Harald Hund – EMPIRE OF EVIL
AT 2016, feat. Stephen Mathewson, 11’, English OV
Based on media representations of Iran, Harald Hund poses the controversial question of trust in image documents which suggest authenticity and thus present a prospect of truth. At that, the title – referring to Ronald Reagan’s and George Bush’s dichotomous terms of ‘Evil Empire’ and ‘Axis of Evil’ – already associates that, initially, Iran appears as a cultural area the political conflict situation of which serves as a projection surface for foreign, ‘western’ attributions.
“As early as in the initial sequences, the web of documentary evidence and fiction, of pictorial testimony and oral report is construed – a web along which EMPIRE OF EVIL turns out to be a critical narrative: images of the airplane’s interior, the view from above on a rugged, cloud-covered landscape, the information screen. As well, it is talked about ‘secret recordings’ and ‘atomic weapons program’, and without naming names it is obvious which country it is about, which one it has to be about. Hund consistently interlocks documentary codes and investigative signatures with elements on the level of the spoken word, of a voice over (with US accent) that increases into the absurd more and more, and with elements that give rise to doubts about the images and their information content evermore.” (Irene Müller)
Warren Neidich – THE SEARCH DRIVE
2015, 17’, English OV
The video takes the perspective of an anonymous internet-user making contingent decisions based upon speculative linkages of information on the web, asserting that the internet itself contains an inner subjectivity that can be interrogated. In THE SEARCH DRIVE, “software programs utilized by the NSA to spy on Americans and foreign nationals, residing in America and abroad, are used by an autonomous agent to search through the web for personal and classified information about myself. Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Instagram are hacked and ransacked. As such it traces over time an autobiographical sketch of my comings and goings, activities and friendships. I am calling this a Hack-ography. […] That I am a radical artist with anarchistic tendencies who has worked in Egypt with many Islamic musicians, as well as Franco Berardi, the political activist, and have wired [my assistant] Ashiq money, creates a narrative of implied guilt by association to popular fears confusing Islam and Islamic fundamentalism. A fiction based on unconfirmed facts is thus built and now substitutes for any actual portrait I might actually have or have had. An uncorroborated story of a fictitious life grows into a kind of monstrosity the result of a program gone haywire. This picture is full of flaws and leads to the necessity of my eradication. ” (Warren Neidich)
Thanks again, first of all, for all your submissions to our open call. We will try to make up our minds now and be as non-biased as possible in judging all of the submitted works. The final selection for the exhibition will be announced in the course of March.
Meanwhile, stay tuned for updates about the rest of the GEGENkino 2017 programme! We will release the first items of it in the next days.
Your GEGENkino crew
Remember all y’all! There’s still 6 weeks left to submit your film and video works for our exhibition at GEGENkino 2017.
Just send a download or screening link (and, optionally, a short description) to opencall[at]gegenkino.de
We’re looking forward to see your works! They should revolve around the topics of disinformation, sepeculative fiction and the like… and they should contain moving images. Anyway, all the information can be found here:
https://gegenkino.tumblr.com/opencall
Love,
your GEGENkino crew
After a long silence from our side, we are happy to announce that GEGENkino will continue in 2017! The fourth edition of our festival will take place from 6th to 16th April 2017.
As in the first two years of the festival, we will do another video art exhibition in 2017, and we are looking for your submissions! The works in the exhibition should revolve around the topics of speculative fiction, fake realities and the boundaries between fact and fiction. Detailed can be found below.
SPREAD THE WORD!
We are looking forward to your submissions.
Yours truly,
the GEGENkino crew.
Dear filmmakers and artists working with moving pictures,
in April 2017, we are hosting GEGENkino film festival in Leipzig for the fourth time. After having realised video art exhibitions in 2014 and 2015—working together with curators Clara Wieck, Katharina Wittmann, Clemens von Wedemeyer and his Expanded Cinema-class at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig—we would like to revive this line of project in 2017.
We are looking for works located along the boundaries of or in between reality and imagination. Something smoothly shifting back and forth between aesthetic fiction and documentary facticity, or conceptionally referring to tactical manouvering with ideological disinformation, to conspiracies, fakes, denunciations or plain lying. Desires, anxieties or subjective perceptions, data, statistics or expertise: what are the components constructing social realities?
At it, we are interested with regards to two things: [1] A content examination of disinformation strategies. Which contemporary or historic narratives and manipulations can be identified? Which claims of truth do they enunciate? To what extent is misinformation capable of producing fomenting meaning and, in doing so, of acting upon social configurations? [2] A wide formal spectrum of cinematic reflection: from documentaries, pseudo-documentary practices (like re-enactment) or alternative historical narratives to works that themselves take action manipulating—mockumentaries, fictional models of utopia and/or
dystopia, parodies, persiflage or other forms of appropriation. The lowest common denominator of submitted work should be the moving image. There are no specifications concerning length.
Submission deadline is February 20th 2017.
Questions cocnerning submissions, formalities and anything else to Stephan Langer and Sebastian Gebeler: opencall@gegenkino.de
We are curious about your entries!
