Entrée + BFK kunstfilm:
Dream Journal by Jon Rafman Shorts by Claudia Maté
at Bergen Filmklubb Kvarteret, Tivoli
Claudia Maté, Inside Out (2015).
Jon Rafman is an interdisciplinary artist merging
photography, sculpture, video, virtual reality, and installation. His work
explores the impact of technology on contemporary consciousness, incorporating
the rich vocabulary of online worlds to create poetic narratives that
critically engage with the present. He examines the relationship between memory
and data, and the ways in which they are corruptible, fragmentary, and subject
to decay. His video works are pulling references from popular culture, Hollywood,
videogames, 1980s adventure films starring kids, body horror, slime aesthetics,
Dungeons and Dragons, and LARPing.
He
is carrying forward the tradition of the Romantic explorer into new virtual
worlds in the hour-long
series ‘Dream Journal
2016-2017’ of freeform narratives created by hobbyist CG animation
softwares. In the video, two female protagonists embark upon a Dantean journey
across strange landscapes and phantasmagorical spaces, encountering a host of
recurring characters; often hybrids between human, monster and animal.
Unconscious fantasies find voice through the vernacular of virtual worlds, as
primeval, libidinous encounters unfold in a series of surreal sequences. The
film is scored by experimental musicians Oneohtrix Point Never and James
Ferraro.
Claudia Maté lives and work in Paris. She works in a
large area of new media and online based works. Her works come from a variety
of formats including programming, 3D, video, videogames, VR, GIF and sound. She
is Co-founder and curator at cloaque.org. Her work manages to blend the
familiar with the odd, and the futuristic with strange retro tropes. She has
realised her ambition to fuse the internet and interactive 3D technology into
an aesthetic that is non-ideological and defines a never-ending new aesthetic –
into a surreal and pixelated world where anything is possible, and nothing is
as it seems. Mate’s works has been exhibited internationally in Spain, USA,
France, Switzerland, Austria, Canada, Croatia, Italy, Germany, Chile,
Argentina, Switzerland, Netherlands, Venezuela, Korea, Mexico, Greece, Czech
Republic, Iran, Peru, Lithuania, UK and online.
Claudia Maté, Inside Out (2015).