Film program MedienKunstTage NRW 2025
If the eye were not sunlike, the sun‘s light it would not see
Film program More Future! MedienKunstTage NRW 2025
If the eye were not sunlike, the sun‘s light it would not see //
Wär nicht das Auge sonnenhaft, die Sonne könnt es nie erblicken
– Curated by Vanina Saracino
Film program on October 24, 2025
The first part of the film program takes a focused look at how technology shapes and forms our present and our future. The artworks operate at the intersection of logic and mysticism, global network infrastructures and local collective struggles, as well as speculative economies and imagined futures. They reflect on how we hope, fear, and cope with uncertainties at the edge of rapidly expanding technological possibilities.
1. Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Keeping Count, Annotated, 9’38’’, 2021–23
Keeping Count (2021–23) displays a musical score by Th&o alongside her animation and excerpts from educational films to explore the desire for certainty, legibility, and a “correct answer.” This video mixes spiritual elements with mathematical and scientific aspects, using digital artifacts, noise, pixelation, and stuttering animations to remind us of instability—the instability of meaning and epistemological hierarchies. Measurements, approximations, and their signs and symbols are related to questions of Black liberation. Through the recombination of phrases and leaps between lines, this video expresses that complex lives cannot be reduced to fixed formulas. The artist engages with questions of solving x as an exercise not in precision, but in deliberate approximation and miscalculation.
2. Elisabeth Brun, Big tech Blues, 20’, 2025
Big Tech Blues is a poetic film essay that reflects on the life and resilience of rural communities in the age of Big Tech. The abandoned school from the filmmaker’s childhood in the small village of Strengelvåg in northern Norway was one day bought up by Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink program—an event that prompted reflections on what is at stake when rapidly developing digital technology permeates all aspects of human life.
The film links personal narratives about SpaceX’s intrusion into the filmmaker’s hometown with existential reflections on connectedness, freedom, nostalgia, and progress. It reflects on dilemmas related to place, digital technology, and physical experience. At the heart of this exploration is the experience of sound: the hum of digital technology, the laughter of children, and the sounds of weather and nature. The film asks: What does a living place sound like?
By blending personal anecdotes with broader reflections, the film offers an insider’s view of the subtle encroachment of the digital industry into rural areas in northern Norway and beyond. It meditates on the complex relationships people have with their surroundings, highlighting the dual constraints of digital technology and the importance of embodied experiences for memory and connection.
3. Gala Hernández López, for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world, 19’06’’, 2024
for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world is an experimental dual-screen film that explores the connections between crypto culture and cryotechnology as two speculative technologies for which the future becomes an economic resource to be exploited. Using a collage of YouTube videos, archival images, and 3D animations, for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world explores the connections between financial speculation, speculative science fiction, and the prediction and control of the future. The narrative explores the fantasies conveyed by cryptocurrencies and is carried by the enveloping text of an invisible narrator who describes her intimate dreams and fears. She accompanies us on a dreamlike, poetic, historical, and futuristic audiovisual journey, conjuring up the figure of American extropian and cypherpunk Hal Finney, a key figure in the history of Bitcoin, who has also been a cryonics patient since 2014. In the narrator’s dreams, Finney integrates a section of society that has entered into a state of suspended animation or subsidized biostasis in order to accelerate economic recovery following a future global economic crisis. The narrator has an imaginary conversation with Finney about belief or fear of the future and how an optimistic bet on the future could actually jeopardize its potential through a political departure from the struggles of the present.
The film also explores the feeling of temporary suspension: through the character of “Scheintod” (apparent death), it recalls a historical era characterized by a high degree of unpredictability and uncertainty due to the acceleration and disruption of new technologies and the manifold consequences of the Anthropocene. The idea of temporary suspension is questioned by the dichotomy “suspension – free fall”: Is humanity floating in uncertainty, or are we rather in free fall? Given the limits of human perception and knowledge, how can we distinguish between the two? “For here am I sitting in a tin can far above the world” works with the nonlinear temporality of dreams and memories, the fractured temporality of time travel narratives, such as the one in which Hal Finney enters his cryogenic capsule.
4. Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung, Literally No Place, 18’36’’, 2023
Hello, everyone, this is the final boss of Vocal Fry. Daniel Felstead’s glamorous Julia Fox avatar is back. Last time, she took on Zuckerberg’s metaverse. Now she takes us on a journey into the cyberwar between AI utopians and AI pessimists, examining the risks, fears, and hopes of all sides. Will AI bring about the post-scarcity society envisioned by Marx, where we can all live in labor-free luxury, or will it literally wipe out humanity?
