have not yet fully digested, to merit the construction of new environments. The careful combing and redistribution of the mess we’ve made could take 8 times as long as we’ve been a conscious species. I find power in reclamation. To turn something on its head is to change perspective.
However, to be careful and calculated has never been a trait of the human condition. In her essay “Too Much World: is the Internet Dead?” Hito Steyerl asks the question: “Why not slowly withdraw from an undead internet to build a few others next to it?” This could mean freedom from the burdens of the current network: the spam, malware and viruses, the racism and sexism, but these are themes that persist with or without the internet, all the digital realm seems to do is exacerbate these issues. My hesitation in creating new environments is not a fear of the unknown but a fear of human nature in tandem with the dismissive unshocked-shock culture of the internet, the constant barrage of information, and the infinite scroll.

We currently seem to be standing at an extremely fertile period in the future of digital art production - something we endeavour to reflect in our programming at The Unstitute. How do you see your own practice developing after the fact of the 'Manifesto', and what projects do you have coming up?

Before and after creating Wayshrines I’ve never considered my work as “digital art” although it deals with our digital experiences. At this point in time, society has seamlessly migrated to the digital, and continues to live as a hybrid creature, existing in both physical and virtual reality. My work is a reaction to the state in which we find ourselves: as divided between and intertwined within two simultaneous realities. My newest projects involve this notion of hybridity, of translation between worlds.
Recently, I created a series called Gamut Performance which involved the 3D printing of popular LAB colorspace models such as sRGB and Adobe RGB 1998. Each gamut performance takes the shape of a nearly-geometric object, born out of a loss in translation from digital to physical. The result is an incomplete version of what was intended—an artifact of the digital realm, partially realized. The resulting objects are sharp, awkward, and unsound, akin to a geode, bismuth, or some geological anomaly that holds an unexpected geometry. This summer, I’ll be showing my videos and sculptural work at The Muted Horn in Cleveland, Ohio, ROY G BIV gallery in my hometown of Columbus, as well as a group show DEMO Project in Springfield, Illinois. I'm also currently working on a mock mail-order catalog of "internet-derived objects."

www.karagut.info

Life is a Bitch: a sci-fi video-novel which tries to interrogate the nature of borders, freedom and resistance. The action of the short-film finds its set in a possible future where the Left has the opportunity to build its project on Europa, moon of planet Jupiter, and follows the struggle of a left-minded couple which couldn’t afford the flight to the “Socialist Moon”.

S.A.B.A (Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu) is an artist couple living and activating in the city of Iasi, Romania. They graduated BA (2013) and MA (2015) studies at “George Enescu” University of Arts (Faculty of Visual Art and Design) in Iasi and have participated in several international alternative education programs: “Summer School for Engaged Art”, project developed by “Chto Delat?” artistic group at Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation (2015, Berlin, Germany), “Autumn School. The 3 s: the space, the social and the sensorium” at University of Applied Arts (2016, Vienna, Austria). Working within the conceptual framework of new-media and having at the same time a background in fine arts, respectively mural art (Silvia) and painting (Bogdan). In their practice they are attempting to transgress the physical and discursive borders of the object (and the labour inscribed in it), searching for methods through which art and artistic means can be instrumentalized in order to overexcite the ability to look beyond capitalism and create a (common) future.

INTERVIEW WITH S.A.B.A

How did SABA get started, and how has working together effected your practice?

We started collaborating, exchanging ideas and debating since our first year at faculty. From the first day we met we felt that we were gravitating around the same interest, more exactly, the meaning and even futility of our practice and lives. Even though at times it may be challenging to overcome subjectivity, we consider that the fact that there are two of us, two brains, two sets of eyes, two souls, helps us in our research and saves us from complacent.

In your film 'Life is a bitch' you recall a lot of Soviet era imagery and ideals. How do you see those influences entering contemporary consciousness and what effect might this have?

It is true that we tried and we did instrumentalize a number of discursive and visual tools. We used them because, first of all, they are already imbedded in our consciousness through their museification and ongoing recuperation and, secondly, maybe we miss those unlived times when people used to live for a common future ideal. Unfortunately, their content is diluted and so their potentiality. Today, these imageries have become another consumption object along other lifestyle imagery.

Where did the science fiction element of the film originate from, and what do you feel the relationship is between Socialism and science fiction?

We used this framework mainly because our interest in poetry. We understood that in order to politicize your art practice and not scare the possible audience with you radicality, one should recuperate aesthetics. The attraction towards aesthetic instruments is so rooted in the western cultural construction that it feels almost futile if you want to change it. Especially when this is not your priority. We want to share political ideas and questions, and in this process, poetry/ aesthetics could be a tool. And for a long time art was understood for its capacity to be an instrument, to be part of the machine, critically engaging the collective imagination. Today, we assist at another form of political engagement of art and culture; diversity. Culture today, in opposition with the discursive approach of modernity, has the purpose of fragmenting the social landscape.

At this juncture of time many artists might question the validity of art whatsoever - perhaps due to economic restraints, or from the sheer oversaturation of media already out there. How do you see art surviving as a necessary practice in the current and future ages?

We believe that for the sake of the future, art should continue to exist as a mirror to our existence. Because we have to adapt to the new rhythm of life and digest information at different, more accelerated pace, art can become that oasis of reflection upon life with all of its earthly implications. In this situation where everyone is constantly producing and consuming visual information, art may seem to be outdated and in some cases, it really is, but we shouldn’t overlook its potential in creating dreams, future realities or translating the world for those who don’t have the time to investigate. Art must adapt itself to the needs of the present in order to survive and in order to do that is not enough to merge with technology but to commit to be true.

S.A.B.A Website
S.A.B.A YouTube Channel

From outer space to the gutter, Your Special Island (YSI) is a three-part video project concerning consciousness and the mental states of shame and fear. An additional theme in the project is the quest of neuroscience to locate and understand these states, or affects, through screen-based imaging. The title is taken from the 1958 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical film, South Pacific. Set against the backdrop of World War II, South Pacific's 'your special island' is a lyric in the song 'Bali Ha'i' that beckons the listener to a place of exoticized pleasure, a measure to combat dissociation and dis-connection.
The title points to the island of any state of being, manifested in the island-like nature of the screen. YSI (yellow, central) concerns uncertainties of mind and matter, fear related phenomena such as fear of emptiness: stuffing the space between celestial bodies in the expanding universe with 'junk'; fear of dying; fear response of violence including fantasy weapons fashioned from artifacts of global conflict. YSI (red, on the left) concerns desire and longing in relation to inner and outer voices, and virtual synapse imaging. YSI (blue, left) focuses on the enigma of shame and fear through implied violence in relation to screen-based experience, and fMRI imaging looking around for the center of empathy.

