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In the very succinct "Make Love, Not War" (2003), the title's classic phrase appears in a form of writing slowly advancing over large shots of superb tulips and of ants busy feeding themselves.

Lisa Steele was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1947, and studied at the University of Missouri before installing herself in Toronto in 1971. Born in Victoria, British Columbia in 1952, Kim Tomczak has a degree from the Vancouver School of Art (Today the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design). Steele and Tomczak both teach in the Fine Arts department at the University of Toronto. They have been working in the media arts medium since the 70s. As artists, administrators, professors, authors, commissioners, and event and project designers, they have profoundly influenced video and connected disciplines in Canada since the beginning of their collaboration in 1983.

The Afternoon Knows What the Morning Never Suspected. It is a 3-channel 22-minute work that opens with a brief history of the Vietnam War, assembled from historical documents and footage, and then proceeds to detail Canada's complicity in the conflict, drawing attention to the massive profit that Canadian companies made during this time. The work also references the American draft dodgers who settled in Canada in the late 1960s, creating a context for the connection to today with a mesmerizing drive down Yonge Street in 2017. It is an interesting time to re-examine Canada's self-view in relation to the Vietnam War: yes we took in the draft dodgers (the work makes ample reference to this) but we also profited from the war (in spite of the fact that these profits were strictly against our own laws). The work concludes with the on-screen presence of our two performers, each telling the other's life story: one a first generation Canadian, the child of a Serbian/Croatian marriage; the other born in Canada to Vietnamese immigrant parents.

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak have worked exclusively in collaboration since 1983, producing videotapes, performances and photo/text works. In 2009, Steele + Tomczak were awarded an Honourary Doctorate by the University of British Columbia (Okanagan); in 2005, a Governor General`s Award for Lifetime Achievement in Visual & Media Arts; in 1994 they received both a Toronto Arts Award and the Bell Canada prize for excellence in Video Art. They are co-founders of Vtape, an award-winning media arts centre established in 1983 in Toronto. Currently Steele is Artistic Director and Tomczak is Restoration and Collections Management Director. Both teach at the University of Toronto in The John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Major public art commissions include: Watertable (2009, and expanded in 2011) a light and sound installation under the Gardiner Expressway (a raised highway) that marks the original shoreline of Lake Ontario at the foot of historic Fort York; …bump in the night (Barrie) (2010) commissioned by McLaren Art Centre and installed in bus shelters; Falling Up (2006) a video work for the Winnipeg Art Gallery; Love Squared (2006) screened on the 2400 square foot video board at Yonge & Dundas Square in Toronto. A major survey of their work, The Long Time: the 21st century work of Steele + Tomczak, curated by Paul Wong (with a 84 page catalogue), opened at On Main Gallery and VIVO, Vancouver, BC in September 2012; the exhibition traveled to A Space Gallery, Toronto, ON (2013), the Art Gallery of Windsor, ON (2016-17), and Dalhousie University Art Gallery, Halifax, NS (2017). Legal Memory, their first feature-length work, has been shown in a number of film festivals since its release including: The Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Festival, the Festival Internazionale Cinema Giovani (Turin, Italy), the Toronto Festival of Festivals and broadcast on TVOntario. In 1996, their work BLOOD RECORDS: written and annotated, received a world premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and toured across Canada with a bi-lingual catalogue published by The Oakville Galleries. Recent solo exhibitions of their works have taken place at Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, (2014); Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal (2011); WHARF Centre D`art contemporain, Herouxville-St. Clair, France (2010); Diaz Contemporary, Toronto (2009); Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, (2009); Dazibao, Montreal (2008); the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris (2003). Selected group exhibitions and screenings of their work include: Every. Now. Then. Reframing Nationhood, Art Gallery of Ontario (2017); Imago Mundi, Instituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti, Venice, Italy (2017); La Biennale de Montréal, Musee d'art contemporain de Montréal (2014); Carbon 14: Climate is Culture, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (2013); STITCHES: Suzhou Fast Forward, Workshop, Toronto (2011); Empire of Dreams: phenomenology of the built environment at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2010); a focus screening at EXIS: Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul, Korea (2010); the Berlin Film Festival, Forum Expanded (2009); Akbank Sanat, Istanbul (2009); TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) Future Projections (2009); Sophia, Bulgaria at the Central Bath House (2008); a focus screening at Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid (2006); Beyond/In Western New York, organized by Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo (2005); Trivandrum Video Festival, New Delhi (2003); City of York Public Gallery, York, England (2000).

