Data, Bodies, Space shows an intriguing mix of different animation art practices, dealing with the “glitches” of our digitality-virtuality-reality condition. The selected shorts fast-forward to a future which is fascinating and frightening at the same time. In The Needlecast Rhapsody we witness a technology that can upload humans to distant locations in the galaxy. Moirai–Thread of Life also shows a journey to different cosmic dimensions and touches on quantum physics to explain notions of fate. Posthuman Hospital and My Mind As/Is Your Memory, My Body As/Is Your Substance take one to a nightmarish posthuman dystopia, whereas Rehousing Technosphere gives a more hopeful look into a new planetary ecology in a more-than-human future in which the digital is omnipresent yet endued with haptic and sensual properties. La Limite est une facade depicts a mesmerizing journey of fluidity and metamorphosis with a poetic approach, whereas CIRCVS MAXIMVS and Interchange feature a humorous take on virtual, computer-animated worlds and their relationship with the “real” world, highlighting the entanglements of power and control.

The Needlecast Rhapsody (2022) | Jonathan Armour (IE) | 06:00 min
Borrowed from Altered Carbon, Needle Casting is a future technology that enables uploading and sending data to distant locations in the galaxy, transmitting the data at speeds greatly in excess of light speed. Working with Wendyl Harris, The Needlecast Rhapsody is a fantastical visualisation of how uploading of the human form might occur. The soundscape is Cestoda from the Nondestructive Examination album by jjjacob. All rights reserved to jjjacob.

Moirai – Thread of Life (2022) | Ina Conradi (US/SG) & Mark Chavez (US) | 06:00 min
What is quantum mechanics and how can we explain it? Moirai attempts to describe quantum phenomena using Southeast Asian design.

The Posthuman Hospital (2022) | Junha Kim (KR) | 07:00 min
The Posthuman Hospital is an experimental animation film about an imaginary hospital showing the medical records of its posthuman patients.

My Mind As/Is Your Memory, My Body As/Is Your Substance (2023) | Jieyuan Huang (CN/AT/DE) | 03:00 min
My Mind As/Is Your Memory, My Body As/Is Your Substance is a new media and video work that explores the relationship between humanoid robots and humans in the context of a post-human wasteland. Through the use of CGI, the artist creates visually rich sequences that integrate themes and clues to provoke questions about the creation and life of robots, the appearance of robots in relation to humans, and the politics associated with the death of a robot. The artist examines the dichotomous hierarchy between robots and humans that was prevalent in the early days of AI, but has since been broken down by literature and art. The spiritual intelligence of robots has been raised to a higher level, and the explosion of hardware development has rapidly upgraded the robot’s body. However, there remains an innate heterogeneity between humans and robots due to the separation of the physical from the mechanical and the procedural from the psychological.

Rehousing Technosphere (2022) | Wang & Söderström (SE) | 06:00 min
This speculative animated film takes place on Earth in a distant future. Playing with the tone and structure of a nature documentary, it offers glimpses into how life forms adapt to a new planetary ecology. Earth has been home to humanity for around two hundred thousand years – a fraction of the geological time scale. Yet in this short slice of habitation, our imprint has been so vast, so palpable, that some now describe the littered layer of human generated structures and systems as the ‘technosphere’. This is a quickly evolving stratum of neo-geologic time and one that, unlike the biosphere, is comparatively deficient in recycling its own materials. This film takes us into a desert-like world, soft and colourful. New species exploit a degrading layer of the planet’s crust by digging, foraging, and designing new homes. What is toxic for one species is a perfect habitat for another. Among the remnants of the Anthropocene, life moves.

La Limite est une facade (2023) | Dorian Rigal Minuit (FR) | 07:00 min
Quatre archétypes architecturaux de la région parisienne se retrouvent numérisés et présentés comme des artefacts archéologiques dans un musée. Ils sont de simple de plâtre sans couleur déraciné de leur urbanité. Mais un jour leur vie bascule, ils vont commencer à se métamorphoser et devenir des objets organiques et mous jusqu’à se comprimer à l’extrême comme des césars. Puis lentement chacun à leur tour, dans des univers fantastiques, vont redevenir eux-même jusqu’à retrouver la peau, la couleur de laquelle ils s’étaient vêtus jadis.

CIRCVS MAXIMVS (2022) | Maxime Chudeau (FR) | 03:00 min
“A simulated city crowd lives in total ignorance of their condition, until their creator suddenly manifests itself…”

Interchange (2022) | Ryotaro Sato (JP) | 08:00 min
This film was produced using only existing 3D models, called “Assets”. “Assets” are material data distributed on the Internet that can be freely used for various productions of digital images such as games and videos.I downloaded a large amount of data of those assets and placed in a scene. The infinitely replicable data becomes a crowd, sweeping away everything. I shot the model of a soldier who was there. I filmed the soldiers being transformed in the mass of data, depicting the Internet as a contemporary battlefield.