Laurel Beckman Attending to themes at the crossroads of consciousness + social conditions, meta-physics + science, my work investigates perceptual phenomena, stage and screen space, and affect. Through the use of unconventional structure, absurdity and humor, the projects are playfully layered, giving equal weight to conceptual and visual richness. My video works have been presented/screened in festivals, museums, and public spaces throughout the United States, and abroad in roughly 30 countries including Canada, Peru, Palestine, Australia, India, China, Switzerland, Italy, Iran, Netherlands, Brazil, the UK and France. I am restless and curious and a professor of art at the University of California Santa Barbara.

www.laurelbeckman.com

What We Talk About When We Talk About Abortion? is focusing on China’s issue around birth control. I set up a post-abortion support group to illustrate how patriarchal mentality in culture consciously and unconsciously influences women. By means of interviews and researches, I created five characters with different social backgrounds to introduce problems and conflicts associated with women’s rights and identities. Through the conversation about their abortion experiences, I address how women submit to and blindly follow the patriarchal social standards. This work not only responds to the gender inequality, but also evokes women’s self-awareness on issues of being women in the current society. Z. Song

Zihui Song is a multimedia artist and photographer from Xi'an, China. Influenced by the Second Wave feminist theorists, her practice questions the construction of femininity in the contemporary society. She is particularly concerned that women in China unconsciously follow the stereotypical gender expectations through the socio-political culture and with the power of social class differences and how it has divided women into different groups. Educated at Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts, Xi'an, Shaanxi, Zihui has received MFA in Photographic and Electronic Media, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD. China. The artist is currently based in Los Angeles, CA.

www.zihuisong.com

Fragments of a relationship frozen in cold night-time frames are related and re-related in a story which deconstructs its own logic, releasing the need for intimacy but paradoxically repelling the actors convulsed by the impulse to be together. Drawing from the ‘Hedgehog’s Dilemma’, Capuzzi and Dainotti explore the parallel needs of complex human impulses which draw us together and drive us apart.

"A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse. However the cold drove them together again, when just the same thing happened. At last, after many turns of huddling and dispersing, they discovered that they would be best off by remaining at a little distance from one another. In the same way the need of society drives the human porcupines together, only to be mutually repelled by the many prickly and disagreeable qualities of their nature." Arthur Schopenhauer

Hedgehog's Dilemma / Il dillemma dell'istrice, Italy, 2016
Starring: A.G. Capuzzi, Mai Nakazato
Music: Terry Bill
Production: Sette Secondi Circa

Colin Rosati 'Autocidal After Image'

15th November -15th December 2016

"The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution." - Hito Steyerl 'In Defense of the Poor Image' 2009

Autocidal After Image is a digital video animation that explores video and video infrastructures in the context of online networks, systems and databases. In the work, multiple found online videos compose a 3D space – rendering each image as virtual objects to examined. Exploring John Berger’s idea of flattened media forms, the work plays with ideas of online video framing, fragmentation, and casual directionless surfing. Exploring the role of the artist as a filter, Rosati employs the metadata generated through users, networks and infrastructures to frame and organize information that privileges the often-privatized usage of online services.

Colin Rosati is a Toronto based multimedia artist who creates videos and installations exploring digital space and the extensions of the physical body. Colin works with 3D modeling, Max MSP, single and multi channel video and interactive installations. Colin has studied Integrated Media at OCADU 2013-2015 and at Ottawa School of Art.
www.colinrosati.com

Alex Hovet 'Counter-Charge'

15th October -15th November 2016

In the third installment of the 1989 adult-oriented computer series Leisure Suit Larry, the eponymous Larry wanders the jungle of a colonized village searching for love, which he finds, after a multitude of failed romantic interactions, with Passionate Patti, a perfect and unattainable woman. In an act of cathexis, Larry's energies concentrate on Patti in a complex of libido, love, and gender expression that leads Larry/Patti on an investigation of duality. bell hooks' meditations on love and relationships attempt to guide them, but are often rejected by the game's instinct. Larry's explorations are anti-cathected--counter-charged in the language of Freud--and blocked by his own ego and the misogynistic, hetero-normative constructs of the game in which he wanders, his desires continually repressed.

Alex Hovet is a New York City-based artist. Working across multiple platforms and using various lens- and screen-based methods, her work navigates cultural and personal memory, often engaging her own experiences as a woman. She reclaims early computer gameplay to create visible, alternative experiences of gender and sexuality in male-designed spaces. She is currently an MFA candidate in Photography, Video and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts.

www.alexhovet.com

'Leave Sth In Your Wake' by David Anthony Sant

& 'Explicate' by MT Walker

15th September -15th October 2016

LEAVE STH IN YOUR WAKE: As the wave of demolition and construction continues its unrelenting sweep across Sydney, its population, wise to the shenanigans of politicians and developers, knows too well that this physical transformation is the measure of a society increasingly polarised racially, religiously and economically. To stake a claim in the midst of change is to seize fragments of and piece together moving imagery that responds to the visual clutter disseminated by a city in transmutation.
David Anthony Sant: Vimeo Channel and Facebook Page

EXPLICATE: is the 9th video in M T Walker's Econasia series. This video art project explores political philosophy in the moving image, with particular emphasis on the so-called Asian Century. While viewing Explicate, the audience is entranced by a jarring synthesised soundtrack. Simultaneously, the 3 channels of the work are bombarded by images of abandoned housing flats in Kuala Lumpur. The video typifies those buried in the undercurrent of poverty that accompanies the economic and industrial rise of Asia in the 21st Century. Explicate is also a pictorial interpretation of a dystopian outcome of this unsurpassed growth.

