Our festival director Arjon Dunnewind is about to take off to South Africa, to The Durban University of Technology where the 4th edition of the DigiFest takes place. On November 10 he will present our Soft Machines screening programme about the mutual influence between AI’s and humans. He will also give his lecture Frankenstein in the Garden of Eden, about a selection of projects and artists working with themes like Bio-Hacking and Bio-Creation.

About DigiFest 4

The Durban University of Technology’s fourth annual DigiFest takes place from 6 to 11 November, featuring a series of live art activations, innovations, exhibitions, discussions, workshops, music, poetry, dance and drama as well as craft and street food markets.

DigiFest 4, is a public event that looks to celebrate the creative spirit through multimedia projects from disciplines such as visual and performing arts and promotes a collaboration across art, science and technology.

“The theme this year is “glitch” which informs the content of the fest that will engage, contest, celebrate and question the idea of malfunctions, technical mishaps and imperfections in systems,” says Dr Rene Smith Festival Director and Executive Dean: Faculty of Arts & Design. “Curated projects will speak to the disruption and subversion of formats, spaces, places and technologies. It is about questioning and going beyond traditional notions of art in an interdisciplinary, multimedia world, where design and creativity merge and interact with science and technology broadly.”

Frankenstein in the Garden of Eden at 15:00 at City Campus in Durban, South-Africa

Soft Machines film programme at 16:00 at City Campus in Durban, South-Africa

About the Soft Machines film programme:

Owen Land
New Improved Institutional Quality: In The Environment Of Liquids And Nasals A Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops USA 1976, 10:00 mins (16mm to video)
“New Improved Institutional Quality…” is the further autobiographical adventures in the land of educational institutions and I.Q exams. Landow turns his wit on himself with references to Film In Which… and the original Institutional Quality and again plays with the absurd sense of space and scale to parody not only himself but the dreamlike aspect of illusion in film.” – Deke Dusinberre.

Wojciech Bąkowski
Suchy Pion (Dry Standpipe) PL 2012, 12:09 mins
Bakowski develops an architectural metaphor for the way a film can construct emotional states by piecing together certain images and associations. What would it be like to literally build structures from images that capture a certain way of being or a sensation? Despite the obvious impossibility of Bakowski’s project, he manages to reveal allegorical truths about the empathetic capabilities of cinema.

Feiko Beckers
Walking up and down to a woman I once had a crush on NL 2009, 07:00 mins
A self-explanatory short that investigates the formalization of love and nostalgia through the technical tropes of cinema.

Jon Rafman
Still Life (Betamale) USA 2013, US, 4:56 mins
A non-linear portrait of a new kind of digital underground man, whose affective environment consists of violent video – games, arguments on message boards, and erotic fixations on avatars.

Daniel Cockburn
You Are Here (excerpt) CA 2011, 10:00 mins excerpt, original length 79:00 mins
You Are Here is a Jorge Borges-like fantasy composed of multiple worlds, circling and weaving around each other in always-unexpected ways. One of these worlds is “The Chinese Room”, staged after a famous thought experiment by the American philosopher and linguist John Searle. “The set-up is deadpan absurdism: an English-speaking man finds himself locked in a room lined with a document written in Chinese. He’s then presented with a multiple-volume set of mindless instructions for translating it, but not for divining the text’s meaning, turning him, in effect, into a human processing unit. Is this, Cockburn (via Searle) asks, merely an approximation of consciousness, and if so, whose?” (Adam Nayman)

Benjamin Nuel
Last Episode (HOTEL) FR 2013, 7:00 mins
In this conclusion to Nuel’s series, two videogame characters based on opposing “terrorist” and “counter-terrorist” teams find themselves stranded on a meteor hurtling through space. The avatars bond over their alienation and radical lack of purpose within a perpetually peaceful if vaguely menacing environment that has abstracted them from their usual structural relations.

John Butler
The Ethical Governor UK, 2010 8:00 mins
Produced in the mock-serious tone of an intra-governmental presentation Butler’s Ethical Governor uses black humor to skewer the ethical problems of autonomous drone strikes. In narrating the “advanced” capabilities of a computerized killing machine, Butler highlights how the language of Neoliberalism makes broad, cold-blooded equivalences amongst economic, humanitarian, and legal concerns in light of overriding geopolitical goals.

Metahaven
Interference (Music Video for Holly Herndon) USA/NL 2015, 05:18 mins
The Dutch design and art collective Metahaven have premiered their new music video “Interference”, by the much acclaimed experimental musician Holly Herndon. Directing their critical attention to the conditions of sharing and display on social media, and recreating Guy Debord’s A Game of War, their video explores how affect and control converge in a new decentralized culture industry. The production of this video was supported by Impakt.