Credit: tom mesic
Golden Nica
Being
Rashaad Newsome (US)
Beingis a social humanoid artificial intelligence created by interdisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome. The first generation of Being was launched in the spring/summer of 2019 with the support of the LACMA Art + Technology Lab Grant. Using a combination of 3D animation, game engines, scripted responses, generative grammars, and unique machine-learning models that use a counterhegemonic algorithm.
Being leads participatory workshops that teach decolonization through a combination of lecture, critical thinking, dance, storytelling, conversation, and mindfulness meditation, guiding participants to analyze the impact of the culture of domination on their lives and create resolutions for positive change. When not teaching workshops, Being expresses themselves creatively by continuously generating and reciting poetry inspired by the work of Queer poet Dazié Rustin Grego-Sykes. While they read, they are backed by a diasporic ASMR soundscape composed by Rashaad and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe. The soundscape acts as a sonic balm comprised of culturally specific sounds deemed soothing by a survey done by Newsome with over 80 Black people.
Being is a reimagining of non-Eurocentric archive and education models like the griot, a West African cultural figure who serves as a historian, library, performance artist, and healer. Their approach to education is active and brings new possibilities for research, reflection, action, and an enhanced academic experience for all people.
Jurystatement
The postcolonial concept of Worlding introduced by Gayatri Spivak in 1985 claims the worlding “power” as that which records and “instructs”. It is a cartography of being-in-the world which forces the colonized to embody the domineering framework of oppression. Cultural resistance to these supremacist legitimating norms and ideas flowered during The Harlem Renaissance (1920-1935). This black cultural mecca birthed a distinctly black and Latino LGBTQ+ performance culture where aspects of identity like race, gender, and sexuality were celebrated as fluid and intersecting. Black bodies, safe to move, gliding in forgotten rhythmic ways became en vogue! Marionettes on sacred, hidden strings—like the AI Being (2019-2022) in Rashaad Newsome’s monumental, celebratory installation Assembly (2022). Ballroom culture with its embodied lexicon is lionized in workshops, large-scale video-mapping, a collage and sculpture installation, and performance. Newsome’s oracular AI Being (2019-2022) unites the disparate parts of Assembly (2022), guiding audience members with their non-gendered voice and linguistic bodily movements. A towering, humanoid, bronze colossus Being (2019-2022) iterates Voguing as a philosophical event of spiritual re-awakening and a political project with the ability to break the orthodox worldview. Rashaad Newsome’s dark, hallowed halls are a witness to acts of psycho-geographical poesies. A deeply thoughtful masterwork of un-worlding.
Credits
With support from: LACMA Art &Technology Lab, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship, and Park Avenue Armory.
www.beingthedigitalgriot.com
https://vimeo.com/711025868
Credit: tom mesic
Award of Distinction
Absence
Marc Hericher (FR)
A homeless man collapses violently on the ground and remains frozen on all fours. The journalists' sudden interest in this man takes us into a grotesque and absurd media vortex.
This project was born out of the artist’s interest in the journalistic treatment of information, particularly on recurring subjects in our societies. In France, the term “marronnier journalistique” (evergreen content) is a news item that comes up every year at the same period. The media exploit these mundane news items to fill moments without interesting news. We often insist on their uninteresting character such as, for example, departures on vacation, Black Fridays, or the start of the school year. But the one that interests me is far from trivial: the homeless in winter, symptomatic of a society overwhelmed by the increase in class inequalities without ever understanding the causes. We are thus led to question the role of the media in our society: how to understand a problem that gets worse every year when it is only treated in a cyclical and superfluous way, focusing only on the symptoms?
Jurystatement
Marc Hericher's spiraling single-shot film is an allegorical tale of one man's socio-political identity eclipsing his immediate human presence. We watch this delicately CG-sculpted figure collapse in a city square—an environment that evokes the type of a bare theatrical set we might find in the staging of a Samuel Beckett play. The protagonist's involuntary action triggers a circus of media attention, selfie ops, and ultimately a televised political debate. As this figure slowly transforms from finely carved flesh into a melting block of ice, we are left with the absurd sensation of something that is missing from the treatment of this man—empathy, care, basic consideration. In a stunning display of technical prowess and stylish aesthetics, this film leaves us pondering the relationship between journalism, politics, and information exchange in a grotesque display of human absence.
Credit: tom mesic
Credits
<emDirector, script: Marc Hericher
Animation: Florian Durand, Thomas Salas, Daniela Metheyer, Marc Hericher
Sound, music: Eric Cervera
http://marc-hericher.com/project/absence/
Credit: tom mesic
Award of Distinction
Anxious Body
Yoriko Mizushiri (JP)
Sensitive, fluid, physical, erotic, meditative, melancholy, and feminine, the films, installations, music videos, and designs by Yoriko Mizushiri offer new perspectives on separate body parts, based on infinitely talented control of the line and movement, a choice of light, “corporeal colors” like pink and purple, and without superfluous emotionality in the face and eyes. Her hand-drawn animation offers haptic suggestions, delves into fragments of daily life, tiny gestures and moments, and immerse deep into the abysses of the unconscious. The serene rhythm of Mizushiri’s works leaves the door open for the viewers to let themselves go to intimate interpretation.
Jurystatement
We often talk about the power of images that can manipulate minds but also heal us. To heal us by colors, by a vision of the world passed to the rainbow. An image that speaks to our senses, an image that feels more than intellectualizes and that directly addresses our body, in a body to body relationship through the screen. This is what Yoriko Mizushiri seeks to provoke: empathy through the softness of colors, curves, and geometric shapes that we daily encounter, but also sensations of strangeness, physical discomfort, and anxiety, so that the spectators can feel “viscerally” this tactile and sensuous animation.
