Film & Video Day

Streaming Life

Thu, Jan 30, 2020
starting at 2pm
Film still from Present.Perfect. by Shengze Zhu, ©2019, Courtesy of the artist and Burn The Film

The Film & Video Day Streaming Life is dedicated to online video cultures. With short film and lecture screenings, talks and a feature film, it sheds light on the ambivalence of social media and mobile communication. Streaming Life probes the boundaries of networks as well as the potentials of democratizing infrastructures by introducing both artistic and documentary perspectives.

One highlight is the Berlin premiere of the documentary Present.Perfect. by Shengze Zhu: Composed of 800 hours of livestreams, she draws a fascinating portrait of Chinese society from a selfie perspective, in which individuals on the margins of society interact with a virtual society. Trine Bjørkmann Berry and Kristoffer Gansing reflect on the cultural history of online videos using rare video clips rescued from now defunct blogs to describe video blogging as a phenomenon of vernacular video making. The short film program Telematic New World links 1980s telecommunication art with contemporary assessments of the Internet as a mirror of society. In their lecture Autonomous Pirate Machinery, Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lütgert discuss autonomous networks, the archive as a failed state of preservation and the many futures of cinema beyond copyright based on more than 20,000 movies downloaded over the past 15 years.

2−3.30pm
Lecture
Videoblogging before YouTube
Trine Bjørkmann Berry, Kristoffer Gansing

4−5.30pm
Short film program
Telematic New World
Levittown/How We Communicate (D: Tom Klinkowstein, NL 1982, 9 min., English OV)
BIT Plane (D: Bureau of Inverse Technology, US 1999, 14 min., English OV)
Heaven's Gate (D: Peggy Ahwesh, US 2001, 4 min., English OV)
Swatted (D: Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis (FR 2018, 21 min., English OV)
This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past (D: Cana Bilir-Meier, DE/AT 2019, 16 min., English OV)
followed by a discussion with Cana Bilir-Meier and Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis, moderated by Florian Wüst

6−7.30pm
Lecture
Autonomous Pirate Machinery
Jan Gerber & Sebastian Lütgert

8−10.30pm
Feature film
Present.Perfect. (D: Shengze Zhu, US/HK 2019, 124 min., OV with English subtitles)
followed by a discussion with Joshua Neves, moderated Florian Wüst