Victor Brim 'Instalgia'

15th August -15th September 2016

INSTALGIA: feeling of restlessness and insatiability for attractions ecloses to be nothing more than general indifference, which the protagonists of the movie experience as boredom. They go sightseeing, eat fast food, fight, take pictures and get lost in the tumult of the city. They move through streets and alleys with gardens and statues, museums and galleries with a more or less lethargic lack of interest. Their fingers never leave the camera thus to periodically create a digital impression of reality. Equipped with a smartphone they prey upon predictable pictures. The apparatus situated between subject and object insidiously becomes part of their perception.

VICTOR BRIM: is a filmmaker and media artist, mainly concerned with the medium film. His works are equally infused with strategies and aesthetics of the fictional and the documentary. They focus on glances, gestures and actions in regard to urban and transitory spaces. In Viktor Brim's films, space appears as a metaphor-creating process due to its liminal status between subject and object.

Curtis Roth 'AfterVal'

15th July - 15th August 2016

AfterVal is something like an advertisement for something like an after-life, the product of my compulsively distracted downloading; a journey through my collection of save-as junk, pirated from various online digital model archives, washed in the rhetorical infinity of deep-space desktop backgrounds and the infinite zoom of the mouse wheel. As digital objects multiply in perpetual copies of an irrelevant original, divorced both material scarcity and the labor of their production, they approach a condition of post-value. Through an exclusive, limited trial release, AfterVal is offering you a personalized ascension into this post-value realm, where too much, or not enough, dissolves into the rejuvenating permanence of maybe.

Curtis Roth (b. 1986, Portland) is an Assistant Professor at the Knowlton School of Architecture at the Ohio State University and a 2015-2017 resident fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. He holds a Master of Architecture degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He investigates architecture processes of cultural, economic and juridical valuation post-internet through diverse media productions including movies, video games, internet micro-economies, drawings, texts and irl stuff.

curtisroth.net

Zach Hill 'There's no Place Like'

15th June - 15th July 2016

My work exposes the sliver of magic that can be found in the everyday and turning it into a fantastical and raucous journey through symbolism. Informed by an interest in cinema and theater, these multimedia narratives are told through video, sculpture, drawing, and impromptu performance. A television becomes a portal, a wig becomes a curse, and a queer youth becomes a zebra as unnamed characters navigate from reality into fictional landscapes. The sculptures I make are almost exclusively interactive and based in the language of craft, utilizing fibers, cardboard constructions and copious amounts of glitter glue. The objects invite viewers to become part of a story, breaking the wall that cinema or theater sets up between the audience and the microcosm presented. The end goal is to prove that maybe we are not so alone after all, that the human experience is in fact a shared one. zach-hill.com

In 2015 Zach curated [dis]Corporate Bodies #10

S.A.B.A [Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu]

THE OMELET MANIFESTO

15th May - 15th June 2016

Curated in conjunction with [dis]Corporate Bodies #14

The Omelet Manifesto: the video is the result of our (poor) attempt to articulate a contemporary socialist manifesto starting from which we could coagulate the productive forces of humankind and change the world.

S.A.B.A (Silvia Amancei and Bogdan Armanu) are an artistic couple living and activating in the city of Iasi, Romania. We were born in 1991, after the fall of Romanian Communism, therefore we have never had a direct relation with the communist ideology and way of organization. During our childhood, like many others, we have been exposed to diverse forms of nostalgia triggered by the precarious condition of life during the so called transition towards the complete democratic / free market. When we developed a political identity we already knew that the promises of capitalism are unfounded and that the future of too many is darkened by instability and minimal subsistence.
Both unemployed, at least not in the form that we would like to be, we activate as independent artists, working with the issues triggered by the new paradigm of life exploitation. We feel the need of change and would like to put a shoulder to the materialization of this much needed movement, at least through the means available for us, i.e. questioning, underlining, sharing, so on and so forth. Unfortunately, most of the time we come to a negative conclusion regarding our future, both as individuals and society / community.

S.A.B.A Website
S.A.B.A YouTube Channel

The Unstitute 'The Double'

15th April - 15th May 2016

On April 9th 2009, maverick video-maker and self-professed ‘outsider’ Arkhip Ippolitov failed in his bid to commit suicide. The investigation that followed revealed a man on the fringes of sanity who had all but erased his identity in favour of living out his life as a fictional character; a character doomed from the outset. Most curious however is that the process of his breakdown was documented and released in the form of the award-winning motion picture ‘Goliadkin’.
This documentary, produced in association with The Institute of Film and Video Studies, Copenhagen, attempts to discern fact from myth and make sensible the question: ‘Who is Arkhip Ippolitov?’

“It is ironic that he [Ippolitov] chose to appropriate the character of Dostoevsky’s Goliadkin as his own, for this is a character driven to desperation by the strange and sudden appearance of his Doppelganger. It is doubly curious when we consider the circumstances of his suicide, his towering resentment toward the success of his movie and the tragic codicil he sought to execute against himself. But what is by far most uncanny is that this movie is a record of his self-destruction and that we, the audience, are capable of taking pleasure in the spectacle.”Tomas Blauveldt, Video-Critic and Lecturer, Department of Unscientific Research, The Institute of Film and Video Studies, Copenhagen

Watch The Double
View other videos by The Institute of Film and Video Studies

Tim Neath 'Iron Horse of The Studio'

15th March - 15th April 2016

The Projection Room at the Unstitute is pleased to present the fast paced, steam powered 'Iron Horse of the Studio' (2015) video by UK artist Tim Neath. Forming a part of an ongoing exploration of the Western genre of cinema, its tropes, conventions and cliches, Tim expertly and wittily manipulates found footage with handmade balsa model miniatures and sets created in his studio at Two Queens, Leicester, UK.

These new digitised hybrid environments, where narrative and linear coincidences and surreal juxtapositions, remythologised in the video frame, create an uncanny clash of visual/narrative fields and cinematic symbols on this Wild West journey of the artist's studio.

www.timneath.wordpress.com

Francesca Fini 'Dadaloop'

15th February - 15th March 2016

Dadaloop is a a surrealist wedding cake, a futurist banquet, a baroque orgy of colors and flavors, a ratatouille of images in which food becomes a dream - or nightmare - and the reflection of schizophrenic diets in the claustrophobic frame of a self-portrait.

