Ghosts in the Machine – 2023

Saturday, April 15, 1:00 PM

The Zoomed in Photo
Director: Simay Yigit, Experimental, Turkey, 2 min
Image and mind are intertwined. But where does the zoomed in photo stand?

Shorthand Stasis
Directors: Megan Jedrysiak, Jackson Ammenheuser, Animation, USA, 5 min
A band of workers maintain the outline of a minivan in a void that threatens to erase them. Their constant maintenance leads one worker to unpack their desires.

Family Vacation Photos
Director: Joel Benjamin, Animation, USA, 5 min
Flawed memories of the places we wanted to go to on vacation and the places we didn’t want to visit. Trying to remember who we were, or who we are.

Lockdown Dreamscape
Director: Nicolas Gebbe, Experimental, Germany, 7 min
When spending a lot of time at home in isolation, the walls begin to move. The sense of time fades, the days pass quietly, everything seems to repeat itself endlessly. Spaces, conversations, visual impressions and sounds merge and make everything seem like a long dream.

What Remains
Director: Alejandro Rodríguez, Experimental, Spain, 9 min
Through the gallery of a cell phone, the documentary reflects on the relationships between memory and the archive that we generate every day.

Soliloquy
Director: Martine Syms, Experimental, USA, 7 min
A selection of videos that riff on the 1990s BET video music show Cita’s World, known for featuring a Black virtual reality character as host.

Vision of Paradise
Director: Leonardo Pirondi, Documentary, Brazil, 16 min
A voyage of the Brazilian Military in search of an imaginary island with the same name as their country.

Very, Very, Tremendously
Director: Guangli Liu, Experimental, France, 12 min
Civilisation is a sewer. We think that garbage is the corpse of a commodity, because it loses its functionality, but we use a lot of 3d models of garbage in video games to decorate the virtual reality.

Falling Forward Into an Unknown and Dangerous Future
Director: Mike Ambs, Experimental, USA, 15 min
On June 6th, 2022, two Google employees had a private conversation with an A.I. system that claimed it was sentient.

Faces in the Wild
Director: Magdalena Bermudez, Experimental, USA, 16 min
An excavation of histories of facial recognition in which scientists direct faces to emote, close ups direct audiences to feel, and a feedback loop between a monkey and an AI reckon with the data-sourced faces of their unconscious.

Hardly Working
Director: Total Refusal, Documentary, Austria, 21 min
Hardly Working sheds a limelight on the very characters that normally remain in the background of video games: NPCs. They are non-player characters that populate the digital world as extras to create the appearance of normality. A laundress, a stable boy, a street sweeper and a carpenter are observed with ethnographic precision. They are Sisyphus machines, whose labour routines, activity patterns as well as bugs and malfunctions paint a vivid analogy for work under capitalism.