10:53 min/sound/colour
Jason Bernagozzi, USA

Single channel video taken from a live realtime a/v performance, 2024 Custom software, video and sound by Jason Bernagozzi Compiled from 15 year old footage from the artist’s archive, “All ye faded expectations” is a meditation on the best laid plans dreamed up by youthful ambition becoming no longer recognizable.

Jason Bernagozzi is an artist and technologist living and working in Colorado. Their work seeks to deconstruct and remix the cultural codes embedded within the psyche of an increasingly mediated world. Their work has been shown internationally at exhibitions such as the European Media Art Festival in Osnabruk, Germany; the Festival Les Instants Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques in Marsaille, France; and the Ilman Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea. Jason is also a co-founder of the experimental media art non-profit organization Signal Culture and is currently an Associate Professor of Electronic Art at Colorado State University.

11:17 min/sound/colour
Lim Paik Yin, Malaysia

“All that is created now moves towards the future. An archive. An aunt I am a steward for my niece and nephew. As they walk towards the future where I step not. Between September 2022 and July 2024, I did not make any new personal work. This piece is an amalgamation of performances that utilizes the apparatus as a means to exceed the singular body to collective. By creating a gap between time, sound, and imagery, perhaps in looking back at the gap when the world stood still during the lockdown, maybe I can listen better to what the future collectively asks of me.”

Lim Paik Yin (b. 1980) is a visual anthropologist and interdisciplinary artist working on research projects that intersect art and anthropology. Her experience working as a photo researcher cultivated an interest in the semiotics of images and it’s cultural representations. This has led to her studies in Visual and Media Anthropology at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, Freie Universität, Berlin (2017-2021). Her thesis research intersects art and anthropology with a focus on collaboration and the various mediums of presenting and transmitting knowledge. Her photography and films have been exhibited online and in India, Malaysia, Singapore, and Spain. She has facilitated labs and workshops in festivals and artist residencies in South East Asia.

13:00 min/sound/colour
Philip Ullman, The Netherlands

In Preoperational Model, anthropomorphic princess Sophie and her maid Jessica prepare for a new day in the royal court. Sophie’s struggle to play her role propels the two protagonists forward and backward in time, through worlds and identities to find a way to live together.

Philip Ullman is a Swedish artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam. By capturing performers’ movements and voices inherent to the human body, and applying these to non-human characters, scattered throughout fictional 3D animated realities, Ullman questions the grounds on which value and sentience are prescribed, why one life is more valuable than another, and what it means to be human.

5:58 min/sound/colour
Demie Dangla, Philippines

If emotions are images, what do they look like? How do they sound like? Daluyong ng Ingay (Waves of Noise) is an experimental film that immerses the audience to the tragedy that is unfolding in Gaza. The filmmaker uses her craft to express and process her own emotions in response to the haunting images and cries of grief. By making use of noises made for Palestine and images of water from the Philippines, she draws a connection between both countries, from the rivers to the seas, as we bear witness to a reality that is not too unfamiliar to us.

Demie Dangla is a filmmaker and audiovisual artist based in Manila. She works on documentary, experimental and multimedia projects, provoking thought by using personal and collective histories, found footage and found audio in storytelling.

Currently, she is also working on her first feature-length documentary film. She has participated in numerous local and international labs and pitching forums, such as Berlinale Talents (2023), Docs by the Sea Storytelling Lab (2023), IDFAcademy (2023) and Visions du Reel-Industry (2024).

11:00 min/sound/colour
Teo Wey Yinn, Malaysia

Once upon a future, a wingless man yearns to fly and often has vivid dreams about it. When the dreams vanished without a trace, his world crumbled, but that devastation didn’t stop him from wanting to fly.

Wey Yinn Teo is a Kuala Lumpur based non-binary film worker whose career revolves around filmmaking since 2014. Her works of sound and moving image often drift away from realms of reality and truth, where she explores the idea of liminality and the spectrum of the human experience. Her debut short film ‘Enflightenment’ (2023) won the audience award at Short waves Festival, Poland; the film then screened at Beijing International Short Film Festival, XPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin, and Leiden Shorts in the Netherlands. Yinn is deeply passionate in translating the synthesis of art, music, stories and fantasy into a symphonic sky of stars on a cloudless dark night – an encompassing space that is sincere, complex, and has power to touch and heal.

08:44 min/sound/colour
Andrew Stiff, Vietnam

“Tan Quy Market” is a vivid exploration of a Vietnamese wet market, capturing its essence as a cultural cornerstone. The film delves into the market’s vibrant atmosphere, where food quality is paramount and shopping is a communal activity often conducted on motorcycles. It highlights the deep, familial knowledge used to assess prices and freshness, showcasing the market’s role in daily life. The film employs layered colors to evoke the market’s intensity, blending documentary and abstract art to reflect the sensory richness and cultural significance of this bustling community hub.

Andrew Stiff is a lecturer at RMIT University Vietnam in the School of Communication & Design, specializing in experimental design and moving image. His practice involves experimental filmmaking, examining the interplay between urban occupancy and the built environment, highlighting cultural impacts on urban spaces. Stiff’s work captures the creation of space through family and community values, providing insights into urban development amid migration. He studied painting at Chelsea School of Art and completed a master’s in Information Systems and Technology at the University of Liverpool. His PhD research, titled “Moving Experiences: Video Observations of Ho Chi Minh City,” was conducted at RMIT University.