RE-ANIMATED explores the intersections of extinction, preservation of immortality. It is a re-imagining of ornithologist Douglas H. Pratt’s memories of the now extinct Kaua’i ???? bird, as told to director Jakob Kudsk Steensen. In the work, a vast virtual landscape based on Kaua’i unfolds and transforms into a photorealistic new world for people to explore. 3D-scanned organic material sourced from both field work and the American Museum of Natural History, as well as real archival audio are all remixed together, alongside algorithmic music composed by Michael Riesman, Musical Director for the Philip Glass Ensemble. Plants, moss, and insects respond to the pulse of music generated in real-time, and the audience’s breath and voice organically impact the virtual atmosphere through the VR headset. As a slow-moving, poetic virtual environment, RE-ANIMATED ultimately investigates how we relate to nature irrevocably altered by human activity. It provokes fresh perspectives on our ecological future, which may become unbound by the physical conditions governing our present reality.

Jakob Kudsk Steensen (b. 1987) is a Danish artist based in New York concerned with how imagination, technology and ecology intertwine. His works range from immersive VR ecosystems to mixed reality installations bridging physical and digital worlds, which invite audiences to enter new ecological realities. He collaborates with NGO’s, residencies, scientists and artists from different fields and ventures on excursions where he collects organic material, which is digitised and converted into digital worlds with 3D scanners, photogrammetry, satellite data and computer game software. Inspired by ecology-oriented science fiction and conversations with biologists and ethnographers, his projects are ultimately virtual simulations populated by mythical beings existing in radical ecological scenarios. Kudsk Steensen has exhibited internationally at the 5th Trondheim Biennale for Art and Technology; the Carnegie Museum of Art; Serpentine Augmented Architecture, Serpentine Galleries; Jepson Center for the Arts; Time Square Midnight Moment; MAXXI Rome; FRIEZE London; Podium, and Ok Corral. He was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize 2019, and as part of the awards program, he was invited to create and exhibit new installations of RE-ANIMATED (2017-18) in Kiev and the Venice Biennale. He has received awards from the Danish Arts Foundation, The Augustinus Foundation, the Lumen Arts Prize, The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, Games for Change, the Lumiere Foundation, The Telly Awards, and Cinequest Festival. His work has shown at Sundance, TriBeCa and Cannes among other film festivals. Steensen is an alumni of NEW INC, a technology and culture incubator by The NEW MUSEUM, in NYC.

I created this work for Wola Museum in Warsaw. I was inspired by anonymous documentary photograph probably from 50` that puzzled me as very contemporary and unbelievably well staged as for a snapshot. I was thinking a lot about how language of “reality” changes over time and how it can be easily influenced reinterpreted. And then I relied that reenactments are very bodily reinterpretation of images, that they make individual bodies to be mediums of transformation meanings; and I realised that their growing popularity and superficial innocence frightens me. I decided to reenact this photograph I came across and asked members of historical re-enactment groups to do it. Later I also wrote accompanying essay in which I have put into words my interest in language of documentary in contemporary art

Grzegorz Stefanski, born in 1983 in Czluchow (PL), lives and works in Warsaw and London where he is currently an artist in residence at Sarabande Foundation. Before attending art school, he earned master’s degree in philosophy and made his artistic debut in with solo exhibition during Cracow Photomonth Festival in 2010. He concluded his artistic education at The Slade School of Fine Art in London and Miroslaw Balka’s Studio of Spatial Activities in Warsaw. In 2017 he won the Ivan Juritz Prize in London and the Grand Prix at the Biennale of Young Art in Poland. He has exhibited his works at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2018), Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2018), Ujazdowski Castle Centre of Contemporary Art (2018), Manifesta 11 in Zurich (2016), Pastificio Cerere Foundation in Rome (2014) and the NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 in New York (2010). He has collaborated, among others, with Nowy Teatr in Warsaw (2016), National Museum in Warsaw (2017), and Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art in Cracow (2018).

