Boris Labbé, recipient of an Award of Distinction at the 2025 Prix Ars Electronica in the category New Animation Art, is featured at the festival with four of his experimental animations: Kyrielle (2011), Orogenesis (2016), Sirki (2019), and Glasshouse (2023). These works combine meticulous hand-drawn watercolors and digital compositions in a kaleidoscopic and hypnotic spectacle. They move through themes such as language and play, geological processes, Indigenous textile traditions, and digital surveillance.
Kyrielle is a 10-minute high-definition animated video installation that explores themes of loneliness, human connection, and interpersonal conflict. Using vivid, multi-layered colors and whimsical abstract figures, the animation unfolds in a playful, improvised, dance-like sequence. The visual narrative features moments of chaos, looping structures, and palindromic patterns.
Sirki is a tetralogy of four short animated films that pay tribute to the textile artistry of the Ainu—an Indigenous people from Hokkaido, northeastern Honshu, Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and the Kamchatka Peninsula. The titles of the animations—KAPARAMIP, CICIRI, TETARAPE, and RUUNPE—reference various types of Ainu kimonos and decorative patterns. Sirki, meaning “pattern” in the Ainu language, animates fundamental forms that evolve endlessly through repetition, set in motion to the rhythm of traditional Ainu music, Ukouk. Each film runs approximately two minutes.
Orogenesis is described by the artists as “a journey into abstraction—an imaginative hypothesis on the formation of mountains.” This work is an evolving audiovisual cycle centered on the theme of landscape. Created using satellite imagery and 3D models from Google Earth, combined with digital image processing techniques, the video presents an aerial view of a mountain range undergoing continuous metamorphosis. Through an extended traveling shot, the transformation of the terrain evokes the compressions, ruptures, and erosions of the earth.
