videography / compositing / edit / direction: Ian Gibbins
poetry / spoken word: Tasos Sagris
music: WhoDoes
artificial face generation: Generated Media, Inc
3D models: Sketchfab.com
audio mastering: Stefan Torto
produced by +the Institute [for Experimental Arts] 2021
“The life we live is a series of illusions… a fleeting smile… mistaken decisions… dangerous, unpredictable… yet, we will meet again, as lovers… parents… children… and you will know who I am…”
Tasos Sagris’s poem, with its haunting soundtrack by Whodoes, offers us an extended exploration of lives lived in parallel, at cross-purposes, in and out of love, around the world, from the innocence of children to the wisdom of elders. There are the good times when summer seems to last forever, and the bad, when persecution and misadventure could land us in prison, with nothing but rain to hear our voice. But what is the reality? What is mere illusion? Can there be more to life than simply living?
The raw footage for the video was shot mainly in and around the city of Adelaide, its suburbs, the nearby Fleurieu Peninsula and Yorke Peninsula, South Australia, supplemented with images from around Greece. But nothing in the video is quite as it seems. Most scenes have been composited and animated from multiple sources. So we look down a city laneway and see friends walking along a beach. Storm clouds, ominously aglow, gather behind skylines. And after the rain, floodwater surges across plazas, covers the floors of ruined buildings.
Who inhabits these strange places? Whom will we meet there? Look carefully in the malls and side-streets: we can see our fellow walkers, and then, again, again… And in windows of city buildings, in old frames hung on walls of broken brick and cracked concrete, we see the faces of the young and old, the boys and girls, the men and women of our imagination, our desires, our reconstructed memories. As alluring as they seem, none of them is real. Rather, they are the product of artificial intelligence, trained on thousands of our fellow humans, and generated by cold, unfeeling algorithms.
Is this Life? Who amongst us is truly Living? Let’s see. And perhaps we will meet again … on another rainy afternoon… “like now, like now.”
• official selection, and Delluc Avant-Garde Winner, Fotogenia Film Festival 2021, vol. 3 (Mexico City, November, 2021);
• official selection, and Winner, Best Experimental Film, REELS International Film Festival 2021 (Aurangabad, India, February, 2022);
• official selection and winner, Best Director (Video Poetry), Vesuvius International Film Festival XVI (Italy, November, 2021);
• finalist, International Video Poetry Award, Bologna In Lettere 2022 (Italy, March / May 2022);
• official selection, Bloomsday Film Festival 2022 (Dublin, Ireland, June, 2022);
• official selection, Venice Experimental Video And Performing Art Festival 2022 | ITSLIQUID (Venice, Italy, April, 2022);
• official selection, VIII Muestra Internacional de Videonarración A/R/TOGRÁFICA (Granada, Spain, May, 2022);
• official selection, 6th Zsigmond Vilmos International Film Festival, (Szeged, Hungary, 24-28 May, 2022);
• official selection, Carmarthen Bay Film Festival (Wales, May, 2022);
• official selection, Filmysea International Film Festival (India, March, 2022);
• official selection, Global Indie Film Fest (USA, June-July, 2022);
• official selection, FLICKFAIR on demand film festival (Los Angeles, February, 2022);
• official selection, ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival (Berlin, 25-28 November, 2021);
• official selection, Ashoka International Film Festival 2021 (Nawada, India, January, 2022);
• official selection and finalist – Special Mention (Experimental Film), Ideal International Film Festival (Maharashtra, India, December, 2021);
• official selection, Puntomov Video Orbits International Video Festival, 2nd edition (Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, Toluca, Mexico, 2021);
• official selection, 18th Annual Another Hole in the Head Film Festival (San Francisco, December, 2021);
• official selection, Fonland International Festival of Video Art and Performance (Coimbra, Portugal, November, 2021);
• invited screening, The Wrong Biennale No 5 – Encounters with Incomprehension (November 2021 – March, 2022);
• official selection, 6th Trujillo International Independent Film Festival (Peru, 23-26 September, 2021);
• official selection, 2021 International Screening of Experimental Films and Videopoems TRANÅS AT THE FRINGE (Tranås, Sweden, 16-24 October, 2021);
• official selection, Spanish version, Nahui Ollin Film Festival 2021 (Durango, Mexico, August – September, 2021);
• official selection, 9th International Video Poetry Festival (Athens, June, 2021);
• honorable mention, Video Art and Experimental Film Festival (New York, 2021).
