About the programme:

The incipit is the 1950s educational Disney-style animated film by Billy Klüver, where the motion of the electrons is explained for a wider audience. The film was produced as a substitute for Klüver’s doctoral thesis at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm. Animation is further developed in Edy Fung’s speculative visual and sonic fiction concerning silicon-based lifeforms and their evolution. Fung understands silicon not only as a physical material, but as a catalyst to pose ethical and existential questions, such as the role played by our (post)human bodies in a machine-dominated world.

Bringing the spectator back to human scale environments – from the lunar winter landscape of Kiev’s countryside to fossils – Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut by Lina Selander presents multiple layers of narrative, starting from the 1986’s nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine. Selander explores human life intended as a mechanism of social structures and ideological systems. In contrast, Katarina Löfström’s immersive, hypnotic works A Void and Chronos investigates the physical experiences of space (or lack thereof) and time through colour animation, sound and abstraction. To follow, the black & white Visusomatic – a film by Lars Siltberg shot in a laboratory for physical research – offers methods of intense observation. The film focuses on an ultra-high vacuum (UHV) system used to clear the air in the small chambers in which various tests on substances smaller than air particles take place. The slow, almost-surgical investigation of this technology goes from the macro to the granular, particles becoming pixels.

The programme concludes with Annika Ström’s poetic piece All My Dreams Have Come True, where the repeated trial and error mixes with the warmth and intimacy of personal relationships, perhaps alluding to the limitations and complexities of human nature.