18.30 Welcome by the organizers

18.40 Screening:

La mécanique des fluides (Gala Hernandez, 2022, 38 min)

Aurore (Marlies Pöschl, 2019, 22 min)

19.40 Zoom conversation with the artists.

The event is free of charge and open to all.

La méchanique des fluides

Gala Hernandez | 2022 | 38 min | French with English subs

In 2018, an incel (i.e. an involuntary celibate) posts a suicide note on the Reddit platform with the title ‘America is responsible for my death’. The Mechanics of fluides is an attempt to find answers to his words. A virtual drift on the Internet in search of his digital traces that ends up being an inner journey between two connected solitudes. The film tackles the issue of self care in a postdigital world, where the regime of hyper-visibility we are exposed to and the hyper-connectivity typical of networked selves causes dynamics of isolation, self-depiction and social acknowledgement that may determine profound effects on people.

Aurore

Marlies Pöschl | 2019 | 22 min | French with English subs

Aurore is a voice without a body, she lives in a crevice, she resides on the interface. At a retirement home in the south of Paris, she provides company for the residents. Technically though, she can work in many places at once. Wherever Aurore appears, she brings warmth to the dimly lit rooms, a glow to people’s eyes and takes the weight of the world off people’s shoulders. She’s there for the people, she really cares for the world, 24/7. Fatigue is foreign to her. This semi-documentary science-fiction about the future of care and the automatization of affect was developed in the context of the collaborative project Pepper Perceval during an artist residency at CAC Brétigny, Paris. All the elements that appear in this film were created in collaboration with the participants: primary school children, high school students and seniors. Aurore is an attempt to write science-fiction differently: both in dialogue and in vernacular.

GALA HERNÁNDEZ is an artist, filmmaker and researcher. She is a PhD Candidate in Aesthetics, Sciences and Technologies of Arts at Université Paris 8, ESTCA laboratory and an ATER/Assistant Professor in Visual Studies and Digital Art at the Université Gustave Eiffel. She co-founded and co-directs the research and creation collective After Social Network.

Her work combines interdisciplinary research with the production of essay films, video installations and performances reflecting on the modes of subjectivation produced specifically by computational digital capitalism. She studies the discourses and imaginaries that circulate in virtual communities as symptomatic fictions of a state of the world.Her film La Mécanique des fluides is the first of a series of films – that will be followed by HODL, currently in development, selected in Berlinale Short Form Station – both proposing a reflection on the processes of individuation in its articulation with algorithms and digital flows of data and capital.

MARLIES PÖSCHL is an artist, filmmaker, curator and educator. Pöschl teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. As co-founder and chairperson of The Golden Pixel Cooperative, an association for moving images, she has developed artistic-curatorial strategies for exhibitions, screenings and projects in public space with a focus on feminism and ecology. Shifting between artistic, curatorial and educational approaches, Pöschl is interested in art as a form of knowledge production. She understands filmmaking as social practice and often collaborates with actors from outside the art world in search for polyphonic narrations and open-ended dramaturgies. Recently, Pöschl has focused on ways in which western societies respond to the ‘care crisis’.

Pöschl has received various prizes for her work: in 2021 she was awarded with the Prize for Innovative Cinema (Diagonale) as part of The Golden Pixel Cooperative as well as the Young Artist’s Award (City of Vienna) for her individual work. Her films and installations have been shown in several solo presentations, most recently at Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, DE (2022), Salzburger Kunstverein, AT (2021), CAC Brétigny, (2018) and MUSA, Vienna, AT (2016). She has participated in biennales and film festivals such as the Vienna Biennale for Change (AT), Antimatter media art festival (CA), Edinburgh International Film Festival (GB), Cinema Verité (IR), Diagonale (AT) and others.