This program assembles films where algorithms breathe. Here, the artist engages in a dialogue with a machine whose “mind” both threatens and expands creativity. From brainwaves controlling music to AI-animated hallucinations; from tactile “post-optical” images to the solar poetry of celluloid—this program explores a new ecology of perception. This is cinema not about the future, but about the present, where a human is born into a technogenic landscape, and their main companion is their own reflection in the digital flow.
I PADDLE MY CANUE THREE METER BELOW CIVILISATION
by Michel Klöfkorn
(9:44 min, Germany)
“The river, an autonomous, natural creature, a living world composed of billions of micro and macro-organisms htat are sensitive and yet exposed with no protection against the human economy” Erika S Dos Santos
THE DIFFUSION PILOT
by Aurelijus Čiupas
(7:12 min, Estonia)
If traditionally the animator is a master illusionist, conjuring motion through static mediums, what does this process look like when they are given a machine of infinite images?
“Diffusion Pilot” is the name of author’s ongoing research project, AI animation toolkit in development, and a short film that follows author’s contemplative journey through said project. This journey is fuelled by the conflicting nature of AI technology – that which both empowers and overpowers the very notion of creativity.
SOUND OF MIND AND BODY
by Gordon Monahan, Bill Coleman
(15:27 min, Canada)
Using the cinematic language to explore the connection between logic and emotion, technology and the organic, Sound of Mind and Body presents a unique film experience. Mind-controlled software harnesses a performer’s brainwaves to sculpt sound, light, kinetic actions, and musical composition while they move and dance. The film captures a unique brainwave-influenced improvisation, where neural impulses trigger chance-based algorithms, which then determine patterns and combinations of sounds, musical notes, and light pulsations.
AURORA OSCILLANS – REFUGIA AT THE INTERSECTION: ENTROPY, EXPOSURE, AND EMERGENCE
by Tristan Zand
(2:30 min, Iceland)
This film responds to a call to reimagine refugia not as enclosures, but as thresholds of transformation. Built through live-coded images and sounds, then fed into generative AI, the piece merges analog video glitches of the pre-Web1.0 era with the biomorphic textures of the early 2000s and the retrofuturist atmospheres of the pre-Web3.0 internet.
The result is an embryonic, proof-of-concept intermedia that vibrates between collapse and renewal, echoing the manifesto’s vision of refugia as sanctuaries where life adapts, modulates, and finds new pathways. Sight and sound become unstable and alive, forming a temporary ecology that resonates with the idea of art as a common language and a bastion of care.
Rather than a bunker, the film proposes refugia as a living interface, an open zone where entropy generates new possibilities, and where art, like life in past ice ages, creates spaces for survival, emergence, and community in uncertain futures.
THREE LONG MINUTES
by Gretchen Busl
(3:47 min, US)
A solar poetry with celluloid that allow perceiving what three minutes are.
I WAS BORN
by Elina Oikari
(14:32 min, Finland)
A man borns on the river. He travels in contrasting landscapes and seasons. The protagonist yearns for nature’s peace, but is continuously surrounded by the artificial while a mysterious figure seems to follow him on his journey.
By merging existential gaze into surreal landscapes, I Was Born examines the paradoxical relationship between human and the nature.
POST-OPTICAL IMAGES
by Paula Margarete Sawatzki
(20:10 min, Germany)
They flow like water, solidify into ice, into fixed visual habits, and go up in smoke when they spread to different places: The moving images of the film, I call them post-optical. They are invisible at first glance because they are created in the montage. Tactile, because they can be experienced haptically through the zoom. They are afterimages, because they contain the memory of the film. Post-optical images appear here on a grid, a moving background, on which the film and the flood of images come to a standstill.
In this film essay, I ask myself what film as an audiovisual experience triggers and can leave us with within the flood of digital images. We are exposed to moving images every day through smartphones and other screens, no matter where we look: films are shown on windows, on maps and on walls. But only some of these images leave an impression on us that shakes us up and makes us think. At the end of the film, a moving, postoptical image recollection is created, because at the end of watching, a film leaves us with questions and images that we were unable to see.
The film was created as part of the Master’s thesis entitled “Postoptische Bildlichkeit” (‘Postoptical Imagery’) at the Bauhaus-University Weimar in the master’s program ‘Medienwissenschaft – Filmkulturen Extended Cinema’, which has a philosophical approach to media and film studies. The term “postoptical” was developed independently and applied to film studies.
The film essay understands the concept of postoptical images, just like its working method, intuitively, essayistically, open-ended and approachable. It invites us to experience the postoptical and to discuss it afterwards.
ANGRY CARS
by Shaun Clark
(6:50 min, UK)
In the brutal chaos of life on the London roads, cars clash, flirt, and fume in this savage reflection of humanity’s impatience and absurdity.
All XII NoFilter Kino programmes
At Close Quarters
Read More
Fiction Swing
Read More
Metanarratives & Vagrant Cinema + Food & Footage:
Read More
Solo Soul Sauna
Read More
Tamed Algorithms
Read More
Through Sounds of Sirens
Read More
Under Pressure
Read More