Buffer Zone Blues

Civilization at the Crossroads: The Scientific-Technical Revolution and the Future of Socialism in Educational Films of the Sixties The screening is a precursor to the exhibition The Self-Awareness of Science: The Scientific-Technical Revolution and the Limits of Emancipation, which will open in December 2018 at Prague’s Display and FUTURA galleries. The exhibition will look at the activities in the 1960s of an interdisciplinary research team led by philosopher Radovan Richta that was expected to present a vision for “the new Czechoslovak model of socialism.” The advent of cybernetics and automatization was expected to help create a more humane socialist society in which people would be liberated from manual labor and from preexisting ideological authorities and predefined roles. The exhibition, which is being prepared by a team of historians, curators, and artists, tries to find the fine line between the liberating potential of science and technology and their use for maintaining and cementing technocratic power or authoritarian regimes. Its aim is to reconstruct the interdisciplinary dialogue of the 1960s, which has recently taken on new meaning, in particular in relation to the subjects of automatization, a society without work, or climate change.   The screening is part of the project “Shape the Future! The Concept of the Science-Technical Revolution,” organized as part of the program “Strategies AV21: Europe and the State: Between Barbarism and Civilization” (Czech Academy of Sciences, 2018)  

An archaeologically significant site diffuses its memory through levels of the myths, rituals, and folk tales in an essayist discourse on the forms of historical continuity. Absence of contact sound and minimalist music emphasizing the visual motifs of both alive and inanimate tracks in the landscape.

In her short, emotional film about life after the loss of a loved one, the author enthrallingly deals with a difficult topic, using techniques of both feature and animated film. Real experiences of the narrators, accompanied by an animated reconstruction of the painful situation, create a mournful insight into the thoughts of three young people untimely exposed to death.

Short postdigital meteorological film poem about black sun and its light, mostly composed of manipulated found footage materials combined with original music. The main storyline is derived from the remixed section of the 1967 film Above the Horizon by American meteorological company.

Signum Supra presents art as a shamanic ritual, as an aestheticized tool materializing principles that cannot be grasped by consciousness. Gripping structures that resemble rocks and landscape contours float in indeterminate space, serving as a springboard for contemplating the patterns of perception beyond the visible and the tangible.

A metaphorical reflection on social exclusion using the participation method reveals the relationship between young Ukrainian Elizaveta and her mother, a dentist. A gritty analogy of an extracted tooth, social essentials, and spiritual purity play out on the screen as a conflict of alienating details and an intimate tableau of family life.

Blinking icons, pop-up windows, a blaring alarm clock, and the blipping of unread messages are normal parts of our everyday lives. The creator turns her back on the endless stream of information and attempts to escape from the world of modern communication technologies for at least five minutes to devote some attention to herself.

Dry ground, gravel, cracks in the asphalt, a look into a microscope, and a weather map as parts of an associative string based on the theme of waiting for the rain. The visual poem shows the soil in close-ups, adding new visual and semantic layers. 

A film essay based on the conflict between decorative shots from a bird’s eye perspective and three mechanical, linearly-connected monologues dissects the subconsciousness of an individual saturated with a multitude of differing choices, opinions, and possibilities in the numbers-driven age of digital media.

In a world where wildlife loses its place, there is a need to replace it. The allusion to a trailer advertising the soft green moss ball breaks down the distance between the sterile human habitat and the sea plant popularized as an organic element of any home.

A metaphorical weather forecast portrays human emotions and sentiments in confrontation with contemporary social debates. The lightly satirical tone of the tv moderator’s presentation accompanies a video collage featuring a central motif of the Earth in which Africa is shrouded by clouds of existential questions and a spiritual crisis front threatens Europe.

imperfect media image can make you give in to emotional illusions. The combination of animation and stable shots of the forest ground is accompanied by the author’s comment on the absurdity of the situation presented.