Aether

Hajime Kawaguchi / Japan / 2025 / International Premiere / 13 min.

synopsis

Kawaguchi's Aether follows on from his earlier film Air (1992), in which he enlarged 8 mm film material, breaking down the image to the level of individual grains and transforming it into a painting. Now he replicates the experiment through a different medium: a digital camera captures a girl walking away in slow motion, and artificial intelligence transforms the enlarged image, finding patterns in the visual noise and thousands of faces in the blurred image. The immortalization of a single happy moment is transformed into a meditation on digital visuality.

“When the deterioration progresses and the loss of information exceeds a certain threshold, an image ‘imagined’ by the AI appears. […] This new ‘noise’ can be said to be closer to an ‘illusion’ in the visual recognition process within the brain. However, in the sense that images are essentially ‘imitations’ of reality, this can be said to be the very nature of images.” — author's commentary

biography

Japanese director Hajime Kawaguchi (born 1967) has been making films since 1987. Through experiments with film material and imaging technologies, he focuses on the theme of cognition and representation of the world. At Ji.hlava IDFF, he has presented the short films Sumie (2018), rack-pinion (2017), and Vanishing Point (2009) among other works.