Film
Sun Set Rise
Short Film, 2023, 35'. Directed, produced and written by Leo Shearmur and Taro Spirig.
This film was selected to the 59th Solothurn Film Festival. More information here.
You can find out more information about the movie on Swissfilms.ch
Logline: Why do we take pictures of the setting sun? That is what Julia Melaninski, a documentary filmmaker, wants to find out. But when she accidentally films a man who did not consent to be filmed, and the argument escalates, Julia discovers a darker side to taking pictures and their hold over reality.
Short director's note: Sun Set Rise is the cinematic equivalent of a non-fiction novel. It fictionalises something real, a troubling and pervasive phenomenon, but in such a way that the audience is never sure what to believe. This phenomenon is what the French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, called ‘hyper-reality’, which describes our perverse relationship with mediated reality. Throughout Sun Set Rise, a fictional documentary filmmaker confronts and is confronted by hyper-reality. She wonders why we take pictures of the setting sun, whether our concern over privacy is a rejection of hyper-reality, if we can still respond to real issues if they are always mediated. These meditation have no conclusion, just leave behind a feeling for the uncanny.
A few pictures from the movie:
Digital
Entrained
Interactive installation, 2022.
This digital art installation emerged, as I was working under the supervision of Marcelo Coehlo during the Spring 2022 semester at MIT.
Behaviors emerging from a collection of independent agents appear frequently in nature. Entrainment is an example of such a phenomenon where individual agents whose behaviors follow a given frequency pattern tend to collectively synchronize. When two pendulums are attached to the same surface, their oscillation frequencies will synchronize. When fireflies emit flashes of light, they tend to synchronize their flashing frequencies. When an audience clap, they tend to reach the same clapping frequency.
As all technological devices are interconnected and working collectively in the current internet era, we are seeing similar emerging behaviors. Such technological emerging behaviors are particularly interesting as they can emulate behaviors found in nature but they can also produce completely new interactions and experiences. This art installation is an exploration of these emerging technological behaviors with the currently available technology.
The viewer is invited to interact with smartphones which behave independently from each other but collectively entrain. The smartphones hang from the ceiling in a dark room. Each phone produces repetitive flashes of light and sounds at a given interval of time and as fireflies would, all the phones synchronize their flashes with their neighbors until all phones are collectively flashing at the same frequency. The viewer can touch the screen of a phone which results in augmenting its flashing-frequency and causing it to desynchronize with its neighbors which will try to synchronize again. Beyond a certain threshold of disruption, all of the phones desynchronize and start with random frequencies until they find a new equilibrium. Moreover, the shapes of the flashing pattern on the phones’ screen depend on the motion of the phones.