The Big Crash VR is a nonlinear immersive virtual reality artpiece based on data mined from real estate sites. The audience experience it either on an Oculus Quest headset within an exhibition context or online with a desktop browser or the one within a VR device. This piece is part of Malte Steiner's art project The Big Crash. The thematic departure point is the instability of the real estate market as a consequence of extreme gentrification. Something that is actively taking place in all bigger cities around the globe. There is a pending ‘big bubble crash’ awaiting as a consequence of this and the piece deals with the growing instability this movement creates and its effects on society. The VR world is build with graphical artifacts derived from real estate ads from Berlin with a custom software. Images from these ads are segmented into objects by a Machine Learning algorithm and used to create a surreal architecture in the 3D environment. Sound based on the data from the prices and square meters over a span of several months provides an additional layer.

Malte Steiner (born 1970) is a German media artist, electronic musician and composer, currently living in Aalborg in Denmark. Steiner started creating electronic music and visual art around 1983, developing his own vision of the interdisciplinary Gesamtkunstwerk, working with, and not limited to, film, theater, paintings, video games, interactive installations and sound. First exhibitions already in 1983. In 1986 Steiner took a course in electro-acoustic music in Lüneburg by H.W. Erdmann and gave his first live performances in the following years, e. g. in Germany, France and Belgium and started 1987 to release his music on cassette, later on vinyl, CD and online. Steiner was a co-founder of the Hörbar club for experimental music located in Hamburg (DE), which opened in 1991 and is still active today. In 1998 he started creating electronic art and installations and in 2003 additionally several netart projects including a collaborative visual networking environment, shown in the Java museum in Sofia, Bulgaria. In 2011 Steiner moved to Berlin, where he opened his own non-public media lab block 4. Besides diverse music projects Steiner is also involved in several open source projects and has done lectures, radio features and workshops. 2018 he relocated to Aalborg, Denmark.

"The Garden" is a reflection on climate change. It is created from found, recycled film footage and is presented in three parts. "I work almost exclusively with found footage (educational and industrial films, and home movies). Once I have appropriated the footage I practice the art of montage with great pleasure by colliding disparate images, looping clips and manipulating time. Such techniques accentuate the gestures and quotidian rhythms of my subjects distilling the essence of a time, place or idea. Although a narrative is never explicit one may be implied."

Ann Steuernagel is an experimental video and sound artist. Her work has been presented throughout the United States and in Canada, Mexico, and Europe. She is the recipient of the grand prize at the XX VideoArt Festival in Locarno, Switzerland, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Media Fellowship, a LEF grant, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Ann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art + Design at Northeastern University.

In this film Imogen Stidworthy interweaves standard and subverted English (backslang) with tropes of class and race, trade and desire in the hidden backwaters and idealised forms of the voice. Backslang developed as a linguistic disguise to protect speakers, especially from the ears of the law. Liverpool slang has absorbed fragments from the language streams of global trade, passing through the docks: Spanish, Dutch, Yiddish, Chinese and African languages. Like all languages Backslang is also a space of identification, spoken proudly. It could be seen as a sign of economic and social conditions and as a form of resistance ? a necessity, or a possibility for different social paradigms. In Barrabackslarrabang, the voice criss-crosses social borders to reflect the mirroring of structures and desires through ostensibly opposing spaces of language, legality and culture. The work continues Stidworthy?s ongoing concern with the social landscape of the voice, its space and borders.

Imogen Stidworthy is a British multimedia artist based in Liverpool. She has exhibited at documenta 12 and most recently her work has been shown at the Thessaloniki Biennale (2007), Shanghai Biennale (2006), ?Be What You Want but Stay Where You Are? at Witte de With, Rotterdam (2005) and ?Governmentality? at Miami Art Central (2004). Recent solo shows include ?Get Here? at Galerie Hohenlohe, Vienna (2006), ?Dummy? at FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon (2005) and ?Audio Cab?, a temporary public art work installed in taxi cabs in Luton (2005). In 2004, Stidworthy was shortlisted for the Beck's Futures prize, for a video work featuring Cilla Black impersonators. In 1996 she won the Dutch Prix de Rome.[citation needed] Stidworthy is a tutor at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and an Advising Researcher at the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht. In 2008 she won the Liverpool Art Prize.

