Artistic Reflections: The Relationship Between Technology and Society in Experimental films and video installations
This blog post features four distinctive, thought-provoking and experimental films and video installations that address the social impact of technology. Each piece offers a unique perspective on the relationship between technology and society. From exploring the relationship between nature and technology to questioning the extremes of surveillance, these works challenge our awareness and invite us to reflect on our relationship with technology. These films question traditional ideas about art and encourage us to think about our future with technology, how it impacts our lives and how it could shape our future.
AI: African Intelligence, by Manthia Diawara
In her most recent essay film, AI: African Intelligence, Manthia Diawara analyses the intersections between traditional Senegalese fishing villages' traditional African rites of possession and the emergence of new technological frontiers known as artificial intelligence. Diawara explores how we could transform algorithms from being controlled by disembodied machines to something more compassionate and spiritual. Could Africa be the setting for the development of such unlikely algorithms?
African Intelligence is a project by Manthia Diawara for the Scientist-In-Residence Program, initiated by GLUON.
This is the Future 2019, by HITO STEYERL
The plot of the video installation revolves around a woman who sets out in search of a garden that she hid in the future so as to preserve it. The display contains digital flowers created by neural networks—computer systems fashioned after the human nervous system and brain—are used in the piece. These networks are trained to forecast the future by determining the position of the next frame in a movie. These 'predicted' plants were made by the artist using artificial intelligence and are situated precisely 0,04 seconds in the future. The installation is modelled by the concept of a ruderal garden, which is a collection of plants that emerge from unused land, sometimes as a result of disturbance or devastation caused by humans. This is the Future is a video installation created for the 58th Venice Biennale and co-commissioned by 180 Studios.
Terror Contagion, a film by Laura Poitras and Forensic Architecture
The documentary explores the disturbing rise of the controversial spyware Pegasus, which was developed by the Israeli cyber-intelligence company NSO. Pegasus can be secretly installed on mobile phones to monitor the calls, emails, texts, and sensor data of activists and dissidents worldwide. The film Terror Contagion documents this research, portraying the experiences of human right defenders and journalists who became the target of this spyware.
American Re-Education by Ciarán Short
In Ciarán Short's video artwork titled "American Re-Education" (2022), he delves into the portrayal of Blackness within the realm of popular media. Through the utilization of glitch aesthetics, the featured images undergo digital alterations, emphasizing the disorientation encountered when attempting to find authentic representation in mainstream media. Short skillfully juxtaposes these thought-provoking textual reflections with well-known visual depictions of Black individuals in the media, thus alluding to the influential channels through which exposure and subsequent internalization of predetermined societal roles occur: the education system and the dominant mass media.