IDFA DocLab: Exhibition

It’s 2024, or—time doesn’t actually matter so much—2529: an octopus as narrator, old dikes that once formed the contours of land. In an generative audio experience, a podcast that is not a podcast, Drift connects rising sea levels and the climate crisis to the rise of AI. This story world combines the imaginary with factual sources, such as the IPCC climate report and real-time weather forecasts by the Dutch meteorological institute. In a distant future, society has learned hard lessons from environmental neglect. Due to pollution and rising sea levels, the Netherlands, such as it once was, no longer exists. The waters have now been injected with AI. A techno-liquid environment serves as a living repository of knowledge, merging ancient wisdom with futuristic insights. The pace and rhythm of the story are synchronized with the lunar phases and the tides, moving away from the rigid mechanical clock that dictates human life, and back to the way Mother Earth intended. Technology and nature combine to create a new reality that the listener can drift through.

The idea that nature and technology are incompatible is outdated. Nature is full of cultivated elements introduced to serve the needs of human beings. The nature around us is subjected to -isms such as anthropocentrism, colonialism and capitalism. Add to this new technological systems such as AI and robotics, from which autonomous entities emerge that will probably also merge with nature, and an infinite number of possible future scenarios unfold. These speculations are the subject of the innovative augmented reality app Future Botanica. The app allows the user to design ecosystems with new nature using an AI. These virtual ecosystems are then planted in existing physical nature: you superimpose digital designs—one of the proposed scenarios or one you make yourself—on existing landscapes. By making your imaginings visible, you can safely explore ideas, expectations, fears and desires regarding the future of the natural environment. Winner of the Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant 2024. 

In an intimate space it can feel slightly uncomfortable, voyeuristic even, to watch Lisa Schamlé draped as a living part of her own performance/installation on a mirrored object. In the mirror, Schamlé looks not only at herself, but also back at you, seeking contact with her audience in order to involve it actively in the process taking place. In this third and final part of her trilogy on sexuality, Schamlé reclaims the autonomy of her body from where it has been lost: in the public domain, that abstract area where the female body is always exposed to the objectifying and normative gaze of the other. A gaze that has an absurd degree of power over the way women see themselves, and through which they often judge themselves, and each other, mercilessly. Schamlé strives to escape the suffocating dictate of an idealized body image. This raises the question whether in art the gaze can become inquiring rather than judgmental. Winner of the Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant 2024.