The video White Transformer engages with the cosplay phenomenon in China and portrays the act of transformation from ?ordinary? human into fictional character. It was shot with the help of the Century Noah cosplay group in Chongqing, China who build and perform characters from a variety of narrative universes such as Gundam, Starcraft and World of Warcraft. The French theorist Gabriel Tarde once stated that in order to understand what the social is, one has to focus on the notion of imitation. The global cosplay culture is a perfect example for this approach, since the fans interact with each other on the basis of global signs that emerge from products of the cultural industry, when they appropriate characters from large video and game franchises. This leads to the issue of intellectual property, which comes into play because all of these characters are registered trademarks owned by large international entertainment companies. What does it mean for the fans and audiences to adapt and transform these symbols. Furthermore, cosplay opens up many questions in conjunction with identification, since cosplayers deliberately choose to identify with and perform as fictional beings from a realm beyond real life limitations such as race, class or gender.

Axel Stockburger is an artist and theorist who lives and works in Vienna. He studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna with Peter Weibel and holds a PhD from the Univeristy of the Arts, London. His films and installations are shown internationally. Among other projects he has initiated the independent art television channel TIV in Vienna in 1998 and collaborated on international projects with the London based media art group D-Fuse (2000-2004). At present he works as a senior artist at the Academy of Fine Arts / Department for Visual Arts and Digital Media in Vienna. Between 2010 and 2012 he was part of the artistic research project ?Troubling Research?, which engaged with the problems and possibilities of art in the context of knowledge production. In recent years his works were presented in the following exhibitions (selected): ?Games People Play?, CCANW, Exeter (2012), "Troubling Research: Performing Knowledge in the Arts", xhibit, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (2011),"Nothing in the World but Youth", Turner Contemporary, Kent (2011), ?Jingshenfenxi?, organhaus art space, Chongqing (2011),"Videorama", Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2011) "Talk Talk - Das Interview als künstlerische Praxis", Galerie 5020, Salzburg (2010)"Worldeater", Winiarczyk Gallery, Vienna (2009).

Multiple layers of fabrication and imposition are laid bare by this fluidly choreographed, single-shot embodiment of control. While portraying sound artists at work, typically invisible support mechanisms of filmmaking are exposed, as are governmental violations of individual privacy. Filmic quotations ground Hacked Circuit, evoking paranoia, and a sense of conviction alongside a lack of certainty about what is visible. Complications of the seen, the known, the heard and the undetectable provide thematic parallels between the stagecraft of Foley and a pervasive climate of government surveillance.

Chicago-based artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes work that investigates issues of power, control and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Non-prescriptive, her works pose a series of problems that allow for complex readings of the questions being asked.

A cross-generational binding of three filmmakers seeking alternative possibilities to power structures they’re inherently part of. The film grew out of abandoned film projects of Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer. Shot at the furthest point of a motorcycle trip Hammer took to Guatemala in 1975, and laced through with Deren’s reflections of failure, encounter and initiation in 1950s Haiti. A vever is a symbolic drawing used in Haitian Voodoo to invoke a Loa, or god.

Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes films and artworks that investigate power, control and belief, considering how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Recent projects have addressed listening, freedom, surveillance, sinkholes, comets, raptors, orthoptera, levitation, exodus, sisterhood and faith. She lives in Chicago where teaches at the University of Illinois.

Draw down the sun. Dig up the gold. The urge to relieve a winter valley of permanent shadow and find fortune in alluvial gravel are part of a long history of desire and extraction in the far Canadian north. Cancan dancers, curlers, ore smelters, former city officials and a curious cliff-side luminous disc congregate to form a town portrait. Shot in location in the Yukon Territory. The disc that appears in the film was part of "Augural Pair", a set of public sculptures created by Stratman and artist Steven Badgett by invitation of the Klondike Institute of Arts and Culture "Natural and Manufactured" series. The works responded to ways value and speculation are connected to landscape and acts of removal.

Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes work that investigates power, control and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Her themes range widely, as do the mediums she uses to question them. Recent projects have addressed freedom, expansionism, surveillance, sonic warfare, public speech, ghosts, sinkholes, levitation, propagation, orthoptera, raptors, comets, exodus and faith.  She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.

