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2020 2022
Sophie Schreurs – Fed Underbelly of Silicon Valley

PHOTOGRAPHY

Sophie Schreurs – Fed Underbelly of Silicon Valley

by Sophie Schreurs

Fed Underbelly of Silicon Valley is an immersive installation that makes the hidden social and political tensions of social media platforms physical and tangible. The power of social media platforms is not only apparent because they possess the archive of our culture, but mostly because they decide on the visibility of content. While seemingly democratic, it is clear that nowadays some voices are amplified while others are silenced by content moderation. I draw a parallel between the mechanisms behind social media platforms and the workings of the human body. I imagine the body as a carrier of memories and emotions that seep through and cling to the walls of our insides. Just like our organs filter and circulate – so do the platforms.

Alisa Strub – My Grind Bears Fruit

PHOTOGRAPHY

Alisa Strub – My Grind Bears Fruit

by Alisa Strub

My Grind Bears Fruit is an installation of projected self-portraits combined with manually painted text which chart territory in my engagement with identity, self-revelation and contemporary media culture. It explores the tension between public and private life, the need to talk about ourselves and our thoughts while creating a blurry line between intimate documentation and a constructed point of view. The seemingly still but slightly moving images are situations where I perform for the camera, influenced by the perception of what I consume online daily. They combine and collide with an intuitive, free, yet deliberately scripted use of words culled from net culture and create a rhythmic counterpoint that challenges viewers to confront their own experiential thresholds.

Emma Bedos – Linger

PHOTOGRAPHY

Emma Bedos – Linger

by Emma Bedos

How can we continue to exist in the places we have left, through the memories of those who remain? In this project, I wanted to grasp the feeling of distance and the way technology tries to compensate for it. I asked my relatives on my home island to capture images of shared memories. Transcribed in photogrammetry to materialise them, the combination of communication and memory work creates a new shared environment. The result highlights the omnipresence of the void. The installation materialises this remote contact, as the negative of itself, via cuts in fluttering and elusive silk. The imagination completes the memory and projects fantasised images of a distant ideal, where presence/absence resonates and lingers.

Yang Su – Cloud and Beyond the Infinite

PHOTOGRAPHY

Yang Su – Cloud and Beyond the Infinite

by Yang Su

Clouds and Beyond the Infinite is a video installation with real-time simulation. Thanks to enhanced rendering engines and higher definition visual representations, the era of the metaverse, an immersive digital virtual environment, is fast emerging. Yet behind the dazzling and realistic visuals of the metaverse lie continuously expanding data centres, more GPU processing and power consumption, and the ensuing heat and carbon emissions. As the metaverse becomes better and more liveable, our physical environment is gradually deteriorating. The artist chose the “Cloud” element to depict an immersive virtual world, showing the flow of an infinity of clouds in various contexts.

Clemens Fischer – Sticks and Wires

PHOTOGRAPHY

Clemens Fischer – Sticks and Wires

by Clemens Fischer

Designed as a laboratory, this work consists of camera installations that speculate on a future where imagery is created and consumed without us being present. The camera becomes an independent actor that will have to learn to work, fail and interpret by itself. Equipped with minimal gear and tasks, the machines created are thrown into existence to find out their purpose and connection to the world around them. Clumsy, naive but at the same time heavily charged with our nostalgic heritage, these installations invite us to reflect on a temporary, improvised state of photography and our own importance as its creators.

Augustin Lignier – Container

PHOTOGRAPHY

Augustin Lignier – Container

by Augustin Lignier

Container is a project about alienation. From the camera, the machine, space, images, the medium, and from an idea. Through the medium of photography and performance, I build rules to experience the relationship with the apparatus. By seeking to push my body to the limits, I experiment on the camera and the body like a black box in a white cube. The rules are inputs and the images the output. Attempting to understand the reaction of a repetitive action on the videos. Focusing on the obsession of pressing the shutter button on the images. Using this action as a solution. To see the pictures, the viewer has to perform the same action as the performer. The experiments give the power to the machine. Producing images, performing, recording and exhibiting are one thing.

