ETHER, (2023)
(in collaboration with Tommaso Petrolo) music and sound design by James Ivačković
Three-channel video installation with sound and a list of sources 15 min and 20 sec
In this video installation, a single actor is playing out statements, appropriated from either very positive and affirmative or very personal comments from underneath YouTube videos. This character, acting as a generalised avatar, through his performance to camera cements these potentially throw-away, yet generalised grandiose existential statements into reality. He is presented as both self-reflective and preacher-like, not unlike the overarching themes of the videos that the comments have been taken from.
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GOLDEN GLOW, (2021)
Digital HD video with mono sound 4 min and 50 sec
Most of the GOLDEN GLOW piece is intentionally produced through Mobile apps and easily accessible open-source/free software - Animaker Voice, the ‘Mug Life' app, SCANN3D app for iPhone X series front-facing camera and the Reface app.
The video is presented as a loose monologue of an unidentified female protagonist spoken in an automated voice. The speaker appears to be both a human customer service agent and an automated assistant alike. Yet, the attitude expressed in the speech is more confrontational than customary for a character as such. Their facial expressions oscillate between life-like and uncannily artificial. The monologue is intended to remotely challenge the attitudes that humans apply towards those that work or exist in the service of them, from a position of an intentionally noncompliant agent.
Ecifitra exhibition text by Jael Arazi
Ziemupe Antagonised Mediations Press Release text
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Pt. 3 SERPENT’S LOVE (2021)
Digital HD video with stereo sound 21 min and 32 sec
SERPENT’S LOVE is the final episode of three-part video work based on interactions between digital machine learning software and a mythical story. It is told from the perspective of a fictional Artificially Intelligent agent. In the series, this entity is trying to make sense of human realities in a speculative post-human future. One of its main sources is a mediated text of a Baltic folk tale poem - 'Spruce, Queen of Serpents.'
In this episode, the AI character is trying to understand love and how in particular, in this story Spruce managed to love Serpent, even though she was forced into that marriage and whether or not she actually loved him. After accepting its own limitations as a singular entity, this AI character reaches out to other algorithms in order to help it better interpret what is going on in this story. GAN(s) propose their own interpretations of what could have happened between the lines of the story, from the perspectives of both the Spruce and the Serpent.
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PLACE FOR LEAVING, (2019-2024)
HD digital video, 19min 38sec
sound design by James Ivačković
In the video, a subject is wandering through a landscape in a nonlinear, dream-like sequence. The unidentified industrial town where the video takes place was meant to be a very prosperous place where the urban environment is balanced out by surrounding nature. There an unrestricted and rapid growth of the town meant that urban planners were able to incorporate vast amounts of parks, green areas and urban woodlands within the city or around.
However with the decline of physical industries prospects of the perfectly balanced urban and natural environments are failed by the lack of financial prosperity and these places get abandoned for bigger, overpopulated cities. These towns become appreciated as places which people aspire to leave.
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THE GREENEST GRASS IS ASTROTURF (2022)
Digital 4K video with stereo sound, 12 min and 50 sec, Director of Photography: Richard Thomkins
Notes form a “plastic-free” world.
Two years after the world wide ban on plastic production, a public trial of an environmental activist group is about to take place. In the wake of it, three characters retell the unfolding of preceeding events from their individual perspectives.
Not everything is what it seems and the greater good might not be the good of the many.
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JUNIPER GROVE, (2022)
HD video with stereo sound, 8min, *contains flashing lights
Juniper Grove is a video essay with the artist's voiceover re-telling a story of the burning of boats, specific to a seaside settlement in rural Latvia. The story is told in relation to Lovelock’s DaisyWorld simulation and proposes the reframing of collective trauma and violence through mythological engagement with history and the place.
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NOSTALGIA 2.0 (2021)
Digital HD video without sound 11 min and 20 sec
Documentation of NOSTALGIA 2.0being presented on ‘Icarus_Blue’ including the soundtrack and 3D render (19min and 20 sec in duration).
Sound - Gyorgy Ono, Visual renders - Vytautas Niedvaras
Nostalgia 2.0 is presented as a fictional nonlinear monologue of a digital omnipresent entity, spoken from the future (let’s call him ALEX for the sake of identification).
His speech is addressed to the unidentified human user in 2020-2021. Throughout the text, ALEX challenges the significance of human actions and experiences, as well as the over-prescription of digital records. He also questions ideas of futurity, memory, significance and internalised human exceptionalism. Other aspects of the video are compiled from augmented digital recordings and other animated fragments that mimic attempts to digitally transcend the experience of banal reality. Visually it follows the experience of Pareidolia and tendencies for spotting patterns in random stimuli.
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HOW TO FORAGE FOR CREAM CARTRIDGES (2020)
HD digital video with audio, 12min 50sec
How to Forage for Cream Cartridges is a part of a larger ongoing project and a long term investigation into common discarded NO2 cartridges. These silver cartridges are used as recreational drugs (quasi-legal highs) and legally distributed under their original purpose. Arguably potent objects themselves, they function as traces of a contemporary gathering. Vast amounts of material are used to manufacture these, while the hype produced is momentary, they are rarely recycled. The video follows the logic of the ‘how-to’ online video genre, it both propagates and criticises practices of proxy DIY ‘emancipation.’ It is set in a reality, which is alternative to our current one where things are to be fetishised, treasured or disregarded; a reality where some kind of value is asserted to these debris-like objects. There, through gleaning-like practices of a post-industrial society, an identified individual(s) are attempting to reclaim agency over their immediate, even if the urban, environment.
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