User:Aitantv/TextOnPractice

DESCRIBE RECENT WORK

AVP (2022) is a video which combines machine learning images based on a data set of lizards; moving illustrations of animal fossils, and live action footage of the Kennemerduinen nature reserve located next to the Tata Steel plant. The collage of imagery is underscored by a selection of climate emergency conference speeches, from the 1980s to the present day, spliced together into one continuous speech performed by an apathetic voicover.

CURRENT WORK

Bubble Tours (2022) is an ongoing video project that examines property speculation and gentrification. In its most recent iteration, an autonomous, metallic, reflective, animated spiky 3D object, known as The Bubble, scans and surveys appartments in soulless high rises. Somewhere between a UN drone and an alien life form from a DC graphic novel, The Bubble has an agency of its own. At key moments we, the audience, share The Bubble’s gaze. Using an ultra-wide lens and post-production stabalisation plugins, bubble vision floats and gyrates offering a 360 persepctive of the architecture. This contrasts to the fixed, static, slow shots which observe the bubble and the architecture from a more objective perspective. This interplay of camera techniques lends the bubble agency, in the objective frame, and subjectivity, in the POV frame.

HOW ARE THE WORKS SIMILAR

Both AVP (2022) and Bubble Tours (2022) are moving image projects with potential for becoming 3D or installation works. These films both exist in a fiction sub-genre I find myself increasingly identifying with: Utopia Apocalypse. This sub-genre of independent cinema, which I encountered on the festival circuit, imagines existential and socio-economic problems progressing leading to a near future where the symptoms and failures of Neoliberalism become unavoidably palpable. Nevertheless, in contrast to dystopian fiction, Utopia Apocalypse offers a seed of hope and humor, an imaginative or even transcendental well spring from which we can imagine new possibilities.

Both projects focus on non-human agents as the main protagonists, divorcing from mainstream social-realist drama and aligning with science fiction, monster movies, horror, paranormal fiction, and fantasy. These films confront the viewer with a megalothic existential threat. In the case of AVP it’s the climate emergency, and in Bubble Tours it’s the capitalization of home and shelter. By taking the unhuman or non-human as the central concern, there’s also an interest in experimenting with other ways of seeing, flipping the gaze and the standpoint from which the action takes place. In AVP I attempt to mimic how a lizard sees through stereoscopic vision and independent eye sockets, and through Bubble Vision we share the gaze of an autonomous monolithic life form. Both projects exist at the intersection of sociology, technology, and catastrophe, and attempt to probe our relationship to an ever-progressing capitalist model.

HOW ARE THEY DIFFERENT

AVP explores the textures of landscapes, lizard skin, foliage, minerals. Bubble Tours dwells in characterless, dull, cookie-cut appartments in new-builds. AVP works with a mixture of image making apparatuses, but most importantly uses GANs or machine learning algorithms to create a majority of the imagery. Bubble Tours, on the other hand, is created through an interface and 2D/3D animation software. AVPs central theme is the climate emergency, whereas the existential concern in Bubble Tours is surveillance and AI autonomy.

FUTURE WORK

I’d like to develop Bubble Tours into a screenplay. I’m becoming very inspired by slow cinema and transcendental film, a term coined by Paul Schrader. I’d like to import this intrigue into Bubble Tours giving added weight and gravitas to the world in which the bubble operates. I’d like to work with a crew and multiple actors creating tableaus and a storyline to build a believable fictional world that mirrors our present. This fiction is a psychological realm that would have its own rules of conduct and where the bubble would become an indecipherable black box, like Kubrick’s monolith.

WHO CAN HELP

Barend – VFX, Motion Design

Simon Pummell – script writing, pitching, production proposal

Rosella – photo real #D in Blender, cinematic CGI and architecture

Steve Rushton / Natasha – research, methodology, interactive text, script writing

Trip to the Moon – production company

IFFR – film networking, pitching

Film Fond, Mondrian, Stimulerings – financing

Sound – Wisse Barkhoff, using modulator synths to build the bubble’s character