In partnership with Charles Street Video
↗ Curated by Insomniac Film Festival
Saturday, July 15, 2023
Charles Street Video (76 Geary Ave, Toronto ON M6H 2B5)
Tickets: PWYC, $10 suggested
Doors open: 8:30 PM
Screening starts: 9 PM
Go outside! Touch Grass!
Snarky internet commenters throw these instructions at each other every single day, and frankly, they do so with good reason. Sometimes we all need to be reminded to take a half hour away from that bodybuilding message board. Still, we have to admit that logging off has become harder and harder to do. Our jobs, our social lives and our societal infrastructures have all moved online. Our identities, our bodies even, are shaped by the internet. So what now? Do we fight harder for our three-dimensional lives, or do we submit to the digital one we have?
To be honest, we don’t have the answer. But we do have 6 gorgeous, funny and thought provoking films to ponder these questions with us. So please join Vector and Insomniac for A Very Human Screening in the genuine, outdoor, real life world. Have some food, watch a film, and touch some grass.
PROGRAMME
↗ PAYSAGE BUCOLIC - EGOTRIP PRODUCTIONS
PAYSAGE BUCOLIC is an animated video collage using hundreds of layers of images to portray scenic images of the farm landscape throughout the ages, from the feudal system to current day agro-industrial complex.
↗ BLINK - Laura Hyunjhee Kim & Chris Corrente
BLINK examines Human/AI collaboration as a breakpoint in concepts of creativity and artistic identity. To 'blink' creates a point of convergence and entanglement; a transitory event that holds the power to fix or unfix reality. Each 'blink' creates a subspace beyond what the retina registers, fracturing space-time experiences. 'Blink-by-blink,' the artist duo unveils an indeterminate destination illuminated with imperceptible happenings. AI generated images narrate speculative futures unlocked in kinship with software based co-dreamers. 'Neither here nor there,' an oscillating push and pull between the human-performers and their diffractive aura creates an unresolved cyborgian-world. Contention and flux are deliberate and persistent. In a high-velocity moment of cultural creation, 'blink' and you might miss it, whatever 'it' may be. Rooted in the pop-sensibilities of contemporary techno-cultural vernacular and poetics, the resulting experiment is a series of kaleidoscopic artifacts and complex culmination of moving images. purposely and immediately outdating itself—provoking human/AI creative collaboration.
↗ Character Creation Stage (decide rn) - Piper Hill
opening number from "How We Came to Build the House"
"How We Came to Build the House That Looks Like Me" is a fantastical autobiography of trans neurodivergence, in the form of a machinima-movie-musical animated using The Sims 3 and 4. Half of the characters’ lives begin in The Sims 3. In Character Creation Stage (decide rn), the show opens on them being faced with the challenge of customizing their newborn selves.
In Sims 3, you can revisit any of the customization steps in Create-a-Sim until you’re satisfied, but once you’ve placed a sim in the world, you can’t edit its attributes again without using cheats or buying special privileges with a currency called “Lifetime Happiness.” Cheating in Sims is easy: it only requires knowledge of the cheat codes, a simple internet search away. However, if you didn’t know these codes were available to begin with, you wouldn’t know how to find them. Sometimes it takes watching another player use them to learn. This is akin to learning about the existence of trans people, learning that transness is even an option. Sometimes all it takes is meeting the right person. It takes a while for the sims in this musical to realize that.
↗ Virtual Spectres - Sarah Boo
Virtual Spectres combines scrolling social media feeds with incomplete body scans, situating them together in 3D space. Moving patterns emerge when layers of TikTok footage are superpositioned and the silhouettes of their creators briefly occupy the same time and space, being swiped together and then away. The video ruminates on our existence as cyborgs in a state of the in-between and everywhere. How does it feel to have body-consciousness that is stretched between macro spaces and virtual spaces, duplicated between flesh organs and corporately owned data centers across the world?
