we are already history,
and we don’t know it
Mozilla Hub take over
In this work Dagmar Schuerrer uses the brain as the central subject. In the (post-)digital age, technology becomes a mirror of our self and our society. It imitates the complex processes of the brain that shape our behaviour and are subject to the progressive developments that at the same time shape them. In this juxtaposition, we are confronted with the questions of our (conscious) being and our time. What makes us who we are and what role does technology play in this? The 3D-world of „we are already history, and we don’t know it“ will unfold in the virtual space, and additionally the visitors will have the chance to see this and earlier video works, contemplating on the relationship of our body and mind with new technologies. The virtual Hub will also serve as the digital springboard to the festival and its events.
Empathic Boot Camp to Disgust: Piss Soap
Video tutorial
The Empathic Boot-Camp to Disgust is a collection of online encounters aiming to reinvent the western vision of Disgust; tools as part of new flows of redefinition of our social constructions. This emotion has been constructed to fit the patriarchal standards of a capitalistic society and reinforce the normalisation of emotions and identities. Disgust is a bodily reaction, a mental contagion that pushes us away from the unknown, the dirty, and the strange.
The Empathic Boot-Camp to disgust: Piss Soap is a video tutorial that will teach you how to produce, using human urine, a usable and deviant soap. Throughout, you will learn to use your socially stigmatised bio-fluid, decolonise your western vision of disgust, as well as create amazing gifts for your loved ones. After the training, make sure to enjoy a luscious and moisturising cleansing with piss soap by the fountain. Rub, lather, cleanse and take a dive into eco-deviance!
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Face filter installation
Damara Ingles experiments with pushing the boundaries of the tech — creatively and culturally. Through fashion, tenacity, and the metaverse, she's on a mission to give voice to those who don't always see technology representing them directly.
Rojo,
HYBRr-ID and a beauty booth
Face Filter installations
Ines Alpha has brought her intuitive creative eye to the world of tech, bringing 3D makeup into the mainstream, with her Snapchat and Instagram filters that provide a surreal and imaginative escape from daily life. Alpha works with rapidly changing technologies to conceptualise new futures within the makeup and beauty space, her work is optimistic, exciting and boundaryless and she is only just getting started.
Ines Alpha turns her filters into pieces of fine art. Iridescent flowers bloom out of people’s heads, sequins rest over glossy skin, faces are etched in delicate lines of gold, and fins grow out of flesh. Alpha says her filters are about giving people the opportunity to play with different versions of beauty, rebelling against the idea that everyone should aspire to look a certain way. “I hope that my work helps people have a more open-minded attitude,” she says. “You can experiment with filters and even if people think you look weird, you are expressing yourself. It's so important for people to feel like they can be different.”
Vibrassae
Video essaie, face filter Work created within the research trajectory Masks, filters and identity initiated by The Overkill and co-curated by Manique Hendricks and Aynouk Tan.
Vibrissae are the stiff hairs found on the face or nostrils of an animal, such as the whiskers of a cat, the hairlike feathers around the bill and eyes of insect-feeding birds, the paired bristles near the mouth of certain flies or the sensitive hairs of insectivorous plants. Vibrissae often act as tactile organs. In Vibrissae, her project for Filters, masks & identities, Sandrine deumier wonders if the face could have another function, playing with our expressive and receptive senses.
Sediment
Hunter
Pohorille
Video installation
SEDIMENT is a new group of work, consisting of stills and animation, by Oliver Hunter Pohorille AKA Scum Boy that takes a look at the various layers and complexities that make up the human condition. Every person is made up of different elements and fragments of masks that come together to create their personality and overall identity. These works are created through various overlay processes combining 3D design, AI neural network image creation and text input.
This work is created within the research trajectory Masks, filters and identity initiated by The Overkill and co-curated by Manique Hendricks and Aynouk Tan.
Queer embodiment: a VR speculative body experience
VR experience
Queer embodiment: a VR speculative body experience, presents interspecies digital avatars as the conceptual center of the virtual queerness, i.e., the presentation of a speculative body projection through which non-normative genders and desires are and have been historically understood. Through the use of Virtual Reality as an immersive medium to explore these acts of embodiment, we will reconsider the medical, scientific, and philosophical discourse on body fluidity underlying contemporary understandings of sexed selfhood in order to understand gender anew as a process of becoming that exceeds restrictive binary logic.
This work is created within the research trajectory Masks, filters and identity initiated by The Overkill and co-curated by Manique Hendricks and Aynouk Tan.
Exquisite Esquisse
Face filter booth
While the digital community uses face filters daily and shares them in stories or DMs, we never really get to see how people out of our circles use them. In an age of globalness and expansion of a meta-verse, what do we show about us, how do we stage and share, what do we narrate of ourselves and to whom? What for? Behind a filter, what do we hide from our immediate and intimate self? Personality comes from persona, which means mask. And as we build our digital personalities through multiple avatars on various media, how many layers are we able to add to our original selves? Where and what is the core? What makes an identity, identity?
