This playlist was made as an aid for animation- and film-students of LUCA School of Arts in Brussels, to get acquainted with (digital) media art. The students were trained in conventional linear narration, making storyboards and such, while I come from the visual arts where nonlinearity and experimental video art is the norm. It was a lot of fun to compile it. It may be a little outdated here and there, and could very well be updated at some point. The entire playlist can be visited here, but below is a selection which includes commentary on why the video is included.
Titanic sinks in REAL TIME
The video below was never intended to be art, but I found it intriguing enough to consider it as such. This two-hour-and-forty-minute real-time simulation was originally intended to promote a game. Based on the actual events and timeframe of the Titanic sinking, it has an eerie artistic quality all of its own. With no human figures present, the story of the disaster is instead told through the vessel itself, a few explanatory captions at key moments and minimal additional audio.
Even without depicting the desperation of the victims and in complete silence, the desolate demise of the Titanic becomes barely watchable by the end of the video.
Vermittlungsfilm: KUB 2019.01 Ed Atkins
Artist Ed Atkins speaks about his work, his avatars, the way he works (mostly by himself, taking up the role of actor, singer, writer, 3D animator, sound designer) with his medium. Atkins is an extremely eloquent speaker, and I find myself nodding along, for instance when he talks about making a scene “hysterical in some kind of way” – turning it into a caricature, an “accelerated version of something in order to draw attention to the original subject”.
“I wanted to make these videos that people were never allowed to relax into being comfortable with them.”
korean sheet masks and password management for pore refining wins
An actual art work, made for YouTube, by Addie Wagenknecht. In the playlists are also some interviews with Addie included, who is a computer engineer and artist. This is – to return to the term – hysterical.
Lorna Mills, What We Talk About When We Talk About GIFs: Visual Culture and Social Media
Lorna Mills foulmouthing her way through a talk about her .gif art works, as only she can do. Very funny, but also giving a good insight at how Lorna works – and thinks. On another note, Lorna’s tour de force, Ways of Something, can be explored here. It is absolutely breathtaking. Warning: there is porn in this video, albeit, as Lorna says, in the form of ‘bloopers’: “there is something good-natured about it”.
Next Level: Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács – Point Cloud, Old Growth | until 19 February 2019
On the occasion of their solo show at Foam (Photomuseum of Amsterdam) in 2018, Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács were interviewed about their work processes. Broersen and Lukács and me were fellow students at the Sandberg Institute Master of Fine Arts school in about 1998-2000. Over the years, our works have regularly crossed paths, as we work with very similar themes: landscapes and simulation, ecological narratives, cinematic references, and prominent (musical) soundtracks. We are also working with 3D scanning, which is one of the main focuses in the interview. The interview is in Dutch, but with English subtitles.
Antikythera Mechanism: The ancient ‘computer’ that simply shouldn’t exist – BBC REEL
We are moving into computer history territory, here, with one of the oldest computing devices ever found, the Antikythera Mechanism. The playlist contains some overviews of the history of computers, including the role of people such as Ada Lovelace.
How to deprogram homicidal sex robots | Lauren Kunze | TEDxSanFrancisco
One of my all time favourite (and unsettling) TEDx talks. Almost a third of messages between bots and humans are off-topic, romantic, sexual, or abusive. In this talk, Lauren Kunze shares what she learned from examining billions of messages. She also shares insights into how society can reduce harmful dynamics.
Lauren Kunze, an expert on ai, built her first chatbot at fifteen. It takes a bit before the talk really takes off, but it is worth it. And despite it being from 2019, before the widespread availability of AI, it remains a topical subject.
How an 1803 Jacquard Loom Led to Computer Technology
A nice, very short video about the connection between automated looms and computers. Having worked with (computer-controlled) looms myself, I consider the tapestries that came from the process as a thoroughly technological result – even though people, when confronted with these textile works, tend to perceive them as something artisanal, associating them exclusively with manual labour.
Telefoon van de toekomst, Wondere Wereld 1985
This video from 1985 (in Dutch) comes from a show by science communicator Chriet Titulaer, who gave the viewer weekly updates on the latest in technology. In contrast to the talk about homicidal robots above, this presentation is now awesomely dated; which is exactly what makes it so fantastic.
The presenter, Titulaer, demonstrates a mobile phone.
VisionVision #1: Welcome to our New Dimension!
VisionVision is a collaborative performance and video art project by artists Sarah Zucker and Edgar Fabián Frías. There is no need for further elaboration:
JODI’s My%Desktop 2002
This is one of the most iconic video works of digital origin. The video is a registration of the installation My%Desktop by artist’s duo JODI, as it was shown at MOMA New York (where I also saw it, in 2020). As JODI themselves say: “You are very close to a person when you are on his desktop.”
The videos are screen recordings of live ‘performances’ where Joan Heemskerk (JO) and Dirk Paesmans (DI) are fighting over the control of their computer mouse. It is not the computer who is malfunctioning through a virus, but it is the people who are getting the computer into a state of malfunction; unable to fulfill any of the many requests the erratically ‘controlled’ mouse is sending it. Poor computer.
Claudia Hart | Residency
A very brief interview with Claudia Hart, whom I had the pleasure of meeting IRL in Rotterdam at her show at the Boymans Depot in 2026. Hart writes and speaks about digital (virtual) media in ways that are too often ignored; it is about the experience of this ‘space’, about the political implications of working with these corporate technologies as artists, about materiality, and about a sense of fluidity of the medium that is so much at odd with a narrow technocratic view.
Bot Battle
For a while, there was a livestream of two chatbots, Pandorabot’s Kuki and Facebook’s Blenderbot, engaged in an endless – and often utterly pointless – ‘conversation’. The bots were ’embodied’ as 3d characters and stood in a TV-studio-like arena. Similar to the Titanic sinks in REAL TIME this post begins with, Bot Battle was never meant as an artwork.
Try to follow a couple of minutes of dialogue between Kuki and Blenderbot, of this 11 hour screen recording. I dare you!
Note: perhaps because of its length, embedding the video into this post turned out to be impossible, so just follow this link!