We all know that Julia Fox is not a Manichean, binary woman. As she navigates the dichotomy of AI apocalypse and AI utopia, she presents us with an uncanny array of possible future scenarios, delving deeply into the predictions of both AI simps and manic tech overlords such as Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. Watch this video before you decide which side you’re on.
The screening of the films will be followed by an artist talk with Elisabeth Brun & Vanina Saracino (curator of the film program).
Film program on October 25, 2025:
Goethe wrote: “Were not the eye sunlike, it could never behold the sun” – a metaphor for the relationality of perception, with the sun at its center. The works in the second part of the film program explore solar energy as a generative, relational, and informational force, reflecting on how life, memory, ecosystems, technologies, and bodies are intertwined through solar rhythms and shaped by exposure, transformation, and decay.
The following films will be shown:
1. Shuang Li, ÆTHER (Poor Objects), 18’28’’, 2021
ÆTHER combines the imagery of ring lighting, a lighting device often used by vloggers, cam models, and a growing group of people who now work from home and live on screens, with that of a ring-shaped solar eclipse, continuing the artist’s reflection on personal subjectivity and its intertwining with an increasingly immersive and ubiquitous online culture.
The concept of “leakage” reflects the inverse relationship between the body and its representation on screen and runs as a fundamental theme through the artist’s visual works and screenplay, as an exploration of the imperfect transmission between virtual pixelated objects and backgrounds into physical life.
The sphere of ring light and solar eclipse becomes an opening that the camera penetrates, while overlapping languages of evolution and pregnancy contemplate the spatio-temporal detachment of our social and technological conditions. Through the portrayal of a cam model and a mukbang vlogger, the work aims to promote a reversal of the dematerialization and digitization of physical bodies under our current mediatized circumstances.
2. Ani Schulze, Flint House Lizard, 15:49 min.,2019
The body and physicality are at the heart of Flint House Lizard, which moves between fable, fiction, reality, and speculation. Through hypnotic sequences of shifting textures, moods, characters, landscapes, and distinctive soundscapes, the film unfolds nonlinear fragments of a bizarre and unsettling story. The result is a mood or state of mind that hovers between sleep and wakefulness.
Flint House Lizard navigates through four different cycles that are oriented toward the sun. The film begins in darkness and starts with a single body or figure. Although its protagonists seem to refine and harness the potential energy of the sun, the assumption arises that the sun has its own intentions.
The film draws on the ideas of Soviet biophysicist Alexander Chizhevsky (1897–1964). His approach linked sunspots, solar flares, and the eleven-year solar cycle to political and social developments such as populist mass movements. Inspired by his writings, the film shows how contemporary social patterns of mass images, information structures, and current forms of populism simulate and determine the individual body and influence the movements of groups.
The densely layered narrative of Flint House Lizard reveals patterns of storytelling influenced by speculation and belief formation. Seductive, haptic close-ups develop into a disturbing, dark sequence of images and a brief choreography of computer-generated images. This animation, created in part with mass simulation software, reflects the striking ease with which crowd movements can be simulated using algorithms.
3. Jana Kerima Stolzer and Lex Rütten, Ponor, 23’29’’, 2025
What does it mean to view a river as an organism consisting of many individual parts? With this question, Lex Rütten and Jana Kerima Stolzer take up the so-called “Gaia hypothesis,” which is based on the scientific concept that the Earth can be viewed as a self-regulating system in which living beings and their physical environment interact to create life-sustaining conditions.
Hypothesis,” which is based on the scientific concept that the Earth can be viewed as a self-regulating system in which living beings and their physical environment interact to create conditions conducive to life.
In the video work “Ponor,” they explore the underground paths of a river from the highlands to its sources.
Like a sinkhole in karst rock, the video work allows viewers to follow the water through complex cave systems and encounter tiny organisms such as cave beetles. Given a voice, our non-human neighbors from the world of flora and fauna take center stage and tell the story of their lives, their survival, and their adaptation.
In a unique way and in a mixture of fact and fiction, the artists tell the story of a river that has its origins in the karst landscape before it emerges from hundreds of springs. The different narratives of the protagonists illustrate the connection and feedback system between all (living) beings on earth and at the same time reveal the different temporalities in which they encounter each other.