Francesca Fini is an interdisciplinary artist mainly focused on video art projects and performance art. With a deep training as a digital artist, she worked for 15 years in the field of television authoring and production.
In 2000 she met American artist Kristin Jones and they started a very long collaboration on the project “Tevereterno”, creating installations for the city of Rome. With Kristin Jones, Kiki Smith and other artists she attended the 2008 River to River Festival in New York, projecting her animation “Moon Loop” on the trees of the Hudson River.
In 2014 she has been selected for the Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, organized by the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. She was also invited in Kolkata, India, where she lectured and performed at the Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute.

www.francescafini.com

Catalina Ouyang 'After Mental Wealth'

15th January - 15th February 2016

After Mental Wealth 2013 takes as its launching point Chris Cunningham's 1999 Playstation commercial, "Mental Wealth." The artist becomes an analogue Fi-Fi, distorted and reconstituted through a decade of internet and social media normalization. The future of Cunningham's technological futurism has become our present, and it is not what we had expected. Nu-goths, Chun Li, space lazers, Pokemon, Grimes and Ben Lerner make their appearance in a melange of Tumblr earnestness and net- and 90s- nostalgia. Cunningham's Fi-Fi told us to land on our own moon. The artist as Fi-Fi tells you to do it in a skylit room, surrounded by your friends.

Catalina Ouyang is the recipient of the 2011 Esther Arthur Proetz Scholarship, the 2011 Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and the 2014 Caroline Risque Janis Prize in Sculpture. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Annapolis, Baltimore, Florence and St. Louis, including at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts and the Contemporary Art Museum. In 2011, her work was included in Manifest Gallery's International Drawing Annual 6. Ouyang received her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in May 2015.

www.catalinaouyang.com

Peter Wildman 'Modulate a Thousand Times More'

Zach Kurth-Nelson 'nothings_nomeanings'

15th December 2015- 15th January 2016

Modulate A Thousand Times Moreis a natural expression of coded language where imagination tangles with constraints of syntactical possibility and limitation to create a moment of poetry. The process of writing is just as much about exploring the possibilities of computer programming as it is about conveying a meaning through words and imagery. There are many layers to code that hide beneath desktops and web browsers. Layers of potential space and meaning that can be explored through subverting the functionality of coded language and the perspective of how it is written, viewed and read.

Peter Wildman is a media artist who has been messing around with technology ever since he was 12 and he successfully wired up a telephone line in his bedroom using sticky tape and al-foil. Since then he has been building interactive installations, teaching others to mess with technology and hacking his way around the world in code.

www.peterwildman.net
Code Poetry

Zach Kurth-Nelson nothings_nomeanings

nothings_nomeanings is a collage of found media, video and sound. I harvest media, extracting snippets / clips to use as part of a collage. I collect tens of thousands of these clips, which I refer to as samples following in the tradition of pop music and hip-hop sampling. I meld these samples together to create new and unique multimedia entities - gestalts. I am bewitched by the inherent beauty of each found-object, and in their potential for existing together in synthesis, so I do not distort or pervert them. Hundreds or thousands of samples are churned together, each providing their own distinct identity. The exact quality of every recording - the hiss, the static, the color - is kept intact. The samples represent exactly themselves, snippets of recorded media, no more and no less. A video sample is not a directreference to the subject material. It contains within it the subject material, but it also contains all of the minutia of recording - the perspective (physical and cultural) of the author, the equipment, and the uniqueness of the conditions of the recording, with the arm positioned exactly thus, or the singer holding the note for an extra 1/100th of a second. All of these details comprise the character of the sample, and the amalgamation of these characters can be startling and beautiful. Yet, at the same time, they also often overwhelm me with nostalgia that I have trouble explaining.

Zach Kurth-Nelson on Vimeo

Kayle Karbowski

'From Inside a Beehive and Back Again'

15th November - 15th December 2015

From Inside a Beehive and Back Again invites us as viewers to peer in through a piece of garden décor to bare witness to a possibly female alien humanoid's experience in an undefined moment in time. Each environment she exists in holds its own sense of artificiality and malleability, almost like going deeper into a virtual subconscious. Who holds the power over these spaces, these things? Where did she come from and where is she going? Is she an abstraction of the contemporary suburban woman or just a figment of our imagination?

Kayle Karbowski is a human being, artist, writer, curator, Scorpio and self-informed cultural critic that was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago and currently lives and works in Milwaukee, WI. She actively traverses the line between DIY and institutional art scenes through participating in and organizing a diverse set of exhibitions and events. In her personal practice, Karbowski utilizes the language and tools of film, video and theater to highlight the value placed upon masking, refining and performing as a way of existing in mainstream American culture. Sculptures present themselves as performance props or surrogates for a portal into another world, characters are always seen as avatars or actors (no matter how sincere they may be), and familiar places become foreign as they take the shape and feel of a digital landscape or dream. Science fiction, queerness and satire take center stage as she navigates these malleable modes of representation. “It is only through happening upon the parallel of your homeland, meeting your doppelgänger, or knowingly engaging with déjà vu, that we can really confront who we are and where we come from.

Watch Kayle Karbowski's videos 'Rainbow Road' and 'Zagreenoboofia' at The Unstitute's [dis]Corporate Bodies Project

www.kaylekarbowski.com

SELECTOR:

Adrian Randall Mark Tholander / Grant Petrey

15th October - 15th November 2015

#### was made in collaboration between contemporary artist Mark Tholander and a former film producer Sam Lomberg (1920–2014). They made this video as a reflection on how the world has changed into a hybrid reality where the space between the physical and the virtual is fluid.

Mark Tholander is a contemporary artist who works and lives in Denmark, and has studied in St. Petersburg, Russia. His video art explores how we perceive the world, and how this perception has changed with the advent of the digital. He has exhibited his videos in various countries, including USA, England, Egypt, Romania, Sweden and Switzerland. Today he is a student at the Jutland Art Academy, Denmark.

Visit Mark Tholander's website

The Bourgeoise Agony of Travel If travel is defined as being disconnected from a place, how exactly can we represent it? Set against today's age of ephemeral network flows, travel (or from the Western perspective, cosmopolitanism) becomes even more difficult to map. More than ever we are set between the infinite images of places and the quest to find our personal experience within that.The Bourgeois Agony of Travel is both a critique of postmodern cosmopolitanism and a testament to travel as a philosophical and emotional state of exploration.