Exquisite Esquisse is a collective art work initiated in the Collective Masquerade Prologue in september 2021. During the event the public had access to various items and crafts to customise a giant blank Facemesh provided as a basis asset by Spark, the AR software developed by Facebook. Each person has left a part of who they wanted to share. A bit of their personality to generate a collective collage of individuals. As a collage artist, my intention was to experiment a new way of colliding and sampling elements.
This neutral face now covered with drawings, flowers, googly eyes and keywords has been used as a base to create a face filter that will be published on Instagram. At The Overkill festival the filter will be presented in a booth for multiple users and with the possibility of creating a collective print.
This work is created within the research trajectory Masks, filters and identity initiated by The Overkill and co-curated by Manique Hendricks and Aynouk Tan.
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Masks creations
Stella Marbles is a multimedia mask designer working in plastics, metals and 3D printing. Their masks intersect design, fashion and performance, seeking to push the boundaries of drag and explore ideas of private identity, gender expression, technology and sexuality. Alongside their own pieces they collaborate regularly with other designers and artists. Stella’s most notable ongoing collaboration is with 3D print designer Sam Ostwald, combining technology, design and conceptual art to create 3D printed masks and headpieces.
I, product
Video + face filter
‘I, product’ is a CGI video artwork that questions the autonomy of a human body from big corporations and their possible impact on shaping and regulating artificial aspects of our identity through new technologies. People became so attached to their devices that algorithms, which are tracking and learning human online behavior, know more about our unconscious drive and desires than we do ourselves. Political parties, advertisers and social media companies are developing powerful techniques to hypnotize people into forgetting themselves and slip into a capitalistic coma. They are watching us. They are predicting our choices. They are selling us. What will be the notion of a human being and the function of a body in the context of technocapitalism?
What is your favorite flower?
interactive film
Through this interactive film the visitor explores a digital ruin, catching glimpses of fragments from previous visitors, images flickering through a landscape that slowly melt into noise. Throughout their exploration they are guided by the voice of Apparatus Ludens, the algorithm inhabiting this place. It is a nice place to visit.
The project takes different shapes and evolves over time with new content. The current iteration is called What is your favorite flower?We are made out of images, imperfect static casts of human memories. We use these images to create our virtual worlds, stored in gigantic server halls around the world. Left to their own devices, these virtual natures constitute a cultural-primordial soup for new things to grow from. What new flora will grow from this fertile soil?
Those flowers will for always grow in your footsteps.
They will dance for you, and sing for you.
Absorb all to yourself and to this song.
Wealgo
Online platform
Wealgo leverages Face Recognition AI & Group Video Meetings to create fluid, hybrid spaces and to encourage transcient identities. We merge human and non-human visual language to play not to profile. We believe machine is as man teaches it. We strive for an open, fair and just playground for all born and unborn.Wealgo.org
Martine Stig is a guest of the talks program chapter 4 - Friday 3 december at 16.00
Misava
‘Misava’ is a Tsonga* word that translates to Mother Earth. The project Misava first manifested in 2020 at the Fakugesi digital innovation festival in the form of an online exhibition.The exhibition seeked to refigure digital space as a site for radical healing and used Dikenga, the Bantu-Kongo Cosmogram as a digital interface. The Dikenga is used to help uncover and map the terrestrial sensorium of human awareness, utilizing digital art to refigure the internet as the manifestation of new metaphors of consciousness inspired by African cosmology and philosophy.Cosmograms (Dikenga) are cruciform signs representing the four moments of the sun. They function as ancient interfaces for divination, mapping and thinking. They're symbolic gestures that augment thought into the sensory realm. The four points of the quadrant are divided by two lines, one vertical (mukula) and the other horizontal (kalûnga). The four cardinal points also carry symbolic meaning: on the right Kala, which means birth, represents the Sun’s first position as it rises in the sky. On the apex is Tukula which means noon, it symbolizes life. The third position on the left is Luvemba which means sunset, symbolizing death and at the bottom Musoni which means midnight symbolizes the ancestral realm or rebirth.*southern African language
The Overkill has invited Nkhensani Mkhari to bring Misava into a physical space while preserving the online aspect in order to connect the artists with the public of the festival. The show will be integrated in the festival, as a healing place, a sharing space, a meditation retreat… This collaboration is an attempt of The Overkill to actively reflect on the role of digital culture in the process of decolonization.
Marechera
Marechera.com
Web archive
This work is part of the exhibition Misava curated by Nkhensani Mkhari
Marechera.com is a speculative inquiry into reincarnation through an open-source digital archival gesture by Tinashe Mushakavanhu on the work of the late Dumbudzo Marechera. The work is a continuation and extension of his research into the life of the eponymous author.
