Hoax

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. 

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)  

A poetic short portrait of the Ústí region of the Czech Republic. Using experimental means of expression, the director creates a hypnotizing study that combines natural and urban landscape motifs into a multi-layered dynamic collage. The film was shot on 16 mm stock and was created without the use of visual effects.Fascinations: Exprmntl.cz: Out of competition

An interplay of horizontal and vertical lines, as well as other types of lines, found in in the public space, evokes a lyrical narrative combining them into a visual continuity in one image. Among found objects, events, and spaces, new relationships and continuations are created.

In this short film, animated natural objects express the artist’s inner world: an unending search for new ways to do projects, searching for hidden meanings, and overcoming the fear of experimentation. The film’s central motif is, however, synesthesia as experienced through the fusion of physical sensory perceptions.

Excerpts from a television interview with Eugène Ionesco in an adaptation of his absurd story The Colonel’s Photograph, which is dominated by the motif of a swimming pool that conceals drowned bodies. The visual pun is a compilation of techniques: animation, video, 3D graphics, and text, which give the seemingly random scenes a sort of structure.

An essay focusing on the topic of the exploitation of natural resources has as its primary theme water, showing its forms and changes in the chain of industry. The deep soundtrack is as dark as dirty water leaking from a power plant and, together with images of industry, evokes a sense of ecological anxiety.

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.

The town of Kyjov has two traditions: folk culture and methamphetamine. Dressing up in folk costumes is one of the things that the region of Moravian Slovakia is known for, but it is a façade funded from the municipal budget. Then there is the less idyllic reality of daily life, the status of men and women, and drinking at the 24-hour bar or in one’s basement. An exacting rhythmic film poem, shot and edited like its subject – traditionally, i.e., using analogue film.

A portrait of sunlight, created on 35mm film negative using a camera obscura built by the filmmaker. The camera records a plant from morning to evening at several-minute intervals. The sequence of images compiled from these photographs create a cinematic sundial.

A dialogue between audio and video reinterprets a scene from the movie The Stranger (1967, dir. Luchino Visconti), in which the condemned debates with a priest about the absurdity of life, death, and the non-existence of God. The debate is abstracted by the skewed image as seen through cut glass and the meanings of their words take on a certain timelessness.

When represented using 3D computer graphics, private artefacts become symbols showing home not just as a collection of iconic objects but above all as the personal stories associated with them. Through the ritual of, for instance, putting on slippers, home can be defined as an intimate private sphere that this act is meant to protect.