Green is toxic, alienating, envious. Green is hopeful, lush, prosperous. Chromakey backgrounds and laser diodes are green: they can place something somewhere else by using a color that is as natural as it is artificial. The organic and the synthetic meet in green. And it is via an ever-changing strip of electric green, presented on a 17-meter long LED video display, that I first encounter the 2021 Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, curated by the Centre d’Art Contemporain’s director Andrea Bellini and the New York-based collective DIS (Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, and David Toro, whose 2016 Berlin Biennale polarized opinions and traced generational gaps like few other artistic proposals). Riccardo Benassi’s Daily Dense Dance Desiderio (DDDD) (2021), a three-minute video loop presented at the Champel Léman station in Geneva, allures biennale visitors and random train commuters alike with its inebriating sound, hypnotic imagery, and poetic reveries. With this installation, the artist turns the station’s calm hallway into a soft rave where semi-abstract images pulsate to the rhythm of a gentle, danceable melody, over which sentences about bodies, technology, and affects float intermittently. DDDD brings together organic, synthetic, and linguistic matter: out-of-focus hands may well be tentacles, iridescent lines …

The press schedule for the opening days of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (BIM) included a special visit to CERN’s “Antimatter Factory.” Our guide was a cheerful Chinese-American engineer who laughed at my astonishment when he explained that our knowledge of the universe—stars, planets, galaxies—amounts to its visible 4 percent. The remaining 96 percent is composed of “dark matter,” i.e. something we know nothing about. Given the dim political climate around the globe, the idea of an ontological fumbling in the dark with the help of a risible fraction of enlightenment felt spot-on. As in deep space, darkness and dark energy also abound in this year’s well-researched BIM. Its thunderous title, “The Sound of Screens Imploding,” echoes the Big Bang, but also the collapse of a dying star: the Big Screen. “The long era of projection on screens is coming to an end,” curators Andrea Bellini and Andrea Lissoni state in their introductory text in the exhibition booklet, “and will give way to environments that reverberate with the radiant echo of their implosion.” It’s exciting to think of moving images as light and sonic waves expanding across space and cyberspace, past the constrains of beamers, reflective surfaces, or human vision. …