Visit Adrian Randall's Vimeo page

Filament 2014, explores temporality and phenomena within moving image and sound. Central to the work is an engagement with subjectivity and mediation to approach notions of the sublime. This processed work combines responses to passages within Lacan's IX Seminar (1961 - 62) that question amongst other things, interiority and exteriority.

Grant Petrey is a Senior Lecturer at the University for the Creative Arts, UK, teaching theory and practice on a range of Fine Art and Media programmes. He has worked extensively with Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK, and as a visiting consultant lecturer at Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, USA. He has presented his research and work internationally, with early work being part of the National Collection of Great Britain Northern Ireland. His fine art practice explores temporality via the triangulation of the still and moving image with the sonic. Recent screenings include L’Alternativa at the Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Art, Spain; Crane Arts Projects Space Philadelphia, USA and SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles Convention Centre, USA.

Visit Grant Petrey's website

UN REALITY

Harold Charre Mauricio Sanhueza / Pendar NasserSharif / David George Alexander DeBavelaere / Simon Mclennan

15th September - 15th October 2015

UN REALITY presents video works by 6 international artists selected to represent the first major group screening at the Projection Room to celebrate 5 years since The Unstitute dug its first hole underground.

Selected from many unspecified open submissions, (and starting with Harold Charre's video 'In between',) over time a distinct body of work evolved that independently render existential subject matter rich in symbolism, dream imagery and innovative videography techniques.
This group presentation seeks to invite some of the less conscious recesses of the human psyche to the fore in this screening with a selection of excellent works that make this subject area so paradoxical and complex. We hope there are areas of resonance within our group of loyal followers...YOU!

Francois Knoetze 'Cape Mongo' Series

VHS | GLASS | METAL | PLASTIC | PAPER

15th August - 15th September 2015

Mongo n. slang. object thrown away and then recovered

Cape Mongo follows the stories of five characters as they journey through the city of Cape Town. Each Mongo character is made from the city's discarded waste', mythical trash creatures, which have emerged from the growing dumps of consumer culture. In five short films, the creatures revisit the spaces of their imagined pasts, the locations associated with their material existence and the constitution of their social relations, as if walking against the consumer-driven currents of city. From postmodern shopping malls to the bustling streets of the Bo Kaap to leafy suburbia and desolate shipping-container yards, these characters' journeys conjure up imagery that touches on some of the historical trajectories that have lead up to the endemic inequality and social alienation which characterises present day Cape Town.

Francois Knoetze has constructed six wearable sculptures entirely out of waste. Rather than merely disposable items which are purged from our lives, as soon as the garbage truck disappears around the bend or which lie dormant in an ever-widening layer in the crust of the earth for future archaeologists to marvel at Cape Mongo imagines trash objects specifically, the packaging of domestic consumables and the electronic devices used to record every-day life as mnemonic vestiges of the activities that shaped them. Performing all over the city of Cape Town for a period of two years, Cape Mongo is the documentation of these performances but also pulls together found footage relating to various issues around housing, food security, inequality and racial segregation.

Francois Knoetze is a Cape Town based artist. He obtained a BFA at Rhodes University in 2012 and recently completed his MFA at Michaelis School of Fine Art. Knoetze's work investigates the relationship between the aesthetics of waste and the glossy facade of consumerism. Through public performance, sculpture and film, his practice explores the nuanced lives of discarded objects and the powerful scope that the indeterminacy of trash allows for reorganisation and redefinition.

francoisknoetze.carbonmade.com

Jenny Vogel 'The Art of Forgetting'

15th July - 15th August 2015

High-resolution photographs of low-resolution encounters, offer a surprisingly intimate reading of a contemporary loneliness. Live streaming video projections of the one-shot-per-second progression of web cameras result in a fireworks-display of light signals as if trying to communicate in some unknown code, some unknown message. Voyeurism and self-induced surveillance through constant online exposure are the desperate desires of participation in the online world, which fails in the colloquial boredom of chat-rooms. News photographs turn the faces of individuals into abstract dots, and the identities of witnesses to wonders are erased through censorship.

Jenny Vogel My work explores subjective themes as they are experienced in the age of information. I examine the anxiety of alienation, the desires of communication and a sense of be-longing in a virtual world. These traits, attributed to Romanticism, are dealt with in my work through the lenses of contemporary communication technology, the media and historical preconceptions. I am particularly interested in the depiction of the individual and individuality through media technology, with its resulting misrepresentations and miscommunications. Through this juxtaposition of technology and Romanticism I attempt to challenge the image of the Internet as the “global village,” objectivism in the news and the ideology of science."

You can view Jenny Vogel's Everything Must Be In Flames' at The Unstitute's [dis]Corporate Bodies Project

www.jennyvogel.net

Oscar Johanson 'On Thames'

15th June - 15th July 2015

On Thames is a short film that follows Sergei Rudenko, a Ukrainian national who believes the City of London Corporation has been secretly transforming the entire Square Mile into a vehicle capable of intercontinental flight.

Oskar Johanson is an artist and writer based in London. He graduated from Goldsmiths with a BA in Fine Art & the History of Art (Dual Honours) in 2013. He is currently studying architecture at the Architectural Association, and is co-editor of the weekly periodical PNYX.

www.oskarjohanson.com

www.pnyx.aaschool.ac.uk

Eden Mitsenmacher 'Seagull'

Patrick Moser 'Saturn Fishing'

15th May - 15th June 2015

Seagull Personal experiences such as love, loneliness and longing are taken at face value but are immediately turned into points of systematic general inquiry. The banal becomes serious, and vice versa. Presenting hyper-worlds, built from cultural stereotypes and clichés, then pushed to the brink of emotional overload. Kitsch is a conscious strategy in my research and practice. My inspirations often come from the observation in daily life and especially the firsthand experiences. As one of the many individuals who are experiencing the confusion and struggles in the current macro environment I am interested in the doubts, curiosity and cognition for the potential new value orientations and its unpredictable future possibilities.

