True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists’ Films
Part One | Simulations and (Hyper)Reality
Tuesday, February 9—Monday, February 22, 2021
A new online series on e-flux Video & Film, programmed by Lukas Brasiskis
www.e-flux.com
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Finding Fanon Part Two, Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, 2015
Harun Farocki’s Parallel II and Parallel III (2014), Peggy Ahwesh’s The Falling Sky (2017), David Blandy’s and Larry Achiampong’s Finding Fanon 2 (2015), and Sondra Perry’s It’s in the Game '17 (2017) explore various kinds of digital simulations and their functioning. From mundane environments to planetary views, from military cartographies to non-human worlds, computer scientists and video game developers are building hyper-realities, where view(s)ers acquire virtual bodies and act in virtual spaces. Experientially, these hyper-realities are characteristic of a means to navigate through complex and multi-scalar situations. Yet, what does the simulation of reality mimic and for whom does it function? What does hyper-reality tell us about the real and how does it represent intrinsic mechanisms of control and colonialism? From ontological questions about the nature of (hyper)reality to the critical appropriation of forms of digital worlds, the works in this chapter of the series re-embody and critically examine the simulated environment.
Lukas Brasiskis is a film and media researcher and curator, currently a PhD candidate at New York University in the Department of Cinema Studies and an adjunct professor at NYU and CUNY/Brooklyn College. His interests include eco-media, the politics and aesthetics of world cinema, and intersections between philosophy, moving-image cultures, and the contemporary art world. Brasiskis’ texts have been published in both academic and non-academic media and he has curated a number of screening programs, including Ecology After Nature (e-flux, NY), From Matter to Data: Ecology of Infrastructures (with Inga Lace, Post MoMa, NY), Environmental Memories in East-Central European Art (Alternative Film/Video Festival, Belgrade), Landscape to be Experienced and to be Read: Time, Ecology, Politics on the work of filmmaker James Benning (CAC, Vilnius), Mermaid with The Movie Camera (Spectacle Theater, NY), Human, Material, Machine (with Leo Goldsmith, CAC, Vilnius, Lithuania), Baltic Poetic Documentary as Ethnographic Cinema (NYU, NY), Welcome to the Anthropocene (CCAMP, Lithuania), and a retrospective of the films of Nathaniel Dorsky (CAC, Vilnius) among others.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.