The 14th In Silico experimental film competition has been bolstered by two new projects: Kiberglaz (Cybereye), the Dziga Vertov Neural Network Film Laboratory and a programme of experimental films by Russian filmmakers Futurum. Film viewing and discussion is no longer limited to the competition programme, and is now even combined with creative laboratory practice.
The content of 2024’s experimental competition is best characterised by the name of the film Decryption, in which the artist Maya Zack deciphers the workings of memory. The “decoding of reality”, as Vertov himself wrote, is the topical thread that links all the films in the programme.
In TWENTYTИƎWT and Synchronicity, Max Hattler and Yann Chapotel use optics and editing to dismember the architectural forms of mass housing developments in Hong Kong and Paris, thereby questioning the laws of physics and the common sense of architects. In the film Pigeons, Anosh Aibara transfers the drama of human relationships to “our smaller brothers”, as if ironising the slightly naive traditions of the avant-garde a century ago. In her video work Sensitive Content, Narges Kalhor analyses the self-righteous escapism of the media, always afraid to shock the consumer with the truth of the documentary image. Jorge Moneo Quintana’s Phantasia examines the inner life of sculptures, while in Surface Séance, Michael Heindl deciphers the traces left by passengers in the metro, invisible to the naked eye. And Viktoria Schmid splits the New York colour spectrum into red, green and blue beams in her film NYC RGB, as if approaching an answer to a problem that has not yet been formulated.
As always, the largest thematic block in the programme is devoted to the functioning of memory and its preservation in the media: we see this in the work of Nikita Spiridonov in Meat Grinder 2, Frank Heath in Protect Your Home (Interpret It Well), Daniele Grosso in The View from the Plane, Saif Alsaegh in Bezuna and the aforementioned Maya Zack in Decryption. All these films attempt to decode the subjective human experience contained in amateur and professional shots and photographs, television commercials and beautiful computer renderings.
If we look at this year’s experimental programme from a “Vertovian” angle, there is a sense that the predictions of the classic Soviet filmmaker, who died 80 years ago, are literally coming true. But any angle is arbitrary – this is something we must always remember when deciphering reality.
Mikhail Zheleznikov