Hikaru Hori – Slowpoke

PHOTOGRAPHY

Hikaru Hori – Slowpoke

by Hikaru Hori

Slowpoke is a series of sculptural collages. Taken from my surroundings, the images of everyday objects are accumulated and layered to transform multi-sensory experiences. For the series, I worked in particular on the idea of a “combination of physical and digital perceptions” for the upcoming degree presentation. In response to this contemporary setting where the representation and the represented simultaneously affect our cognition, Slowpoke invites viewers to experience the hidden construction of image-making through sculptural collages.

Alexey Chernikov – Above Everything

PHOTOGRAPHY

Alexey Chernikov – Above Everything

by Alexey Chernikov

Developed during the war in Ukraine, this project focuses on the fragility of our peaceful existence, the power of surveillance and uncertainty about the future. The project uses the visual vocabulary of military drones. A thermal camera is mounted on a drone that provides recognisable black and white imagery. The medium itself has a vital role as it conveys the aesthetic appearance of the work. A huge amount of images from battlefields are shot from the sky. This footage most often ends with a bomb strike. In Above Everything, a parallel reality is created where the ending of each video is unpredictable. The video sequences, together with distorted propeller sounds, create a feeling of constant threat, depicting the tension caused by the war that is happening thousands of kilometres away.

Nikolai Frerichs – Carrie Ann

PHOTOGRAPHY

Nikolai Frerichs – Carrie Ann

by Nikolai Frerichs

The movie Carrie Ann questions the concept of standardisation. Individuality and losing control seem impossible to achieve in digital environments. Nevertheless software developers are constantly trying to build new tools and possibilities to simulate our world as realistically as possible. However, when we take a closer look, we recognise that these tools and representations are full of stereotypes. Is it possible to speak about love in a controlled and unnatural synthetic world? Is our Idea of love just another readymade asset in our mind, formed by the ideals and clichés of the society we live in, or can love resist it? Is it truly something bigger or just a projection of our imagination? Does it have the power to save us from the standardisation of everything?

Mahalia Taje Giotto – Existential Boner

PHOTOGRAPHY

Mahalia Taje Giotto – Existential Boner

by Mahalia Taje Giotto

existential boner is a book about obsessions. Obsessions linked to the body, gender identity, sexuality and desire. Mahalia Taje Giotto, born in 1992, was assigned female at birth. Going through several phases of physical transformation - from writing on their skin as a child to tattoos as an adult and eating disorders as an adolescent - Taje began their transition in 2020. This identity journey is at the heart of their work, which expresses the incessant thoughts that drive them through a play of superimpositions. The daily observation of physical changes is transcribed in images and texts, somewhere between abstract and concrete. The result is an articulated chaos that reflects the way in which taje is experiencing their transformation, with a sculptural approach to the book as a reflection of the changes in her body. The artist explores their desires and fluid identity, while giving visibility to the transgender community from which they come.

Natalie Maximova – There Is No Spoon

PHOTOGRAPHY

Natalie Maximova – There Is No Spoon

by Natalie Maximova

Mention Bien This artwork is an interpretation of the possibility that we are living in a computer-generated reality, similar to a video game, inspired by the ideas of simulation theory. The world is built as an assemblage of soulless structures with no indication of time or place. The rapid change of architectural styles throughout the journey explains the ambiguity of simulation theory and the impossibility of proving it. There are multitudes of architectures and imaginations, thus there are multitudes of mysteries. It is a journey halfway between dream and nightmare. In the absence of a total understanding, what else can we do but plough ahead? Video installation: CGI animation created in the game engine, surround sound.

