Part Two | Virtually Yours
Join us on e-flux Video & Film for Virtually Yours, the second part of the online series True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists’ Films programmed by Lukas Brasiskis.
Social networking, micro-blogging, and dating apps among other forms of online presence made way for new avenues for constructing digital identities and practicing de-personalized communication, enabling larger digital networks built around individuals. As a consequence, one’s personal narrative becomes linked to vast social, artistic, and political dimensions of the virtual world. In Part Two of the series True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists’ Films, Chris Marker’s Level Five (1997), Alison Nguyen’s every dog has its day (2019), Daniel Chew’s and Micaela Durand’s First (2019), and Jesse McLean’s See A Dog, Hear A Dog (2016) examine the blurred division between the physical and the online worlds. They reveal the complexity of digital identities, while investigating the potentials and limitations of artificial-intelligence-driven communication with the digital Other.
The films in Part Two | Virtually Yours will screen for two weeks, from February 23 through March 8, 2021.
True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists’ Films
Part Two | Virtually Yours
Tuesday, February 23—Monday, March 8, 2021
Chris Marker, Level Five, 1997
110 minutes
A programmer, Laura inherits the task of making a computer game featuring the Battle of Okinawa that took place in Japan during WWII. She searches the internet for information on the battle, and interviews experts and witnesses while trying to get to the most difficult level of the game—level 5—of the computer program left behind by her husband. The extraordinary circumstances of the Battle of Okinawa lead Laura to reflect deeply on her own life and on humanity facing its traumatic history, mediated by screens. Level Five addresses digital exteriorization of memories and alteration of intersubjective connections in the early age of virtual communication.
Alison Nguyen, every dog has its day, 2019
6:38 minutes
…you didn’t do anything, all you did was you pushed a button.
every dog has its day brings together consumer-produced media dating from early Camcorder footage to smartphone videos, to present-day vlogger uploads and web-cam streams. In a frenetic montage, the work explores internet vernacular, mediated presence, and the inherent manipulation in image production and consumption loops. This work extends the artist’s interest in mass media and the more specified role of the prosumer amidst society’s changing relationship to images. Throughout the work, prosumers address anonymous audiences through their cameras. A camboy proselytizes; an early vlogger points her camcorder into the bathroom mirror; members of the Heaven’s Gate internet cult sit in white lawn chairs and tell the audience how they would like to be remembered after their death. every dog has its day approaches the digital image not only as an extension of the self but also as a mirroring of cultural conditions and corporate expansion. It explores the complexities of the circular notion that, while we produce images, images also produce us.
Daniel Chew and Micaela Durand, First, 2019
11:53 minutes
A teenager lives her life toggling seamlessly between her physical and digital self. She walks over a bridge at sunrise, follows a stranger through the streets of the city, and meets up with a friend to wander in their favorite spots in New York City. She documents all of this on her phone, sharing her life with the world by uploading these videos to her profile. Comments—in the form of subtitles—puncture this narrative. They range from casual banter with friends to threatening comments from strangers. The work is a glimpse into the realities that teenagers have to negotiate today—how they connect through personas and engage in random digital encounters, and how that in turn shapes them.
Jesse McLean, Sea a Dog, Hear a Dog, 2016
17:41 minutes
Sea A Dog, Hear A Dog takes it title from a sound-design maxim and uses it as a conceit to grasp the desire for connection. The work probes the limits and possibilities of communication, asking: Can ever truly communicate with a machine, with a nonhuman animal, with each other? Our anthropomorphic tendencies, our fear of replacement by nonhuman forms, even our interpersonal limitations, cannot foreclose the possibility of connection and understanding, of a great unknown sometimes called trust. Reflecting on the infiniteness of human desires and finiteness of technological capacity, McLean’s video considers the deficits and surpluses produced by attempts at communication among humans, animals, and machines.
About the series
The unparalleled technological change happening over the past decades has caused a drastic shift in the perception and experience of reality. In the 1990s and early 2000s, traditional certitudes were cast into doubt indicating that belief in factual truths became just an option among a wide variety of angles and perspectives on the real. Consequently, academic discussions about the crisis of truth found resonance in the art world. A number of artists started to make works reflecting on or criticizing the “post-truth” discourse, causing what art critics and historians call the “documentary turn in contemporary art.” However, in the last ten years, when scientific facts about the irreversibility of global climate change have coincided with the unprecedented growth of science denialism, and when a reactionary rhetoric of “alternative facts” as well as the online spread of “fake news” have become a real threat to democracy, the question of the relationship between reality, mediated facts, and identity begs to be reconsidered.
Responding to the current political, technological, and environmental conditions, this series of screenings highlights twenty contemporary and historically important films and videos that examine unstable boundaries between fact and fiction, nature and artifice, objectivity and subjectivity, mediation and exposition. The title True Fake has been chosen as a statement alluding to audiovisual images perceived as fabricated or non-indexical and yet that surpass a simple true/false, documentary/fiction division.
Accompanying the series is a complementary e-flux journal reader dedicated to further inquiry around the often unstable and ambiguous relationship between reality and documentary facts. The series will also include a live discussion with some of the participating artists and other guests, date to be announced.
True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists’ Films runs from February 9 through April 20, 2021. Screening from today and for the next two weeks are the four films in Part Two: Virtually Yours. Subsequent parts will follow bi-weekly, with new films screened every other Tuesday.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
