performance,film
FALSE
A found-footage horror film
made in realtime.
(This is a work-in-progress. )
FALSE
WITNESS
A found-footage horror film
made in realtime.
(This is a work-in-progress. )
Part of my series of research in “performance of absence”, False Witness will be a live found-footage horror film crafted within an enclosed black box. Witness the artist’s absence through night-vision cameras, blended with wildlife trail cams, AI forgeries, and dreamlike self-documenting videos. The film’s narrative evolves uniquely through code-based randomization, existing in constant flux.
The
‘live’ aspect of the performance will be intentionally obscure and blended in
throughout the making of sound, trials, image texture, and other details.
I want to use this project to continue my investigation on layers of witnessing, and the impact of absence amidst censorial erasures. It will look at how technological processing, appropriation, and simulation of found footage – including the ones powered by today’s AI – mystify the act of ‘witnessing’. It will also offer a highly personal and empathetic response to the experience of living in an openly censored culture where only euphemism and simulation can carry messages within. The depths of said messages depend solely on the viewer’s willingness to deduce from the obvious, the gibberish, and the absent.
Throughout the experience, the off-screen gaze from the ‘witnesses’ and their complicity are invoked by a fluid spiral of content between surveillance, documentary, and fiction. Their expectations are repeatedly perturbed as the film morphs and takes shape. False Witness has no single purpose. It depicts, it arouses, it generates loopholes and crosses fourth walls. What makes evidence? What accounts for truth? Can we own the truth of what we are witnessing? Four decades after Baudrillard’s prophecy of ‘simulacra’ – how are we coping with the disorientation, knowing what we know?
Exhibition:
False Witness (Pilot, 3-channel video art, 4”):
2023.9 - Sysco’s Creative AI Challenge, Outernet London, UK
False Witness (Film with live performance, 11”):
2024.3 - Violent Divinity, Luckypot 196, London, UK
False Witness (Single-channel video, 2”):
2024.4 - Melting Walls, Montreux, Switzerland
Award:
2023-24 - The Jamie Iddon Award, Blast Theory, UK
I want to use this project to continue my investigation on layers of witnessing, and the impact of absence amidst censorial erasures. It will look at how technological processing, appropriation, and simulation of found footage – including the ones powered by today’s AI – mystify the act of ‘witnessing’. It will also offer a highly personal and empathetic response to the experience of living in an openly censored culture where only euphemism and simulation can carry messages within. The depths of said messages depend solely on the viewer’s willingness to deduce from the obvious, the gibberish, and the absent.
Throughout the experience, the off-screen gaze from the ‘witnesses’ and their complicity are invoked by a fluid spiral of content between surveillance, documentary, and fiction. Their expectations are repeatedly perturbed as the film morphs and takes shape. False Witness has no single purpose. It depicts, it arouses, it generates loopholes and crosses fourth walls. What makes evidence? What accounts for truth? Can we own the truth of what we are witnessing? Four decades after Baudrillard’s prophecy of ‘simulacra’ – how are we coping with the disorientation, knowing what we know?
Exhibition:
False Witness (Pilot, 3-channel video art, 4”):
2023.9 - Sysco’s Creative AI Challenge, Outernet London, UK
False Witness (Film with live performance, 11”):
2024.3 - Violent Divinity, Luckypot 196, London, UK
False Witness (Single-channel video, 2”):
2024.4 - Melting Walls, Montreux, Switzerland
Award:
2023-24 - The Jamie Iddon Award, Blast Theory, UK