Eden Mitsenmacher: Born 1987 in the USA; works in London and Tel Aviv. Combining performance, video and installation to take a critical yet engaging view of social, political and cultural issues. Embracing the desire to do what you love and occasionally getting embarrassed by it. Finding a form for vulnerability and blurring the lines between sincerity and ambiguity. Using pop culture as a frame of reference for social and personal critique but also as a way to create familiarity and accessibility. Sharing and connecting experiences between an I and a You.

Eden Mitsenmacher on Wordpress

Saturn Fishing: A former neighbor inspired the yellow mask I wear in this video. I invented it to perform ceremonial physical actions in his stead as he struggled with a life ending sickness. The character is an avatar exploring a contrived personal mythology flavored with gratuitous violence. The form is an inverted mask, a cover to wear when you are alone, a mask only revealed in isolation. I live and work in Florida, a fully realized material and conceptual wilderness wonderland."

Patrik Moser: "I make paintings, drawings and experimental performance videos. I am excited by physical and emotional spaces that are simultaneously heavy and light, something like the experience of one’s own child, a conflation of deep love and profound fear. I find the intentional misuse of tools thrilling, seeding new outcomes, shaping fantasy, melancholy and futility.Lives and works in St Augustine, Florida.

Patrick Moser's website

Paul Harrison 'CIRCUMstance' 

15th April - 15th May 2015

CIRCUMstance I believe that my film resonates quite deeply with visualising and thinking through everyday images of protest. In that the film is an attempt to understand the digital platforms which dominate our popular and common modes of communication. This can be seen by it’s narrative tactic of using GOOGLE’s programmes to demonstrate their truly global spread and influence. I guess that I created this work to express annoyance toward the fact that technology can accurately map and portray this world so accurately. However, this does seemingly not aid in affective changes in our daily attempt’s to understand why the system’s we live by often fail us as individuals.

Paul Harrison's video channel

Brandon Aleson 'Blood Let'

15th March - 15th April 2015

I have been more sensitive recently to the ways in which external influences are consumed, digested, and incorporated into my demeanor and personal affectations. If I spend time with someone over the course of days or weeks, I start to notice that I selectively, yet inadvertently, begin to adopt their mannerisms, modes of expression, particular colloquialisms, even their distinctive gait… vestiges of their person which can and do reverberate through time, and which start to exist independently of the individual which set them in motion. They are ripples in the fabric of my personality where it has been touched by another. Some of them last for a time and fade away, others take root and change shape as they find a permanent nest in that thing which constitutes the affectable and effectible me.

Blood Let is an attempt to localize this phenomenon of change within the irreducible immediacy of physical being. By extracting my own blood, exposing it to external action and substance - making it into a blood sausage - and then consuming it, this process of change is run from start to finish in a closed system. How will this action change the blood itself? Will it alter the constitution of my physical or personal body? Will this be a product of the action, the physical substance, or both? Where, exactly, does the change occur? Or, phrased differently, will this particular series of events have any real consequence outside of its abstraction via critical thought?

Brandon Aleson's website

Paul Remund & Hollie Miller 'Hill of Crosses'

15th February - 15th March 2015

Hill of Crosses is film that blindly guides you through a space between solitude and the feverish discovery of the self. Two wanderers imprisoned by their silence discover movement as a means of finding their voice. It is a trans-Atlantic collaboration meeting at an in between place. This experimental film documents a journey through the Baltic's discovering abandoned and sacred places and delving into the freedom of loneliness. A series of performance rituals of the body in response to space are played out to a dreamlike and eerie sound score. Locations include: Hill of Crosses, Siauliai, Lithuania; Patarei Prison, Tallinn, Estonia and Linnahall, Tallinn, Estonia.

Paul Remund works out of Brooklyn, New York in a variety of media including film, sound, sculpture, performance and paint. 
Hollie Miller is a performance artist from London, UK interested in the moving body and creating site specific work for film.

Paul Remund's Website
Hollie Miller's Website

Kayleigh O'Keefe 'Flabzilla'

15th January - 15th February 2015

Flabzilla subverts the concept of the monstrous fatty and plays with common perceptions of an ‘othered’ physique. A morbidly obese behemoth rises from the sea and uses her body mass to attack the city of London, which is built entirely from cardboard and packaging tape. Treading a fine line between grotesque and sex, weighty flesh and physical power clash with intricately crafted landmarks until all is destroyed.'

Kayleigh O'Keefe is a contemporary artist engaging with themes of body confidence, identity and alienation through performance and film. She has collaborated with artists, filmmakers and non-performers, produced and directed immersive live art events for the Pink Bear Club and distributed her performance art videos to an online audience.

Kayleigh O'Keefe's Website

Jorge Catoni 'Developing Nation'

15th December 2014 - 15th January 2015

Developing Nation presents a montage of living vignettes, of pasted-together subworlds and rejects, derelicts and conflagrations, as though an irruption/flourishing in the southern heart of Santiago had engulfed this modern, high-tech city, accelerated the rate of entropy in the interconnecting neighbourhoods. Catoni's observations are highly sensitive, both everyday and unimpressive like the bulk of our everyday lives, yet they inflict resonant images on the retina - a sort of video-graffiti or poetic economy of means.

www.vimeo.com/jorgecatoni 

Nicholas Mortimer 'Duty to Act'

15th November - 15th December 2014

Duty to Act shows a hobbyist’s response to the world of broadcast television and past cinematic techniques married with a domesticated DIY pursuit that reflects on today’s implosion of socially mediated news casting. We are witness to a confused interpretation of the production and consumption of personal and mass media, forming a cyclical and closed system in an anonymous living room. The historically loaded script becomes a document that examines the role of rhetoric and political speeches as a form of linguistic technology, something which aids the design of ideologies, emotions and culture.

www.nicholasmortimer.net 

Tim Miller 'Interview in Progress'

15th October - 15th November 2014

Interview in Progress is the first part of a larger project 'Professional Practice' that explores the creation and use of narrative in professional environments. Through a forum theatre role-play event, narrative is explored to construct effective personal narratives as a response to standard job interview questions. Through a process of re-scripting, individuals are aided by a panel of screen-writers, each narrative developed being acted out on stage by two actors allowing participants the opportunity to reflect upon possible professional performances.

Tim Miller's work explores a process of re-scripting and commodification of reality. Through analysing and re-performing behavioural systems, he aims to highlight multiple possibilities, informing, contributing towards and reflecting upon the construction of individual realities.