9:59 min/sound/colour
Eric Souther, USA

Deep Time of Latent Space relates the strata of human activity within large language models as another layer of the Anthropocene, which places AI into the realm of geological thinking that spirals into deep time and broadcasts into the future. The AI narrator takes us through the most incomprehensible moments of our history starting with the big bang, creation of earth, and the start of life. It uses its generalized knowledge to resolve our grasp of these moments into data-visualized images. It does so with confidence and a little bit of attitude, however, it tends to hallucinate. These hallucinations shine a light on what is needed to create a more ethical and accurate AI.

Eric Souther (b.1987, Kansas City) holds an MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and an BFA in New Media from the Kansas City Art Institute. His creative research draws from a multiplicity of disciplines, including new materialism, anthropology, ritual, deep time, and toolmaking. Souther is an Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging in the Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University.

3:33 min/sound/black & white
Wichkunt, Taiwan

In this film, staged within a stark, sterile white void, Wichkunt assumes the role of a god-like entity, collaborating with AI to reimagine the human form. This reimagining treats the human body as malleable clay, ready to be shaped without constraints of morality or conventional logic.

The “test subjects” in their work can transform into a wide array of forms—ranging from male to female, beast to machinery, and human-bug hybrids to ethereal, god-like beings. These forms confront the viewer with intense, direct stares, compelling them to grapple with their own interpretations of what a human being could be.

Wichkunt is a multi-disciplinary design collective from Taiwan that delves into themes such as the inherent pain of evolution and the dichotomy between Man and Beast. Their work employs wearable installations and performances to explore these concepts.

05:07 min/sound/colour
Max Ferguson, Belgium

You are the Truck and I am the Deer is an experimental short film that explores the experience of emotional pain. The film use poetic text to express the feelings of loss, helplessness and overwhelm during the process of accepting the hurt inflicted by others. These emotional wounds are translated visually into a physical and pulsing presence that represents a dark and unsettling image of femininity. You are the Truck and I am the Deer speaks to a feeling. A feeling of roaming, gnawing hunger. The knife’s edge between decay and growth; the fertile potential for total destruction.

Max Ferguson is a Brussels-based artist from Hong Kong who uses the curatorial as a basket to hold her various interests. With her practice and foundations firmly rooted in the audiovisual arts, in recent years, she has branched out into writing and exhibition-making in the contemporary arts. This blurring of lines between techniques, forms and disciplines is a binding element within Ferguson’s constellation of work. Ferguson’s most recent film, You Are the Truck and I Am the Deer (premiere at Annecy Festival), is an experimental hybrid film blending poetry and animation. Ferguson also strongly sees the need for community in the arts and so started the cinema collective LuCi which offers community-building encounters with the moving image in all its forms. Ferguson holds a Masters of Audiovisual Arts – Animation from LUCA School of Arts Brussels and is graduating from the Curatorial Studies post-graduate programme at KASK Gent with the exhibition Grains of Sands like Mountains at Kunsthal Gent.

4:48 min/sound/colour
Kien Faye & Tony Yap, Malaysia

Filmed in Melaka (Malaysia), this is a dance set in the ancient Dutch quarters of Old Melaka and evokes the sense of being lost and longing, memory and an existential wound. Dance in its origin has a meaning of the body quivering or trembling as if the nerves hold the memory within a zone of trance and is manifested to the dancer and viewer. In ‘I am many’, dancer and choreographer, Tony Yap delved into a spectrum of trance states to recall the numerous poignant times of his life when he was lost. Faye is the emphatic observer. He films and edits as an archeologist of the poetic and emotional narrative.

Lee Kien Fei (Faye) is a trance practitioner. Javanese trance culture and Malaysian trance culture are both traditional customs he currently focused on. In his ritual’s performance, natural and manmade elements such as water, flower, kemenyan(incense cones), candles, mantras and more are manifested by his body which offer a connection with the space and viewers. From his training with Tony Yap(Australia/Malaysia) & Agus Riyanto(Indonesia) on the methodology of psycho-physical practice & Bantengan(bull trance) , he confidently shaped himself into a contemporary trance performer.

11:35 min/sound/colour
Mark Chua & Lam Li Shuen, Singapore

Two crocodilian men go to a swimming pool to cool off. One of them is seemingly of a different and special kind; the other is unable to control his desire. The film expresses the sense of fatalism and cold-bloodedness under the skin of the Singaporean way. It is a personal wrestling with the place we grew up in, a making sense of what our meritocracy feels like, where surviving it makes one as absurd as the rest. Capturing this film on 16mm film was something important to us as we wanted to chase in the image, a ‘sweating through the screen’. To tease out and sensorially project the humidity and density that backdrops high-pressure life on this island, its nasty, sweaty tendencies and tensions.

Mark Chua and Lam Li Shuen are a Singaporean filmmaker and artist duo. Their films explore existential anxiety, alienation and histories, often using surrealistic imagery, bizarre narratives and body horror as social commentary. Their films have screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2024, 2023), New Directors/New Films (2023) and BFI London Film Festival (2021). Their short film A Man Trembles was awarded Best Southeast Asian Director at the Singapore International Film Festival 2021. As artists working across the moving image and sound, Chua and Lam have presented audiovisual and expanded cinema performances utilising 16mm and Super 8 projections, at the Kunstraum Walcheturm (Zurich), ArtScience Museum (Singapore), Oldham Theatre (Singapore) and the National Museum of Singapore. They have also released multiple albums as the art rock duo ARE.