Sara Bastai – RAM_1.0

PHOTOGRAPHY

Sara Bastai – RAM_1.0

by Sara Bastai

RAM 1.0 is a collaborative project between myself and Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is a fictional account of my life, based on my personal visual archive, but constructed and mediated by AI. The project explores the concept of memories and the importance of the construction of an archive in the digital realm.  Focused on the interaction between images and text, I let AI analyse my memories and then reinterpret the captions to create new images. New memories are created in the form of five different books and five slide shows on a modular installation. Floating between human and non-human, the dialogue between myself and the machine comes into being and enables you to immerse yourself in a new data set of my memories through the gaze of technology.

Manqin Zhang – I'm not a Loner

PHOTOGRAPHY

Manqin Zhang – I'm not a Loner

by Manqin Zhang

I’m not a Loner is a photo-based installation in which Manqin acts as an archaeologist digging into the forgotten and insignificant part of life. The work consists of three resin spinning tops, four concrete blocks, five T-shirts, twelve lighters and two plates. By treating them as historical artifacts – displayed on plinths of different heights, evoking a forest-like environment – the work intends to construct a narrative of individual history through memories, relations and objects. While individual history describes fear, anger and guilt (personal, family-related, societal and historical), Manqin wishes to increase the role of the individual in history to evoke the importance of being oneself and to confront modern alienation.

Olivia Wünsche – New State of Equilibrium

PHOTOGRAPHY

Olivia Wünsche – New State of Equilibrium

by Olivia Wünsche

New State of Equilibrium is a visual interpretation of my years-long spiritual quest and psychedelic adventures. Inner peace, a sense of deep connectedness, unbounded love for the natural world and longing for transcendence are central themes I tried to visualise throughout this project. Both the book and the installation attempt to question and investigate the mechanisms and limitations of our cognitive and sensory perception. By emphasising the simultaneous presence of the visible and the invisible, I seek to challenge the secular, materialistic worldview that still seems to prevail in our Western culture.

Maeva Bosko – Step into the unknown

PHOTOGRAPHY

Maeva Bosko – Step into the unknown

by Maeva Bosko

Entering the Unknown is an immersive experience that tends to alter the consciousness during an introspective journey. Because of its wild and authentic side, the forest has always bewitched the collective mind. A nature of peace but also a kingdom of mysteries, the forest gives off an almost supernatural force. To cross the threshold of the forest, because of its deep roots, is to open the door of the unconscious and to trigger the awakening of panic fears, terrors or even phobias. According to Jung, these terrors translate the fear of seeing the contents of the unconscious revealed, the fear of meeting oneself.Starting from the conscious world you gonna dive to reach the world of the unconscious. A fall into the realms of the unknown.

Joanna Wierzbicka – Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something

PHOTOGRAPHY

Joanna Wierzbicka – Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something

by Joanna Wierzbicka

What is a body, where does it start, where does it end? How do we experience having a body and being a body, especially among other bodies? How can we resituate ourselves within earth others, and rethink relations on a wider level between human and nonhuman actants to account for a more ethical living? The project aims to interrogate the notion of bodily matter, recapture our corporeality and challenge the assumption that our bodies end at the skin. Instead, they are redefined as radically open systems, human and non-human assemblages, corporeal chimeras, microbiotic multi-species in the constant process of becoming. Matter, when recognised as an active agent, helps to acknowledge infinite interactions within complex networks of agency between various porous corporealities and entities. Trans-corporeality disrupts divisions between a body and the world. Bodies leave traces everywhere, ascribing themselves into various corporeal, technological, political narratives, but also traces are ascribed onto bodies - mediating and altering their flesh. As captured by Haraway in the figuration of compost - we are always becoming with others, together creating a lively matter of compost, composing and decomposing each other. “Nothing is connected to everything, everything is connected to something” takes a form of an installation, a speculative self-portrait as compost, built out of images of my own body (made with different apparatuses including Scanning Electron Microscope, digital microscopes) mixed with still lifes of food and different materials representing the transformation and movement, as in compost. Additionally, sculptures are accompanied by the video that expands on the idea of corporeal companionship and brings in the notion of uncanny-like lump of flesh covered with skin. It is a performative act, a result of wondering how to become a microorganism, a bacteria and if I am already enough of one. All the parts of installation, exploring the line between oppositions such as human/nonhuman, internal/external, self/the other, refer to the definition of an abject and are meant to translate that moment, or a sensation - how a breakdown in meaning, something expelled from “I” eventually comes to define “I”.