Stephen Broomer 'Christ Church - Saint James'

15th September - 15th October 2014

In the spring of 1998, Christ Church – Saint James, an historic black church in Toronto’s Little Italy, was destroyed by arson. All that remained were walls and a pit, and over subsequent years, the site was overtaken with graffiti. This film has taken on the layered form of the site itself, the space and its surfaces becoming tangled and multiple, the grid of a stone-filled window giving geometric form to simultaneously occurring images of concrete, nature, waste, paint, and sky.

This is the statement that I have used to introduce this film since its completion in late 2011. It is a mysterious statement, in a sense; it suggests a deeper narrative of the ruins, but it primarily describes the film by surface terms, its central aesthetic one of simultaneous perspective.

Sandra Fruebing 'The Individual's Pursuit'

15th August - 15th September 2014

The Individual’s Pursuit by Sandra Fruebing is the creation of a narrative based on a character whose quest is to inhabit an in-between space as an exploration of borders and boundaries. The personal desire to walk along the edge of water and earth, where both elements meet, is becoming a strong desire- almost an obsession. Specially designed apparatus and physical training exercises will be employed in an attempt to fulfil the desire. The project challenges our perception of what is accepted as normal and questions common sense. It looks at how borders in a physical and philosophical way create our definition of identity and reality.

Sandra Fruebing’s work involves the development of narration to explore and reflect upon the relation between individual politics and contemporary society. Mostly her work involves deeper research within the fields of film, literature and the everyday social interaction. The outcomes are presented in various media from objects that are involved in the storytelling till the creation of a filmed spectacle. Sandra Fruebing is currently based in London and finished her MA in Design Products at the Royal College of Art.

sandra-fruebing.de

Ocusonic 'A Diamond Forms Under Pressure'

15th July - 15th August 2014

A Diamond Forms Under Pressure, is an anomaly existing somewhere between experimental film and music video. An improvised electronic soundtrack drives proprietary software, which analyses the audio’s frequency content and generates a cogent synchronous image in real-time. Frequencies push and pull against each other stabilising or agitating the central image.

Paul O'Donoghue aka Ocusonic is an Irish composer/ audio visual artist based in Dublin, Ireland. He has released music under a number of pseudonyms for a variety of labels and produced music for television and radio. To date his audio visual work has screened internationally at more than 200 festivals and galleries in 45 countries. His current work is entirely audio visual and explores a disparate collection of methods and techniques for the creation of visual music. Underpinning all of these disciplines is Ocusonics, the real-time generation of synchronous audio and visual material.

www.ocusonic.com

Illich Castillo 'TOUCH-Auto-Glitch'

15th June - 15th July 2014

TOUCH-Auto-Glitch is a part of a series that explore an automatic/machinic corruption of a film frame - in the video a singular gesture of a finger pressing down is looped, lifted from the original context of the film narrative; isolated, it becomes a gesture of a mechanic destruction, a corruption of its own image. Manipulated by another gesture of the artist pressing down a pause button on a remote control, this mirroring effect of a mechanic and a manual gesture renders the image unrecognizable, in a sense cancelling them both by transforming figurative into abstract which perverts its own image to completely alter its figurative nature. This ends up becoming something unrecognizable.

Matthew Williamson 'Everything is Cool'

15th May - 15th June 2014

Described once as "epiphanic", Matthew Williamson makes work about the cohesion between the internet and the stuff that used to be called 'real life'. While working mostly with video and animation gifs, his work is focused on the humorous relationships we forge with our machines. A graduate of the Ontario College of Art & Design and Syracuse University, his work has appeared online and offline at various galleries and websites.

www.matthew-williamson.com

Dakota Gearhart 'Laundry Day'

15th April - 15th May 2014

Laundry Day By blurring lines between reality and illusion, my work examines natural phenomena through the lens of material, landscape, and language. Elements, creatures, and molecules morph into playful and otherworldly scenes of sentience through narratives I create with accessible technology. Taking form in video, photography, and sculptural installation, my work constructs an experience that ponders the collapse of psychic distance between living beings. Working with diverse objects, such as laser prints, borrowed microscopes, and discarded houseplants, I find visual methods to invoke the intelligence of intuition, the infinite in the banal, and the ability to understand things on different terms.

Dakota Gearhart, also known as Tiffany Peters and Tiff Mich, is an artist working in video, performance, sculpture, and multi-media installation. Dakota has exhibited work both nationally and internationally in venues such as Interstitial Theater, Seattle; Elsewhere Studios, Greensboro; Launchpad Gallery, Portland; Core Art Space, Denver; Artgrease, Buffalo; Purdue University Gallery, West Lafayette; Universitat de Barcelona, Spain; and Taiyuan University Gallery, China. Dakota was born in Arizona, raised in Florida and lives and works in Portland, OR and Seattle, WA, where she recently graduated with her MFA from the University of Washington.

Silvia Dal Dosso 'The 1 Up Fever'

15th March - 15th April 2014

In the Berlin city everyone is going crazy for a viral new app. Anyone with a smartphone can play a sort of Super Mario Bros arcade game in Augmented Reality and win Bitcoins by playing. One coin corresponds to 0.01 Bitcoins. Citizens' habits are tainted by the game. Coins are hidden all over the city, you can spot them just scanning around with your device, not always they are easy to grab. People started to leave their jobs in order to collect Coins in the streets. All over the city people are jumping and running around with their smartphones, trying to grab as many virtual coins as they can, while the App developers identity remain covered. The 14 minutes movie is divided in chapters or "levels" which follows the 8bit vintage graphic and introduce to the following events with a small 8 bit animations. Peculiar elements of the Berlin city become part the Super Mario Land landscape, see those pink or blue tubes that run everywhere in the city, those climber plants popping out from wild abandoned place like old factories, longlines, gardens, those those east side building made with old red bricks, and the brige Oberbaumbrucke on the Spree river which seem the exact copy of the Super Mario's final boss castle. In these scenery there are now people chasing coins by jumping around the city, people sailing on small boats on rivers, people losing their job and falling from bridges… and so on, while nobody knows who is giving them all that money and why. During the movie, acknowledged bloggers, hackers, game developers, financial expert are interviewed. The shooting itself appear to be a game in the game: all the interviewees are asked to imagine the city as the app release happened for real and to answer thereby, sometimes they are even asked to play with it, but their skills and knowledge in the field allows to raise important questions on the actual use of internet, social networks and virtual currencies. Part of the work is dedicated to the Bitcoinkiez, a small Berlin district where local owners started to sell their products in Bitcoins through the Bitcoin Wallet App, which would be the "real" app to whom the Super Mario app is corresponding and who holds a world record: no other neighborhood in the world is so densely populated with commercial activities that accept the Bitcoin as a valid currency.