↗ Quitting - Anxious to Make
Quitting depicts a series of hired spokespeople from the online gig-platform website, Fiverr.com, who were paid to “quit” their temporary jobs of acting as remote spokespersons for the art collective Anxious to Make in this video. Quitting speaks humorously to the themes of hierarchies, fractalized labor, and instability that result from today’s so-called “sharing-” or “gig-” economy.
↗ BIRDFEED - Karina Iskandarsjah
In 2021, BIRDFEED was created as part of the “Dawat-Yan Banquet”, a collaborative artist residency and group exhibition led by Mariam Magsi and Eric Chengyang at the AGO. Responding to the topic of “florals”, BIRDFEED is the start of an exploration of botany and ecology as a way to form connections across different cultures and histories. With immigrant narratives as the central focus, this video weaves together plant research, poetry, theory, and personal journal entries about the common fig tree’s ancestry. (Narrator voices: Daniel Howe & Mariam Magsi)
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
EGOTRIP PRODUCTIONS is directed by interdisciplinary artists Allison Moore and Arthur Desmarteaux, working collaboratively as an artistic duo creating artworks using new and traditional mediums of expression since 2006. Their projects include digital artworks involving open narrative thematics, public art, site-specific performances, VR, shadow puppetry, music videos, contemporary art installations, video mapping on architecture and print media. Their studio is located in the Mile End borough of Montreal.
Laura Hyunjhee Kim and Chris Corrente have a longstanding collaborative history, having produced numerous pieces and exhibited their work at over 30 venues, including screenings, festivals, galleries, and museums, in six countries. They view their collaborations as a space to explore their shared interests in emerging technologies, human technological hybridization, mental health, myth-making, absurdity, and digital-kitsch. As a collective, they are dedicated to creating work that is fun, playful, and accessible, but incorporates humanity and vulnerability. Their signature aesthetic uses mixed-fidelity video collages and other analog elements to produce, remix, and overlay rich, multisensory experiences.
Piper Hill is a Brooklyn-based performer/composer/theater artist/gamer from central Ohio, USA. In June 2022, Hill finished up his Master's in Digital Musics at Dartmouth, where he started making game musicals with guidance from César Alvarez. His favourite non-creating activities include karaoke, hanging out with friends, watching cartoons, and playing video games.
Sarah Boo is a Toronto-based multimedia artist who spent her formative years immersed in virtual worlds of various shapes and sizes. Her internet and video works aim to make sense of her experiences of memory, space, and time in a techno-capitalist society. Recently, she has spent much of her time thinking about online sound environments and their ability to foster digital intimacy. She is currently in the Digital Futures program at OCAD University.
Anxious to Make is the collaborative practice of Liat Berdugo and Emily Martinez, two commissioning bodies. Their focus is on economic concepts, such as cryptocurrencies and the so-called “sharing economy”, and the accelerationist, neoliberal landscapes associated with them. Their work examines how these economic concepts intersect with colonialism, technology, wealth culture, race, altruism, utopianism, and exploitation. Anxious to Make believes in absurdist extremes as way to examine contemporary realities.
Karina Iskandarsjah is a queer Indonesian artist, writer, curator and administrator whose work explores cultural hybridity, technology, plants, ecologies, borders, power, and contemporary post-colonial conditions. Karina holds an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University, and is part of the collectives Crocus and Glory Hole Gallery.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Founded in 2014, Insomniac Film Festival aims to celebrate works emerging from the lives and experiences of young Toronto artists. We curate films and film-related events that blur the lines between age, genre, and budget - reminding audiences of the creativity behind intelligent and powerful low-budget filmmaking.
Charles Street Video (CSV) is a non-profit production organization established in 1981 to help support media artists. They provide affordable access to equipment and post-production editing facilities and a presenting space for creating videos, films, installations and other media art forms. They also offer regular workshops, training sessions and residencies. CSV fosters the creation of media art, encourages experimentation, and develops an artistic community where emerging and established artists gather and achieve their artistic vision
Reach out to Vector Festival Assistant mena@interaccess.org with any questions or requests leading up to the event.