The screening of the films will be followed by an artist talk with Ani Schulze, Jana Kerima Stolzer, Lex Rütten & Vanina Saracino (curator of the film program).
Biographies of filmmakers and artists
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner. Her middle name, Janan, comes from the Arabic root (J-N-N / جنان) and stands for the unbound, the veiled, and the unsanctioned. Accordingly, Rasheed explores the relationship between language, mysticism, and disobedience. She examines the materiality of wayward language—acrobatic (Clarice Lispector) sentences with trapdoors (Fred Moten), runaway syllables scattered across the margins of a page, words that break free from the orbit of their parent clause, footnotes that devour their references, and utterances that dissolve before they can be recorded. She also explores the materiality of reading, focusing on spiritual practices in which reading takes place through touch and digestion rather than just viewing. As a “language person” (Paul Soulellis), she “gives language a body” (Chang Yuchen) through her large-scale installations, multi-channel video works, publications, software, performances, public archives, and learning platforms.
Her work in the fields of art, education, and new technologies has been recognized with numerous awards. In 2024, she was a finalist for Artes Mundi 11 and received a fellowship from High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree. She has received additional grants and awards from Working Artist (2023), the Schering Foundation (2022 Award for Artistic Research), the Creative Capital Award (2022), an Artists + Machine Intelligence Grant – Experiments with Google (2022), and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts (2021). Her work has been presented worldwide, including in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Her recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include the Henry Art Gallery (2025), REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). She has participated in group exhibitions at the Studio Museum, Bronx Museum, New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, MASSMoCA, The Kitchen, and ICA Philadelphia.
Elisabeth Brun is a visual artist, filmmaker, and theorist who explores questions of form, mediation, knowledge, and the relationship between humans and the environment. Her work takes various forms, including films, installations, 3D works, and texts, and engages in a dialogue between philosophy, environmental science, and visual art. Brun is particularly interested in how media technology influences the perception of place, space, and time, often drawing on her subarctic/northern Norwegian origins.
Brun’s work has been shown internationally at festivals and venues such as the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (DE), the Seattle Art Museum (US), the Festival du Nouveaux Cinéma in Montreal (CA), and the Lofoten International Art Festival LIAF (NO). Her recent awards and honors include the 2020 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment from Kings College, a special mention at the Mimesis Doc Fest Emerging Artist Award, and a Poetry by Video Artist Award at the Cadence Video Poetry Festival. Elisabeth Brun holds a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Oslo, has 14 years of experience as a documentary filmmaker/journalist (NRK), and a Post-Master in Public Art from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.
Gala Hernández López is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. Her work combines interdisciplinary research with the production of essay films, video installations, and performances on new forms of subjectification brought about specifically by computer-assisted digital capitalism. From a feminist and critical perspective, she examines the discourses and imaginary worlds that circulate in virtual communities as symptomatic fictions of the state of the world. Her work has been shown at the Berlinale, DOK Leipzig, Cinéma du Réel, IndieLisboa, Transmediale, and Salon de Montrouge, among others. Her film “The Mechanics of Fluids” won the César Award for Best Short Documentary and the Scam (France) Experimental Work Award 2023, receiving a total of a dozen awards. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Paris 8, where she is developing a research and creative project on screen recordings and has been teaching for three years. Thanks to a DAAD research fellowship, she has worked as an associate professor (ATER) at Gustave Eiffel University and as a visiting researcher at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf (Germany). From 2023 to 2024, she will be Artist in Residence at the French Academy in Spain – Casa de Velázquez. She is co-director of the research and creative collective After Social Networks (www.after-social-networks.com). She regularly gives workshops.
Daniel Felstead is a scientist and artist whose work focuses on the relationship between the body, technology, and culture. He is the course director of the Master’s program in Fashion Media & Communication at the London College of Fashion (UAL). Daniel has given lectures and organized exhibitions internationally, including at the Architectural Association, Berlin Critics Week, Angewandte, Fundació Foto Colectania, Global Art Forum, MAPS, ICA, PAF, RCA, RISD, Shedhalle, Transmediale, and the V&A Museum.
Most recently, Daniel and his collaborator Jenn Leung have produced a series of highly acclaimed short films exploring the myths, ideologies, and realities of the metaverse, AI, biotechnology, and neural media.