Watch 'The 1 Up Fever'

Toby Tatum 'The Secluded Grove'

15th February - 15th March 2014

Toby Tatum is an artist living and working in Hastings on the English south-coast, who makes films.

"I basically make films on my own, shooting digitally and editing at home. For the last few years I’ve worked with a composer, Abi Fry from the band British Sea Power. The films cost almost nothing to make. Each film, for me, addresses a series of ideas that I’d have been mulling over for several months, although not all of those may come over to the viewer. Central to the whole practice is the idea of an artist being able to create worlds of their own, self contained universes that abide by their own limits and rules, that exist to some degree independent from the wider world"

www.tobytatum.com
'The Lost World Of Toby Tatum

Dawn Nye 'American Love Story: A Landscape in Sequence'

15th January - 15th February 2014

Part of an ongoing collaboration between artists Dawn Nye and Katrazyna Randall, this is a true story told from memory and visually investigated through the lens of one very far removed. Looking through the idyllic frame of the rural American landscape, the narrator leads tells the story of a culture where death is the mundane thread of daily existence and comfort food marks the limited boundaries of hope. Throughout the centuries the landscape has been imbued with the hope, fear, honor, righteousness, delicacy, power and the faith of man. This video investigates that history through a contemporary lens and seeks to find a relationship between the romantic, the tragic and the everyday.

Watch 'An American Love Story'

FUTURE DEATH TOLL 'PRISONASACORPORATION'

15 December 2013 - 15 January 2014

FUTURE DEATH TOLL (F-DT) is a multidisciplinary collective creating work that circumvent the normal bounds that geographic locations and physical media impose on an art form. In a society where choice and personal privacy are increasingly under attack, the struggle for personal empowerment has become the pulled lynchpin to the derailment of human evolution. By confronting and harnessing technology we hope to create tools to orientate our post-evolutionary selves. F-DT is a throbbing mess of noise.

Watch 'PRISONASACORORATION'
F-DT Website

Mladen Stropnik 'Fat and Virtual'

15 November - 15 December 2013

Mladen Stropnik's Website
Stropnik's Youtube Channel

Rebecca La Marre & Jaakko Pallasvuo 'Full Disclosure'

15 October - 15 November 2013

'Full Disclosure' Interview

Based on your experience, how does it feel to become one, or more than two?

Rebecca La Marre with Jaakko Pallasvuo: When I think of two becoming one I am at first reminded of my early love of the Spice Girls, with the Biblical sense of the phrase floating around in the background.
The process of becoming one, as part of Full Disclosure, required a great deal of trust and negotiation; it was an experiment that was mutually entered into with, on my part, little thought about where it might take us both.* It also took a certain amount of commitment to sharing my experience of the process, and having to accept and stay with the parts that were uncomfortable. The project has probably been more successful than most of my romantic relationships in this sense. It also felt oddly sexual in the way the phrase “two become one” intimates, odd in a queer sense that involved my body but only to the extent that it was working and work can be pleasurable, and also odd because it was completely a-romantic.
The sexual component and the religious component are linked for me, and recently when Jaakko and I gave a lecture at Kingston University, without consulting each other we somehow both ended up talking about the way language interferes with communicating love—a theme that is very bound up with religious and mystic traditions, and more recently, linguistic theory.
I apprenticed under a shaman in Vancouver. I can say with the benefit of hindsight that even though the project was framed as a critical investigation or experiment, effectively Jaakko was asking me to use his energy. When this kind of exchange is unethical, or imbalanced in some way, it can be called a possession, so I was somewhat aware of the level of risk involved in his request. A shamanic view is that all relations are founded on some kind of agreement that in turn produces material conditions.
This is matched by the questions I was inquiring into about the way the Internet is talked about as something immaterial with no supposed connection to bodies. I also wanted to interrogate exactly how writing produces value for artists: what the relation is between a name, or a word, and the material existence of what that name is attached to, and how manipulating that relation produces effects.
The unfortunate outcome of our experiment, or game, is that we both applied to a residency that I was accepted to and Jaakko was not. I didn’t find out that the selectors didn’t believe in Jaakko’s existence until I arrived, and it was too late to address the situation. In effect, I was using Jaakko as a material in my practice and to extend my capabilities to exist in multiple places at once. I would make jokes about omnipotence and omnipresence, and the project conveniently made it look as though I was able to produce work at the speed of the Internet, which is physically impossible for one person who barely gets paid to do. I deeply suspect that our appetite for images on the Internet comes from the same impulse as the worship of religious icons and images.

* Full Disclosure was an online collaboration between Jaakko Pallasvuo and Rebecca La Marre, which existed on the Internet between July 29 and August 23, 2012. In a video diary, La Marre claimed to have been making work as Pallasvuo since 2011, and the artists’ websites were interchanged.

New Degrees of Freedom
www.rebecca-lamarre.com

Dawn Woolley 'Encounters' and 'Homo Bulla'

15 September - 15 October 2013

Dawn Woolley: My artistic practice encompasses photography, video, installation and performance. I use photographs of objects and people to question issues of artificiality and idealisation. The artwork forms an enquiry into the act of looking and being looked at. Referring to psychoanalysis, phenomenology and feminism I examine my own experience of becoming an object of sight and also consider the experience the viewer has when looking at me as a female, and a photographic object. Voyeurism and exhibitionism intertwine as I attempt to disrupt relationships of power in purposefully provocative scenes.

Watch 'Encounters 1-6'
Watch 'Homo Bulla'
www.dawnwoolley.com

The Unstitute 'Radical Atheism: An Approach'

1 August - 15 September 2013

Watch 'Radical Atheism: An Approach'
www.theunstitute.org