Between promises for a better world and a future threat to humanity, AI is contemplated with joy and fear in equal parts. The program delves into the changing forms and conceptions of work within this new paradigm. Where can the human body and mind be interwoven within the new labor hierarchies between humans and machines, bodily gestures, and phantom algorithms? The films challenge productivity, acceleration, enhancement, and commodification in digital capitalism from a bodily and affective perspective. (Maria Morata)
Otto spends night and day blurring faces on Google Streetview for a cent each. It's the kind of work he and his friends around the world can find on the Amazon Mechanical Turk, the crowdworking platform. Alongside his turker friends, Otto sinks into a robotic world that raises the question of humanity.… >>>
"Deliver, deliver, deliver, deliver, I'm your delivery deliver, I'm your deliver delivery deliver ... I deliver everything!" raps the “Delivery Heroine” in the battered quarterback dress in some kind of basement storage room. She "delivers'" the sound of a rebellious exhaustion in a world increasingly determined by algorithms and AI in the service of a turbo-accelerated platform capitalism, where everything, without exception, threatens to become a commodity, and we all become breathless suppliers. The limit of growth, which has long since been exceeded, is wonderfully performed and questioned here.… >>>
ANIMAL explores the concept of animation. Creating a parallel between the “uncanny valley” of the archaic tradition of puppetry and recent technological developments in robotics and artificial intelligence, the film is inspired by a series of conversations with scientists and researchers from the robotics labs at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Footage from the EPFL alternates with images from the ancient Carlo Colla & Figli Marionette Company in Milan. The structure of the film resembles both an inventory of images and an audiobook, combining the aseptic atmospheres of scientific laboratories with the archaic dimension of puppetry, weaving together these figures and punctuating them with black frames.… >>>
The diary kept by Anne Frank in hiding was published in Holland in 1947 and for the first time in Germany in 1950. Within a few years, the book became a worldwide bestseller and its author a symbolic figure for Jewish suffering. However, the ongoing offensive marketing of her story was soon met with fierce criticism. Even the inclusion of Anne Frank in her hiding place in the canon of Madame Tussauds wax museum – most recently in Vienna in 2013 – was not without controversy: The owner argued to make a contribution to the culture of remembrance. Others see it as a sensationalist show. RECONSTRUCTING ANNE FRANK follows the Studio Artist of Madame Tussauds Vienna on her daily routine maintaining the wax figure of Anne Frank. (Hannes Sulzenbacher, Chief Curator, Jewish Museum Vienna)… >>>