Focus

Rarely screened all together in a single screening, the seven parts of Is This What You Were Born For? (1981-1989) by Abigail Child, pioneering New York experimental feminist and queer filmmaker and poet, unfold as a polyphonic, cross-hatched investigation into the ways in which contemporary life is inscribed in the body, especially the female body: how posture, movement and even desire are choreographed by the omnipresent influence of media and machines. The films place bodies in shifting landscapes - public and private, intimate and industrial - where they become speakers, workers and lovers, but always under pressure, always in jeopardy. Thisjeopardy (a word Child often uses to describe his work) stems not from a single source, but from the incessant interplay between social conventions, technological devices and cultural fictions so deeply entrenched that they present themselves as natural.

Drawing on an editing practice that extends William Burroughs’ cut-up methods, Child composes his films from fragments - found images, staged performances, home movies, industrial scenes - juxtaposed and displaced in both sound and image. The cuts emerge like unexpected encounters: images and sounds collide, often chaotically, dissonantly. These disjunctions reject the fluid continuity of conventional cinema, replacing it with a network of contradictions, crossings and overlaps. Viewers are torn between attention and disorientation, obliged to chart their own course. Child’s montage also insists on the visibility of the construction: it shows the seams and refuses the too-easy closure of meaning.

The result is a work that dances on the fault line between “the human will to persist” and the cultural machinery that seeks to choreograph it - a work that asks whether what we are “born to do” has not already been written for us.

Between hijacking and biometric hacking, the films in this session blur the lines of individual surveillance by attempting to make faces - or their absence - our weapons.

From the silence of a clinical inspection of contemporary suburbs to the observation of menstrual cycles via the telephone, a new kind of horrific film takes shape, where control is total.

They also bear witness to the stagnant normalization of collective surveillance, a state trap that feeds a protean, faceless fear of the “other”.

In Selfie, the body is also probed, but the surveillance can be reversed! If “No one is safe in a police state”, let’s keep trying to infiltrate these technologies to thwart the gaze that squares us.

The fifth Focus programme celebrates hackers, artivists, rebels, innovators in the field of video and new media. It gathers historical works which creatively and critically engage with media technologies, revealing their often hidden, material and ideological, dimensions. 

From pioneer experimentations with analog video signal (Woody Vasulka, Dan Sandin), subversions of live TV broadcast (Richard Serra), artivist implementations of early computer graphics (Dana Plepys, Barbara Hammer), explorations of computer games as political and social tools (Gun Holmström) to whimsical commentary of internet censorship made in primitive code (Clint Enns) – these works rebel against the standardized use of technology, they open it, dissect it, make visible its internal functioning and invite us to do the same.

They belong to, what film scholar Nicole Brenez called, a larger counter-history of technical disobedience – a history of avant-garde dissidents who refused to play by the industry rules. 

However ! Quoting a notable free software activist Richard Stallman, we should not forget the spirit of playful cleverness that defines the hacking activity. Thus, after the screening, Lyon-based artist Ralt144MI will immerse us in the depths of the computer software in his lively audiovisual performance, where the joyful magic of algorithms is liberated and freely shared with the audience. Have fun and enjoy !