The following video essays are the result of the summer course, “Linia Verde”, which was held in Câmpu Cetății. The course attempted to elicit idiosyncratic solutions for circumventing the apparent inability of audiovisual media to represent complex phenomena that go beyond what our senses can perceive in a unified way, such as those coined by philosopher Timothy Morton as “hyper-objects”. According to Morton, the term “hyper-object” tentatively designates phenomena which, because of their massive scale and diffusion in both space and time, cannot be encompassed by the conventional modes of visual representation that humans use in relation to their environment. In an age of image overload, when audiovisual modalities are the main generators of meaning in our society, how can we come to terms with the unrepresentable nature of hyper-objects such as the internet; language and code; the interplay of desire and power; sleep; and planetary doom?
desire power (Ioana Colac, Miruna Diaconu, Ana-Maria Diaconu)
What is desire? It is the question we kept asking as we were looking through media archives, film history, and definitions proposed in literature. Our visual culture is saturated with messages about what we should want, what we truly want, and how we might obtain it. In this video, we present a variety of sources that reflect the multifaceted and often contradictory nature of desire, especially as it intersects with morality, sexuality, and societal pressure.
language, code, memory (Emilia Faur, Bogdan Bălan, Dan Robert Nicolau, Nicoleta Vlad)
Naming the object as a means to map reality is an essential human trait. What happens when one loses the memory of the meaning of the words, or when one decides to break the referential code? What happens as language loses its function? Does reality make sense anymore? Our video essay explores the various and unbounded facets of language, diffused concentrically, from its encoding, to its relation to both individual and collective memory and to our Weltanschauung.
you’ve got spam (Paul Catalan, Szilágyi Csenge)
Challenged with “representing the unrepresentable”, we picked the internet as our hyperobject. Spam is a vast and particularly viscous digital phenomenon, a relentless intrusion for which any click is a possible exploit. Many digital platforms seem to be built on – or at least heavily infected by – a bedrock of spam. We mirrored the often unstructured and misshapen forms spam takes by mixing impersonal text narration and a grammarless interlude with desktop documentary storytelling.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz (Darius Bumbar, Călin Boto, Adnana Greșiță, Rareș Ignat)
Using various found footage from early YouTube (uploaded before 2014), zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz is a video peekaboo looking at different contemporary instances of sleep (intimacy, rest, non-activity, non-productivity), as they appear randomly across audiovisual media.
someday we will all be a fairy tale (Elisa Ganea, Viviana, Mara Oglakci, Toni Aricei)
someday we will all be a fairy tale is a video essay that aims to visually represent the loss of the planet, which is all around but impossible to locate, a true hyperobject. Everything is constantly changing, our worlds are coming to an end, and new worlds are being born.
The summer course “Linia Verde”, organized by Tranzit.ro/Cluj and hypha_etc, was conceived and taught by Ana Szel and Liri Chapelan (National University of Theatre and Film, Bucharest).