Jelena Luise – tip-toeing on blades of glory

PHOTOGRAPHY

Jelena Luise – tip-toeing on blades of glory

by Jelena Luise

It is inevitable that after a shared crisis, time will be described as having a before and after. Seeing everything burned to the ground may be disturbing at first but profound transformations are at work. This provides an opportunity to build something new - but what? Expanding on a moment of overwhelming climax, the scope of our imagination is put to the test. The old world is dying and the new world is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters.

Philipp Klak – wasserturm()

PHOTOGRAPHY

Philipp Klak – wasserturm()

by Philipp Klak

Mention Bien Randomness is a crucial quality in artistic practice. This project addresses the issue of the extent to which machines can help further enhance and overcome the human aspect by programming an image and randomly generating unlimited variations of the same scene and the same type of object. During my time at ECAL I developed an interest in studying hidden processes and structures. For this project, and in reference to the history of photography and in particular to the Bechers’ typologies, I randomly generated images with the help of a fully automated system.

Emidio Battipaglia – Build38, Patch Release 13

PHOTOGRAPHY

Emidio Battipaglia – Build38, Patch Release 13

with Simone Niquille, François Zajega

Mention Bien The work addresses genetic determinism, representation, network infrastructure and privacy using a range of digital techniques to reflect on technology. Current technological approaches are characterised by an aspiration to map the world in order to achieve a full quantification of reality, reducing the subject to mere data or a collection of commodified objects. The installation uses a range of technological tools (VR, DNA analysis, AI, photography) and aims to present the outcomes of my theoretical research through a personal journey.

Robin Bervini – Until I Stop Trying to Get Out of My Skin

PHOTOGRAPHY

Robin Bervini – Until I Stop Trying to Get Out of My Skin

by Robin Bervini

Mention Excellent Prix Elinchrom “Until I Stop Trying to Get Out of My Skin” is a spatial and virtual reality installation that depicts the artist’s personal struggle in seeking his identity as a mixed-race man in Southern Switzerland. Surrounded by white family and friends and knowing only local culture, the artist identified as white, but the continuous questioning of his origins and prejudices made him doubt his belonging. The installation puts the viewer in the artist’s shoes: by embodying his avatars, the viewer meets the artist’s alter-egos which are the embodiment of his ideal selves at various stages of his life.

Doruk Kumkumoglu – Gates

PHOTOGRAPHY

Doruk Kumkumoglu – Gates

with Simone Niquille, François Zajega

Digging a hole and excavating the land can be seen as the most primitive and elementary human activity. However, it is also something to which all human activity can be reduced to. This project mainly investigates our relationship with the land by depicting a strange reality in which a two-dimensional ground plan opens up to reveal tunnels of different shapes and sizes. The work is meant to create a sort of religious journey, enabling the viewer to contemplate life, cyclical reality and perpetual motion through unending paths and tunnels.

Johanna Hullar – If I Could Only Be Sure

PHOTOGRAPHY

Johanna Hullar – If I Could Only Be Sure

with Charles Negre

Inspired by the human capacity for emotional transformation and the examination of the still life genre, the project merges a series of still life videos of characterised everyday objects and organic material, creating a collage of different recurring moments and processes in time. The emphasis is on exploring the concept of entropy, making time tangible and capturing the transformation of a moment into its material representation. The project is presented on a 12x2m half-circular projection screen, thus surrounding the viewer with the imagery and allowing for a more visceral experience.

