Videos are hard currencies in the exchange of emotions. The combination of smartphones and social web creates consuming filmmakers. How can the power of technology be reflected? For example by translating terms from political science in short films. Again, Kassel Dokfest and the field of political theory at Universität Kassel cooperate. The screening is intended for students of political science as well as the general interested public.
Post-internet cultures have become a huge archive of live fragments, pieces, and bits of coded identities, and digital self-optimized avatars, where banality and deep human questions are interlaced almost indistinguishably from each other in the never-ending and short-lived flux of information. An open forum to share dreams, recipes, frustrations, puzzled pets, hate, and pain. For digital subcultures to emerge as a refuge to be heard and ignored at the same time. Digital spaces evolve as another part of the political field, with a new logic of political discourse, new actors, and new strategies. The films of the screening display how every step in the internet is not only part of a private stroll but takes place in specific political contexts. What data do we leave behind when we die? Is our digital legacy regulated? And to what extent does our digital identities match with real life? The film program ARTIFICIALLY BIASED shows individual enactments in the digital sphere and opens the question if it is possible to adopt these spaces collectively. (Maria Morata, Afsun Moshiry, Maximilian Pichl)
In 2018, an incel (involuntary celibate) called Anathematic Anarchist posted a suicide letter on Reddit entitled "America is responsible for my death". THE MECHANICS OF FLUIDS is an attempt to find answers to his words. A virtual drift through the internet in search of his digital traces that ends up being an inner journey between our connected solitudes.… >>>
In his film, Daniel Franke drags us into the digital cloud, which concretizes enormous data sets for us with its micro-work. We board an abstract conglomerate of fibers, structures, colors and sounds that gives us the space to let our associations flow freely. The sponge-like structure we sink into allows our thoughts to wander, to semiconductors, bitcoins, electricity consumption, rare earths, crystals and other phenomena somewhere between environmental sin and digital evolution.… >>>
In the 20th century, the world has finally supplied humanity with the machine for the ultimate answers. And so, burdened with the eternal questions of meaning, life and existence, the film departs on a journey through the world wide web. In a jungle of connection errors, glitches, search bars and pop-up messages, we meet three people lost in cyberspace: a man who hopes that the digital realm can help him reach immortality, a young woman, who uses it as a platform for her spiritual practice, and a young man, who believes that the only reason for existence is in the meaninglessness of it. Staying safely behind the screen, we are invited to think of life through data, god through numbers and to witness the endless digital questions, many of which will never be answered.… >>>