DEEP THOUGHT


DEEP THOUGHT


3hd 2022: Deep Thought
October 21 –  November 21, 2022
Shuang Li, Agnieszka Polska, Alice Bucknell, Josèfa Ntjam

In Douglas Adams’ 1978 comedy science-fiction, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2), there’s a supercomputer that’s been programmed to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question, which is the purpose of existence. This threatens to put “other professional thinking persons” devoted to contemplating such an idea out of a job. Happening as part of 3hd 2022: “Life, the Universe, and Everything,” Creamcake’s “Deep Thought” film program—named after the aforementioned artificial intelligence, while deferring only to four human artists—presents four of their films that broadly examine notions of interstellar imaginaries and life on earth without offering any absolute assertions.

Running through the ten-day 3hd festival into the following month, four films by four artists broadly examine notions of life on earth and interstellar imaginaries, from the globalized connectivity of trade routes to the terraforming of other planets. There’s Shuang Li’s fictionalized account of a French mother and young Chinese yellow vest factory worker, involved in the production of a ubiquitous symbol of industry distributed worldwide, while Agnieszka Polska presents a poetic collage of stock videos reflecting on notions of everyday life, inspired by a 1990 experiment to test conducted by the Galileo spacecraft on its way to Jupiter. Alice Bucknell’s 3D-animated work of world-building, AI, and speculative fiction investigates and critiques contemporary architectural visions for the colonization of Mars. Finally, Josèfa Ntjam offers an exploration around Persona, a fictional character inhabited by memories and narratives from her ancestors’ fight for Cameroon’s independence, in a film that explores permeations between temporalities, histories, hybrid bodies, and geographies.

I WANT TO SLEEP MORE BUT BY YOUR SIDE
Shuang Li


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Oct 21    --:--:--

I WANT TO SLEEP MORE BUT BY YOUR SIDE
Shuang Li

The Berlin and Geneva-based artist focuses on a single commodity and its imagery—the yellow vests, produced in Yiwu, China, while reflecting on the object as it circulates around the world, then emerging as a symbol of a social movement in France. Following a fictional narrative of an online relationship between a French mother and a young Chinese factory worker at one of these high-visibility vest factories, the work aims to discuss digital relationships and desires, as well as the interdependence between the digital landscape and the physical infrastructure and logistics systems that support it—but, more importantly, the cracks in between.

Commissioned by Times Museum, Guangzhou

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PERFECT LIVES
Agnieszka Polska


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Oct 22    --:--:--

PERFECT LIVES
Agnieszka Polska

In her film, the Berlin-based artist reflects on a 1990 control experiment, which took place when the Galileo spacecraft was passing Earth on its way to Jupiter. In the experiment, scientists wanted to determine if data sent from Galileo will confirm the existence of life on Earth. The film is constructed as a dense, hypnotic essay, where dynamically edited multiple layers of stock footage and music composed in similarity to game music create a melancholic atmosphere. The material used to create this poetic collage is a collection of hundreds of short stock videos presenting various scenes from human life and covering a number of themes, such as: business meetings, enjoying nature, group therapy, marriage, loneliness, crime. These highly artificial and unlikely situations seem to question the very existence of life: they are the evidence for the western idea of life being an illusion.

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THE MARTIAN WORD FOR WORLD IS MOTHER
Alice Bucknell


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Oct 22    --:--:--

THE MARTIAN WORD FOR WORLD IS MOTHER
Alice Bucknell

The London-based artist merges speculative fiction, 3D worldbuilding, artificial intelligence, and critiquing contemporary architectural proposals for the habitation of Mars, in this exploration of three Martian worlds with very different understandings of the Red Planet's future, and who gets to decide. Working with historical and contemporary science-fiction, Donna Haraway's theories on the nonhuman, and emergent space economies as its narrative backbone, the project underscores the limiting aspects of our language of space exploration that does not pivot towards human settlement as the necessary default, while exploring the political, ecological, economic, technological, and linguistic parameters framing contemporary discussions of Mars. 

Supported by the Goethe-Institut and Bloomberg New Contemporaries

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DISLOCATION
Josèfa Ntjam


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Oct 22    --:--:--

DISLOCATION
Josèfa Ntjam

The Saint-Étienne-based artist explores categories and labels through their deconstruction, in Persona’s journey telling of cycles, circulation and entanglement. In seeking permeations between temporalities, histories, hybrid (and sometimes monstrous) bodies and geographies made up with fragments of known and unknown, Ntjam’s character of Persona is subtly inhabited by memories and narratives from her ancestors’ fight for Cameroon’s independence. Reworking History from unofficial, personal and embodied stories, some of which have been silenced and sidelined, the artist mends historical legacy by integrating repressed voices and accounts, gathering fiction, memories, dreams, reality, myths, artificiality and orality, which is strongly linked to sound, vibrations and words under perpetual reconfiguration.

Written and directed by Josèfa Ntjam, in collaboration with Sean Hart and Nicolas Pirus

Co-produced with Aquatic Invasion Production and Palais de Tokyo, Paris

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