Credit: tom mesic
Credits
Director, storyboard, animation, editor: Yoriko Mizushiri
Miyu Productions: Emmanuel-Alain Raynal, Pierre Baussaron
New Deer: Nobuaki Doi
Commissioned by: Towada Art Center, Curators: Kodama Kanazawa, Meruro Washida
Sound: Yuka C. Honda
Title design: Yosuke Nakanishi (Studio PT.), Hiroko Terawaki
5.1 Sound remix: Seigen Ono
With support from: Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image animée
Credit: tom mesic
Honorary Mention
Ad Hominem
Alex Verhaest (BE)
Change is an old revolutionary, returning to its hometown looking for recognition for all it has done. Upon its arrival, it becomes clear that an event is organized in its honor. Change talks to four people, who guide it towards the event, but seem to hold different views on what Change should bring in the future. Change has to choose its answer to their questions and is judged for all responses. In the end, it becomes clear that Change is never really welcome.
Ad Hominem is an interactive philosophical choose-your-own-adventure film, based on Sofie Verhaest’s brilliant doctoral thesis Eutopia Unbound, in which the player is cast in the role of Change. The player is invited to pick an answer to questions proposed by four different characters representing four distinct utopic ideas.
Jurystatement
The maze of historical quotes on collectivism, individualism, progressive thinking, and conservatism make you reflect on various choices and radical changes that we were forced to face all of a sudden after the pandemic. The work was unique in that it challenges the players with the questions and issues of modern society, which is cleverly abstracted on the meta-level in the game, through humorous visuals and storytelling.
Credits
Written & directed: Alex Verhaest
Produced: Melissa Dhondt
Director of photography: Korneel Moeyaert
Costume design: Gudrun Wylleman
Music, sound design & mix: Théo Pogoza
Ad Hominem was made with the support of: Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF); Kunsten en Erfgoed – Flemish Government; Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles; Stad Roeselare; Cultuurcentrum De Spil; Barakat Contemporary, Seoul; in Hinterland
Credit: tom mesic
Honorary Mention
Unless
Deborah Joyce Holman (CH/GB), Yara Dulac Gisler (CH)
Unless is an experimental docu-fiction, which follows five characters through mundane, ritualistic situations of Basel's industrial, eerie neighborhood of Dreispitz. The project emerged from my longer-term engagement and research into the figure of the trickster, who is characterized by their “political gestures, insofar as [they are] a tactic of apparent conformity while retaining some measure of self-empowerment; a means of working within the framework of power without fully subscribing to its ‘truths’.” (Jean Fisher)
This figure is central to Unless, and was born of the confrontation with what it means to perform for the camera as much of my work deals with strategies of refusals. Unless explores the potential of intimacy and illegibility along the borders of a group and its outside. Here, a group of young people forge a space-time that is characterised solely by the tricksters’ interactions that are built on intimacy and solidarity. This space is characterised by an ever lasting sunset, which signifies an ‘otherwise’ as it draws parallels to a generative space-time for those who create liveable bubbles, inhabitable spaces through elusivity, fugitivity, and fabulation.
Jurystatement
Swiss artists Deborah Joyce Holman and Yara Dulac Gisler open their video triptych Unless (2021) with a pair of talon-tipped black hands engaged in a manicure, flipped to give the rare perspective from beneath the nail. It is a classic Trickster move designed to make your mind somersault into different directions. Normally oppositional, thoughts about predators and self-care fuse as this moving image poem unfolds in non-linear time. Basel’s industrial neighborhood Dreispitz transforms through the magic of storytelling into a sci-fi dystopian landscape where a group of Tricksters perform rituals of water and breaking bread. Sacred water rippling through the screen—freezing time and ripping soundscapes. Bodies moving, bodies collaborating with a Swiss German narrative resist the monolithic portrayals of Blackness presented through the media of US-American discourse. Unless (2021), set in Trickster time, is a work of Trickster heaven.
Credits
A moving image project by Yara Dulac Gisler & Deborah Joyce Holman
Performers: Yara Dulac Gisler, Deborah Joyce Holman, Mirco Joao Pedro, Cynthia Matumona, Suhyene Iddrisu
Camera: Jumana Issa
Director of picture: Jelena Luise
Sound recordist: Ananda Schmidt
Styling and Make-up (concept): Desmond Chan
Hair and Make-up and styling assistants: Jahsiri Asabi-Shakir, Chaïm Vischel
Production assistant: Caroline Honorien
Set assistants: Joy Asumadu, Glenn Asumadu, Timon Essoungou, Imani Fux, Alice Lushima, Sera Ndlovu, KT Omole, Fatima Salum , Nahom Weldemehret
Editing: Deborah Joyce Holman, Rodan Tekle (from Studio Junbi)
Grading: Natacha Ikoli
Score: Yara Dulac Gisler, Deborah Joyce Holman
The Bells (Remix) – Bearcat: Yara Dulac Gisler, Deborah Joyce Holman, Dion McKenzie
Mixing: Jackie Poloni
Mastering: Russell E. L. Butler, Merlin Züllig
Graphic design: Ann Kern
Editing: subtitles: Imani Robinson, B. Covington Sam-Sumana
Exterior eye: Jeremy Nedd
Special thanks: Atelier Mondial, Ali-Eddine Abdelkhalek, Hochschule für Kunst und Gestaltung Basel, Julie Machin, Flavio Luca Marano, Ivy Monteiro, None Nissen, Uncle Naa Dom aka Fred Biney, David Nana Opoku Ansah, Philip Ortelli, Point de Vue Basel, Jonas Schaffter
Commissioned by Explorers Film Club; With generous support from Pro Helvetia Stiftung and Jugendkulturpauschale Basel-Stadt.
