Digital Acts #4

9am > 12am ::: Digital Acts #4 – Part 2

Sequence dedicated to Hokyung Moon, curator of the NeMaf festival (Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival, South Korea) and to TOTAL REFUSAL (pseudo-Marxist artists collective, Austria).

Moderator: Élise Aspord

• 9:00 am: Welcome
• 9.30am: Presentation – Hokyung Moon
• 9.40am: Screening – FOCUS #2: NeMaf (curator Hokyung Moon)
• 10:25 am: Exchange between Hokyung Moon and Elise Aspord
• 10.30am: Presentation – TOTAL REFUSAL
• 10:40 am: Round Table #2

Round Table: Metaverse and meta-video

“Meta-video, metaverse: the backroom of the world… “

While COVIDEO-FORMES is gradually recovering from its three-year pandemic, an unexpected outcome seems to be emerging; that of “an illusion that has now been demystified … that of dematerialization” (Camille Dejardin, Les Echos, 10 October 2022). Whatever the Anses report in 2021 says about the new “social drama” announced – that of the confusion between fiction and reality – the “beyond” (“Meta”, ex-Facebook) would no longer be a success! If this nightmare of “de-reality”, of the loss of social reference points, and the voluntary confinement in the Platonic Cave 3.0 that is the metaverse (the meta-universe), is perhaps not to come on a massive scale; for all that, many artists are taking a close interest in these alternative immersive virtualities or in these lives scanned by interposed screens (screenlife) which are making a notable breakthrough. It is time to take an interest in this “backroom of the world”, to use the expression of the geographer Roger Brunet, but under the prism here of the technical arcana and other micro-entities of the net.

The participants in these discussions will explore the hidden side of the matrix, whether technical (manufacturing secrets), geographical (parallel worlds) or politico-social (characters on the margins). The debate will be held in the presence of Hokyung Moon, chief curator of the Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival (NeMaf) and Michael Stumpf and Robin Klengel of Total Refusal, a collective of “pseudo-Marxist” artivists who use video games as a critique of our current capitalist societies; notably through marginal figures, as here in Hardly Working, with the NPCs, characters who are not playable in the games.

In what way does the meta work – conscious of being a work – break the fourth wall; the one between the stage and the audience and which maintains the illusion of a reality of fiction? In what way and to what end is the computer screen both a camera lens and a canvas, an artistic medium in its own right (desktop film)? What message is hidden in the blind spot of the images? Is the Matrix really that cool?

2pm > 4.20pm ::: Digital Acts #4 – Part 3

Sequence dedicated to Abir Boukhari, artistic director of the AllArtNow festival (Sweden) and to Agnès Guillaume (artist, Belgium).

Moderator: Élise Aspord

2.00 pm: Presentation – Abir Boukhari
2.10 pm: Screening – FOCUS #3 : AllArtNow (curator Abir Boukhari)
2.55 pm: Exchange between Abir Boukhari and Elise Aspord
3.00 pm: Presentation – Agnès Guillaume
3.10 pm: Round Table #3

Round Table : Introspection and art in spite of everything

“The work in itself: art in the heart of a world without light?

Even if solitude is necessary for the construction of oneself, humans are by essence a social animal. What an ordeal then than the Covid pandemic or these wandering lives driven by hunger, misery, war… Individually or collectively we are suddenly faced with ourselves, cut off “from what is at the foundation of all human relationships: otherness and its share of unpredictability, risks and pleasures” (Alone together: “More and more technologies less and less human relationships“, Sherry Turkle, 2015).

As an alternative to general immobility, art must rethink itself in times of crisis. Between isolation and connectivity; whether through life stories, logbooks, professional strolls… the artists present in this focus, try to hang on to the slightest bit of light. Like Dziga Vertov, they use the camera eye and the strength of their presence, often facing the camera, to redefine our perception of intimacy and solitude. The crisis suddenly becomes a vector of inspiration, the spectre of an art without artists, feared during the pandemic, fades away.

To the questions of Abir Boukhari – curator, director and co-founder of AllArtNow and originally from Damascus – about spaces and nomadic artists, often uprooted…, about temporary forms, states of contingency… will be answered by Agnès Guillaume, whose mirror works and their poetic forms also question self-awareness, the intimate…

How to free oneself from one’s solitude? How – like Albert Camus – can one not feel like a stranger in the country in which one lives, whether it is one’s birthplace or one’s heart? How do creators express and share their inner worlds?

“Courage, it’s grace under pressure”! Indeed, Mr Ernest Hemingway, art always happens when you least expect it… The work, which is to be sought in oneself, blossoms, like pavement flowers, on the most inhospitable ground… The protagonists of these exchanges – through their questioning, their sensitivity – will lead us towards this vital, creative and poetic impulse that burns in the heart of each one.