Post-Internet, Essay Film, Machinima, Desktop Films, Online, Poor Image, Digital Extreme

An intimate, insightful look into how virtual reality is affecting people’s social lives for the better.

Due to his video and interview based investigations of a top-secret, marginalized class of book-scanning workers on the campus of Google headquarters, Andrew Norman Wilson was fired from his job there as a video editor. Workers Leaving the Googleplex is the result of these investigations.

The mind process behind the film, Transformers the Premake, explained by Kevin B Lee himself.

Harun Farocki: Serious Games I–IV (2009–10) explores the use of virtual reality and gaming technology in U.S. military recruitment, training and after-action therapy, revealing fundamental links between technology and violence in a time of war. Young recruits engage in simulated combat training, which barely differs from video games produced as entertainment. Footage is included from a workshop demonstrating the use of computer re-enactments in the psychological care of veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. As a large-scale installation, Serious Games critically focuses on the role of audiovisual culture in the spectacle of war.

In this video I share my experience as the first Resident of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin during the winter of 2016-2017. Produced for the Goethe Institute.

An austere treatise on the military-industrial complex that produces napalm.

At a morgue, forensic pathologists conduct autopsies of the corpses assigned.

When Hugh finds out that his video, his artwork has been stolen, re-contextualised, and turned into a viral meme by a TikTok user, he embarks on an internet odyssey, interrogating people.

A compelling mix of attraction and repulsion, Mainsqueeze is entirely composed of footage found online, surfing the deep web.

Originally published on YouTube in 2007, Petra Cortright's VVEBCAM highlights the conditions of watching video online. Her passive surveillance of her videoscreen is mirrored by the viewer's own experience at that very moment, who is necessarily also consuming online content as they watch the work. Cortright complicates the dynamic of disengaged onlooking, however, by inserting a collection of animations that flash across the video. Default effects taken from the $20 webcam she used to record the work, running the gamut from cats to lightning bolts, literally animate the otherwise nonactive scene. Her passive stare mixed with these flashing images lend the video a hypnotic quality, further accentuated by the background music, Ceephax's "Summer Frosby," playing in Cortright's iTunes as she filme [Rhizome].

Session I investigates the holophrastic stage of language development, where the child is able to reproduce sounds of combined words but not not fully ascertain their distinction, as a greater symbol of the ego’s integration into the symbolic order. Action is staged in the digital realm as a computerized consciousness passes through the pre-libidinal stages of development, articulating and mimicking signs like a child learning to speak. The fundamental trauma of the distinction between souls is embodied in the severance of the mother/child bond, enacted with humanity as the parents of digital simulacra. What does it mean to be born without a body? A discarded draft of a larger project in development. All algorithms coded by hand.

In a journey that mixes cinematic genres, a legendary arcade video gamer moves seamlessly through actual and virtual space and time. While he cherishes the intense experiences of mastering a renowned video game, or defeating an archrival, he comes to question the significance of his legacy and the tradition itself.

A three-channel video that begins with the animation of a fragmented sentence: HELL YEAH WE FUCK DIE—which, according to Billboard magazine, are the most frequently used five words in the English language music charts of the past decade. They provide the basis for the musical compositions that score documentary lab footage showing computer-simulated or actual physical force applied to humanoid robots to test their balance behavior.

Cash for organs and anything for love.

A desktop documentary investigation of what it means to watch David Lynch films as a pre-teen and get lost in the image regime of the internet.

Mario's world is falling apart.

廣場上正在舉辦集會，人們喧鬧的進行著各式活動，然而，世界卻逐漸分崩離析，混亂與突發狀況一一發生。特殊的動畫風格游移在穩定與失序之間，喻示動畫製作如本片角色般不可預測。

What do the numerous similarities between the films of Michael Haneke and Quentin Dupieux reveal about their respective filmmaking strategies?

A video essay by Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee. Commissioned by Dana Linssen and Jan Pieter Ekker for Critics Choice V: Absence, 2019 International Film Festival Rotterdam. Special thanks to Bero Beyer. Dedicated to the film I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS by Radu Jude.