Guli Silberstein

In early 2020, MUTA - International Festival of Audiovisual Appropriation and Cine Íntimo rescued and digitised a Peruvian archive of orphaned 8mm and Super 8 home movies. With the aim of restoring these lost memories, we sent the images around the world. This omnibus film is the result of the intervention of this material, by 14 experimental filmmakers. Fourteen perspectives and ways of experiencing appropriation. Fourteen variations on the intimate.

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A collaboration with a machine-learning based AI technology of next-frame prediction. The computerised synthesis of images by a neural network learns video clips and then guesses how they will continue, recreating them in the process. The reborn video images are then woven together into an audio-visual poem, revealing both computer and human cognition processes and raising reflections regarding the implications and future of this new technology.

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A gut reaction to the Coronavirus apocalypse, made in the first months of isolation and confusion in March-June 2020, echoing the shocking, eerie and surreal experience of the pandemic. Reworking the classic Zombie public-domain film from 1968 'Night of the Living Dead' by AI colorization, video processing, re-cutting and sound work. The attack of the outside and tensions within the inside were found in the horror film images, broken apart and reassembled to become a haunting kaleidoscopic nightmare. A post-horror series of three acts. This is Act II - Turmoil.

A gut reaction to the Coronavirus apocalypse, made in the first weeks of isolation and confusion in March-April 2020, echoing the shocking, eerie and surreal experience of the pandemic. Reworking the classic Zombie public-domain film from 1968 'Night of the Living Dead' by a mix of deep-learning AI coloring technology, datamosh techniques, re-cutting and sound work. Visions of the invisible found in the horror film images get broken apart and reassembled to become a haunting kaleidoscopic experience.

An AI computer-vision system reconstructs footage of humanity in different contexts - business, love, city, joy, protest. The next-frame-prediction technology is trying to predict the future based on just a couple of seconds from each clip, producing surprisingly hallucinatory video outputs, engaging with surrealist and expressionist painting tradition. The AI-produced material is arranged by the human artist in a narrative reflecting on the tenderness of the human body, the implications of AI interacting with it, and the politics of its usage. We are a viral breath, one embodiment, connected to each other physically, socially and psychologically. Now it's becoming mediated by machines, controlled by corporations and governments. The work explores senses of touch and body as seen by algorithmic processes.

A stream of audio-visual material interweaving environmental, cultural and social crises, addressing exploitation of both natural and human resources, and the overall meltdown of environmental and economical balancing systems. The work overflows the viewer with images and sounds collected from online media and personal filming, echoing superfluous information, waste, disasters, unrest and climate damage.

"A radiant, energetic girl is shouting and punching the empty space in front of her. She is roughly cut out from her surroundings by a computer algorithm struggling to contain her. Her enemies are rubbed off the frame, sound is removed and music added, emphasising her anguish and anger. Is she real? Is she a dream? Gradually, more fragments of the scene are revealed, and the context is made clearer. The video-processing highlights the documented scene as image, both of a fight for freedom, and a media event." (Guli Silberstein)

In a collage of private scenes and fragments of medialized events as part of the “war on terror”, Guli Silberstein uses his typical method of digital image degradation with the help of compression algorithms to draw attention to the actual process of remediating images and thus in two way raises questions as to their representation, credibility, and the emotions that they can carry.

A gut reaction to the Coronavirus apocalypse, made in the first months of isolation and confusion in March-June 2020, echoing the shocking, eerie and surreal experience of the pandemic. Reworking the classic Zombie public-domain film from 1968 'Night of the Living Dead' by a mix of AI colorization technology, datamosh techniques, re-cutting and sound work. Visions of the invisible virus were found in the horror film images, got broken apart and reassembled to become a haunting kaleidoscopic nightmare. A post-horror experimental film/series in three acts. This is Act III - Hell.

A tribute to the pioneering, visionary film 'A Page of Madness' (1926, Japan, director: Teinosuke Kinugasa), reworked by AI coloring technology, digital processing, and re-cutting. Confinement, madness and love haunt an asylum (of the mind?), where a couple and their daughter become entangled in a troubled past and a complex present, as perceived through layers of moving-image making across almost a century.

In a flickering TV image we see a happy family on a beach, as 100 km away a girl frantically runs on a bombed beach in Gaza. The happy family is shown in a rapidly speeding stream of still images, while the girl is filmed in video, gradually taking over the screen, creating a growing impact of shock and horror, until the girl dissolves in TV noise and becomes a news report.

The combination of image manipulation and suggestive music turns journalistic footage of an extreme encounter between a young woman and a group of soldiers into a scene from a dramatic story. If the soldiers weren’t aiming their weapons at her, the choice of shots and the scene’s mood could almost be called romantic. The young woman wants to keep the soldiers from shooting at a group of protesting villagers. The Israeli-born director offers another critical look at the way the media portray the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The film centres around a single excerpt from a news video, taken off the internet. The clip is of a family hiding behind a wall in a neighbourhood in Beirut, Lebanon. The neighbourhood has become a warzone. Over time the compressed video is slowed down, enlarged, and gets a new soundscape. Additional dimensions are revealed in the scene, and a troubling contrast between imagery and content is created, leading to an anxiously destabilising affect in the viewer.

A meditative yet intense AI animated fictional-documentary journey, zooming in on the story of Earth creation, going from light to enlightenment. It's a reflection on Artificial intelligence, as a generator, a creator, using a combination of deep learning models of text to image, text to text, and text to voice. The output ties AI back to the source of our origins, to past narratives of creation, to create a Cybernetic genesis, The film experiments with duration and repetition, in a hypnotic collage of semi-abstract colorful images. It counters online media culture of short quick hits of imagery, offering instead a longer contemplation.

Images from Bay of Somme France, London canals, home garden, and Margate Kent UK seaside, collapse into each other in a dark dream. A requiem for a world where life continues deconstructing itself continuously. A philosophical-poetic reflection on nature, perception and digital technology, carrying ideas developed in tradition of oil painting, into contemporary moving image practice.

Hardcore techno music, repetitive loops of images from the 1955 movie ‘The Ten Commandments’, international TV news broadcasts of 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon, and a video documentation of a belly dancer in the desert, become an apocalyptic Middle East horror rave party, addressing Middle East war and myths representations of in Western media, and the fetishisation of images of war and religion in mass media.

A symbiosis of human and nature forms, by direct manipulation of video code, purposely damaging it in ‘glitch’ process, creating rich explosions of colour and form. The images, a little girl in a flower field, Earth from space and bits of satellites, become vibrant substance, where the girl and the environment interact in mutual consumption, reflecting poetic perception of existence, echoing childhood sense of endless open planes of possibilities.

This experimental film presents a kaleidoscopic and psychedelic composition of digitally modified images thematizing mainly nature, the human body, and machines. Silberstein draws his inspiration from video games and cybernetics theory resulting in futuristic meditation. The sci-fi atmosphere is made complete with electronic music by sound artist Łukasz Szałankiewicz.