Clockwork
Video
This work is part of the exhibition Misava curated by Nkhensani Mkhari
Sharing the gaze and the narrative of an “awkward” and “alternative” black girl, Natalie Paneng explores what it means to have an online presence. She explores the persona’s we develop to be online, how the Internet and its algorithms control and influence our behaviors and how together, it transforms our perception of reality. A growing theme in her work is observing and taking ownership of online spaces and dissecting the rules of engagement.
Pele and Plastiglomerate
Ribeaux
3D environment
This work is part of the exhibition Misava curated by Nkhensani Mkhari.
Pele and Plastiglomerate considers the mediation of Hawai’i Island via technological monitoring, plastiglomerate*, as well as bioplastics**.As researchers and geologists have only focused on plastiglomerate as being a marker of the Anthropocene, they have never considered the spiritual connections it has to Hawai'i and it's native peoples. Plastiglomerate can be seen from a perspective of the invasion of the melding of toxic/colonial and petrochemical substances with Pele’s sacred and spiritual body, and as a metaphor for the loss of native spiritual beliefs with the continuous arrival of settler-colonialists, and their new materials and technologies. Bioplastics can be considered as a new material technology and ritual practice, offering alternatives to the petrochemical derived plastics and their relationship to colonialism.Pele and Plastiglomerate meditates on the materiality of lava, the spirituality embedded within, and potentialities for new material rituals. It considers biodegradable bioplastics wrapped around rocks and on the body as new skins - as both offerings and protection, and sites of healing. It repositions satellite data next to lava flows to re-envision spiritual practices and healing in these continuously transformed landscapes of the island.*Plastiglomerate is a new geological layer discovered in Kamilo Beach in 2012 formed by commercial plastics washed ashore from the ocean melted with sand and rock to form a new conglomerate.**Bioplastic is an alternative biodegradable material to petrochemical plastics.
Born Fire
Video
This work is part of the exhibition Misava curated by Nkhensani Mkhari.
Double K is a South African sound selector crew composed of Sound artist Doby & multimedia artist Ketu Meso. Their interests lie in exploring the art of chopping, digging and spreading love through sound.
Journey to Misava
This work is part of the exhibition Misava curated by Nkhensani Mkhari.
Journey to Misava is a syncopated afro-futuristic visual mosaic dedicated to Misava (Earth). The video piece is a visual meditation telling the story of our collective emergence and shared relation with the Earth through a distinctly African lens.
The Moon center
Soundscape
This work is part of the exhibition Misava curated by Nkhensani Mkhari.
The Moon center is a collective offering of sounds inspired by the lunar mare, the seas of the moon. This lunar album was blessed with sonic offerings from: Julien Creuset, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Hlasko, Fela Gucci, Robert Machiri & Memory Biwa, Elsa Mbala, Jenny Mbaye, Aisha Mirza & Mahta Hassanzadeh, Liz Mputu, Tabita Rezaire, and Bogosi Sekhukhuni. These soundscapes were conceived under the The Moon Center, an invitation to build intimacy with the moon, an opportunity to experience her depth and an ode to her glow.
_feel all the made up feelings
J Phakhati
Video
This work is part of the exhibition Misava curated by Nkhensani Mkhari.
How does it feel to hold on to the heaviness of your digital interactions? To wade in the viscosity of an ambivalent dance with visual data? You are falling down a path of negative outcomes caused by your psychological dependence on the need for social validation. Your behaviors are changing, your feelings are unpleasant and your compulsions are overwhelming.
_feel all the made up feelings is a virtual reality prototype for digital mindfulness, social cohesion and self care. Sending subtle light, sound and color to interact with your senses, energy is transferred between (un)conscious bodies.
Clear your mind.Open your eyes. Open your heart. Cleanse your thoughts and give clarity to your thoughts.
An esoteric retreat creating new environments and pathways for the mind to heal, rest and restore.
Emergence: Afriviola
Video
This work is part of the exhibition Misava curated by Nkhensani Mkhari.
Emergence: Afri Viola is a performance art piece that merges the traditions and conceptual visual language of art and the innovative technology of Virtual Realities. Emergence Afri’ Viola is immersed with visual cues, retelling forgotten and omitted histories of African people and the re-imaged colourful, comic and animated world of pop-culture. It is inspired by a fresco from the 1400s by Masolino da Panicale, in which a dead ‘westernised’ Christ is shown at the moment of Resurrection. This art work aims to over-turn this convention of the white messiah, whilst exposing the long-term effects of the colonial project through religion on the Black African identity and the plundering of land and mineral resources - stripped, and stolen, only to be re-appropriated into a mouth-piece of Western colonial propaganda.