Jung-Ting Hu – Shuǐhuò

PHOTOGRAPHY

Jung-Ting Hu – Shuǐhuò

with Charles Negre

“Shuǐhuò” is a Mandarin term that refers to the trade of a commodity through distribution channels that are not authorised by the original manufacturer or trademark proprietor. 水 (“Shuǐ”) in Mandarin means “water”, while 貨 (“huò”) means “goods”. However, since the commodity is not authorised, the quality is usually poor. Therefore, when we see poor quality products, we use the word “Shuǐ” to describe them.

Alessia Gunawan – Counter Faith

PHOTOGRAPHY

Alessia Gunawan – Counter Faith

with Simone Niquille, François Zajega

“Counter Faith” addresses a personal narrative with the aim of understanding the driver behind the construction of gated communities in Indonesia, while the violent events of 1998 remain unresolved in the nation’s damaged belief system. Single-channel video, 10'34"

Gedvile Tamosiunaite – We are not so far away, it’s just water

PHOTOGRAPHY

Gedvile Tamosiunaite – We are not so far away, it’s just water

with Bruno Ceschel

The two-channel video installation aims to transfer contemporary human emotions into visual digital culture and non-verbal codes. Our desire to connect with other species (AI, nature) is explored through the premise that it is rooted in deep existential fear. This emotional experience requires dominance, seen here as a form of captivity: by investigating artificial environments we create for this purpose, I question whether we can still see ourselves as a part of nature. Lastly, a tactile experience is sought by visually conveying limiting and unpleasant sensations.

Igor Pjörrt – Apartamento

PHOTOGRAPHY

Igor Pjörrt – Apartamento

with Bruno Ceschel

Growing up between apartments in the same complex, a familiar feeling would remain in the empty homes, encouraging transformation. Such is the experience of inhabiting a body, fluctuating from one state into another. In “Apartamento”, this oscillation takes place in potential constellations around gender binarity. The male/female dichotomy is replaced by a dichotomy between gender and its negation. This renunciation however, is a perpetual shift, a gathering of questions rather than answers, a set of daily contemplations in the face of psychic constructs.

Chris Harker – Entangled Life

PHOTOGRAPHY

Chris Harker – Entangled Life

with Bruno Ceschel

Throughout the enterprise of human civilisation, it has been deemed important to be able to control the natural environment for the benefit of progress, which in turn has led to a tendency to divide the natural and the cultural sphere. In an attempt to rejuvenate an understanding of the biosphere as one of constant cross-contamination, “Entangled Life” emphasises the notion of fungal networks as an encouraging force in decentralising humanity, thus transgressing anthropocentric notions of perceiving the world.

Anja Karolina Furrer – Overturn/Überturm

PHOTOGRAPHY

Anja Karolina Furrer – Overturn/Überturm

with Bruno Ceschel

Our system is a fragile construct. The project examines the outlook on the outside world, shows traces of de- cayed architecture, and reveals fine and fragile constructions and thus our desire for an intimate space, a place in society. Metaphorically, the still lifes show the individual manipulation of artefacts. At the same time they reflect the medium itself and show direct physical confrontation with the material in a spontaneous, light-hearted way. The work is presented in a spatial installation, in order to create a photographic situation and a connection between image and material.

Jasmine Deporta – Screenshot 2020-4-11 at 11.30.01.png

PHOTOGRAPHY

Jasmine Deporta – Screenshot 2020-4-11 at 11.30.01.png

with Bruno Ceschel

Virtual reality is becoming an essential means of experiencing interpersonal relationships and changes the way the space between bodies is performed. This project features a series of screenshots that document virtual encoun- ters between the artist and depicted figures – reciprocal performances through screens and webcams. Presented in the form of an installation, the project investigates the female body in space, the locus of relationships and space-time in the digital age.

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