Jenn Leung is an educator and technical artist specializing in 3D, game engine simulations, and real-time streaming tools. She is a lecturer in Creative Technology and Design at London College of Fashion, UAL, and a researcher at Antikythera’s Synthetic Intelligence Studio in 2024. She is also a member of Off World Live, an engineering and research group for Unreal Engine developers, and was program director at Architectural Association VS Unit 5 Xalon.
Shuang Li (born 1990 in the Wuyi Mountains, CN) lives and works in Berlin, DE, and Geneva, CH. In 2014, she completed her master’s degree in media studies at New York University. Li’s work, which includes performance, interactive websites, sculptures, and moving image installations, deals with various media that shape the contemporary digital landscape. She takes globalized communication systems as her starting point and draws inspiration from different locations and uneven flows of information.
Her recent solo exhibitions include “I’m Not,” Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2024); “Distance of the Moon,” Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai (2024); “I’m Not,” Swiss Institute, New York (2024); Galeria Madragoa, Lisbon (2023); Cherish, Geneva (2021); and Callie’s, Berlin (2020). She has also participated in numerous institutional group exhibitions, including Fondazione Prada, Milan, curated by Nicholas Cullinan (2023); Zuzeum Art Centre, Riga, curated by Tīna Pētersone (2023); Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2022); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, curated by Tobias Berger, Jill Chun, and Daniel Ho (2022); Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva (2021); X Museum, Beijing, curated by Poppy Dongxue Wu (2020); Times Museum, Guangzhou, curated by Biljana Ciric (2019); and Mao Jihong Arts Foundation, Chengdu, in collaboration with Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018).
Her work has been shown at a number of biennials, including the most recent Whitney Biennial 2024 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024); the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2024, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Switzerland (2024); the Kunsthal Charlottenborg Biennale 2023 in Copenhagen; and the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia (2022). Li has also collaborated with Miuccia Prada on a special project for the Miu Miu Spring/Summer 2023 fashion show.
Ani Schulze (*1982 lives and works in Cologne and Porto) studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and the Glasgow School of Arts. Her works have been shown in group and solo exhibitions, including at the Mountains Gallery in Berlin, the Lehmann + Silva Gallery in Porto, and the Kunstverein Siegen, as well as in the Double Feature program at the Kunsthalle Schirn in Frankfurt. She works with video, painting, and large-scale installations. Her most recent solo exhibitions include “At One Go” at Mountains (Berlin 2025); “The Convent of Pleasure- Prolog/ Ticking Time” at the Moltkerei Werkstatt (Cologne 2023/24); “Snake Charming” at Galerie Lehmann+Silva (Porto 2023); “Lovers & Hunters,” Kunstverein Siegen (2021); “Hang in there, baby,” A Certain Lack of Coherence, Porto (2021); “Flint House Lizard,” Basis (Frankfurt, 2019); “Flint House Lizard,” I: Project Space (Beijing, 2019) and “7 Follies,” Artothek (Cologne, 2019). Her work has been shown in a number of international group exhibitions and screenings, including at the Hamburger Kunsthalle; Galerie Clages, Cologne; Galeria Municipal Porto; Salzburger Kunstverein; Fundacion Botin, Santander; Kölnischer Kunstverein; Pavilhão Branco, Lisbon; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Kunsthalle Schirn, Frankfurt; MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; and Extra City Kunsthalle, Antwerp. She has received numerous scholarships and awards, including the Scholarship for Media Artists from the State of North Rhine-Westphalia; working scholarships from the Kunststif
Ani Schulze studierte an der Städelschule in Frankfurt, Kunstakademie Karlsruhe, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf und der Glasgow School of Arts. 2023 erschien ihre Monografie Hang in There, Baby bei Mousse Publishing.
Jana Kerima Stolzer and Lex Rütten are an artist duo who have been working together since 2016. They create multimedia installations and performances that deal with the technological environment as a formative and transformative component of the world, influencing not only humans but also flora and fauna. The protagonists of their multimedia works are mostly beings that have no voice in reality: hybrid beings representing nature and technology, plants and animals that convey their own view of the world in musical environments. The duo collects stories from around the world, based on factual research, to develop narratives that enable new connections and relationships. They combine historical and scientific research with science fiction to design the (im)possible for the future.
Jana Kerima Stolzer studied at the Münster University of Fine Arts with Aernout Mik and Lex Rütten at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with Dominique Gonzalez Foerster. In 2020, both were fellows at the Academy for Theater and Digitality. In 2023, the duo opened their first institutional solo exhibition at Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund. This year, they had their first solo exhibition in Seoul, South Korea, at Loop Alt Space.
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