While people are divided over those in favor of culling and others who advocate for the preservation of wilderness, the current Canis Lupis in Norway and Sweden questions the very meaning of naturalness and wildness. Regulated and moderated through technologies of government, the current wolf of the wildlife is a technical animal tipping across zones between preservation and eradication. For Per Segerbäck, an engineer who is allergic to electromagnetic frequencies, life is only possible outside the city, closer to that wilderness. Through gps, radio waves and found images, M-1 seems to map a territory between the visible and the invisible.

White Cloud mines the fecund fields of AI-generated video, NPC girlfriends, and the military training apparatus of deep learning to discuss rare-earth mining. Life is conditionally reacting to the potentialities of electronic systems. Van der Auwera looks into the deep underbelly of these technologies and the rarely spoken relationship between the earth’s bowels and humanity’s outer space dreams. The film has an uncanny, slightly grotesque feel as emerging AI technologies show their own flaws. While questions related to geopolitics, ecology, capitalism, conspiracy and future scenarios circulate around the film, at the core is the testimony of a lonely miner attempting to embrace a dark and desolate landscape in search of a better tomorrow.

My Way Home Is Through You centers on a stock image featuring a castle, included in a family photo album the artist had while growing up in China. After moving to Geneva, she encountered the castle by chance and discovered that the building in the stock image turned out to be a juvenile prison. A young Chinese actor holds the family photo album and delivers a text written by the artist that intertwines themes of incarceration and the ubiquitous nature of stock imagery.

A production of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève for the BIM’24, with the support of the Fonds d’Art Contemporain de la Ville de Genève (FMAC) and of the Fonds cantonal d’art contemporain (FCAC).

A barrage of images of Kurdish activists, journalists and fighters—mostly women—facing the camera, often smiling. Scored to rapid electronic music, this visual onslaught echoes the sensory overload of media. While the similarity of portraits, whose low resolution raises its own political questions, encourages instant parsing, the sight of young women in uniform slows down our perception, inviting us to interrogate the meaning of these smiles and poses.

The Taste of Tea explores uncanny AI-generated visuals depicting a body undergoing decay over time, symbolizing the circle of life and the fusion of digital technology with traditional paintings, using AI imagery. The inspiration is drawn from Kusôzu, ‘painting of the nine stages of a decaying corpse’ in Japanese Buddhist paintings. It begins with a depiction of a female body and illustrates the stages of decomposition, ultimately to nature. This was a practice rooted in the aesthetic ideas of impermanence.

The central character is an artificial intelligence called Elaine. AI learns language-based communication by interpreting language as code, and by filtering out noise. Sounds like sighs, gasps or “mmm” vocalisations are categorised as noise and omitted from translation into code. Pure speech/ words is what remains. The video also consists of thousands of medical images that were used to train medical AI’s with the purpose of developing a medical eye. How do we teach the machine what human speech and what the body is?