Le défi que se/nous propose Jean-Marie Straub est bien d'ordre cinématographique. Tous ses films ont toujours été constitués de blocs. Et ces blocs qui s'entrechoquent, blocs denses de textes, de paysages, de visages, ont toujours eu pour nécessité de donner à voir à travers ces chocs l'invisible des sentiments et du politique. Mélangeant les blocs de temps (40 ans séparent les différents extraits), les blocs de textes (Malraux, Fortini, Vittorini, Holderlin) et les blocs de langues (français, italien, allemand), pour que de ce fracas émerge l'histoire du monde, oui l'Histoire, et du même mouvement l'espoir politique de son dépassement. La première chose que nous dit Kommunisten, c’est que Straub pense ici son cinéma comme un fonds d’archives personnel dans lequel puiser, si bien que ce film devient une leçon où les fragments des films passés – plus un « nouveau », en ouverture, inspiré de Malraux, avec la voix de Straub lui-même (hors champ) qui interroge des communistes en prison – peuvent être utilisés comme objets d’étude. Kommunisten, c’est Straub et c’est Danièle Huillet, mais c’est surtout leur cinéma – qui a traversé le XXe siècle, ses conflits et ses utopies impossibles, en cherchant dans le pli des mots et des images qui les tissent ce qui est resté suspendu, caché, enfoui avec les oublis imposés par ceux qui écrivent et déterminent l’Histoire. Chaque « bout » de film nous emmène en terrain découvert, dans un passé qui paraît actuel, parce que ces questions sont restées sans réponse – si ce n’est avec une image, qui continue à les poser sans relâche, avec détermination. (Cristina Piccino, Il Manifesto, 19 août 2014)

‘So Settler, Are You a Pioneer?’ captures the structures of a rapidly changing peripheral neighbourhood: material remains of an obsolete infrastructure, luxury apartments, and piles of bricks that once used to house people. The work re-assembles and digitally preserves sites that are often overlooked in tales of linear progress. The piece is a journey through distorted urban landscapes, an assemblage of partial perspectives. By adapting the cartographic technique of photogrammetry, Wouter aims to question the authorities who decide what is and what is not in focus.

Through unravelling tales of linear progression I seek to map out the blurriness of our world. By adapting and appropriating modern contemporary cartographic techniques, such as photogrammetry, and the use of aerial and satellite imagery. I aim to question the authority that decides what is and what is not in focus to re-orient and ignite curiosity. Currently I am active as an artist and graphic designer. Besides my individual practice I collobarate in communal projects, one being OUTLINE; a collective and publishing platform consisting of one other graphic designer and two photographers. Another one being Radio Voorwaarts which is a platfom for underground culture in Amsterdam. More recently: Verdedig Noord, an activist group fighting against gentrification in Amsterdam Noord.

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"Cultural Quarter presents the relationships of observation in the city to its citizens, whilst begging ethical questions about surveillance, the gaze and human behaviour. It exposes some of the gaps between developers? dreams and citizens` perceptions of what cultural space means and how to use it." Cultural Quarter has won several awards: - Sphinx Award for the best single-channel work, Videomedeja, 9th International Video Festival, Serbia and Montenegro, 2005 - No Budget Award, Hamburg International Short Film festival, 2004 - Second Prize, International Competition, Videoex 2004 festival, Zurich - Tom Finkelpearl and Barbara London Prizes, Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, Japan, 2003 http://www.forma.org.uk/

"Mike Stubbs practice includes film and media art production, arts management, and consultancy. Trained at Cardiff and the Royal College of Art, Mike is currently Honorary Lecturer, The School of TVI and Honorary Lecturer at the University of Dundee. His work at Hull Time Based Arts won him recognition as a primary promoter of New Media. During his Directorship, he set up Time Base and developed the Centre for Time Based Art, AVIDLAB (a digital media lab) and EMARE (European Media Arts Residency Exchange). He co-founded Metamedia, a Soho-based production company specializing in art and music. Highlights as a producer include commissioning the award-winning media performance, POL by Granular Synthesis featured at the 01 Venice Biennale, the curation of new media programs for the Kiev International Media Art Festival in the Ukraine and the Microwave Festival in Hong Kong. He is an advisor to the ACE and NESTA and as a consultant has worked with Federation Sq Project Melbourne, the Royal Academy of Arts, London and Site Gallery, Sheffield. Newly commissioned films "Donut" and "Resistor" were recently transmitted on BBC 2 and Channel 4 Television. He has won major international awards including first prizes at Oberhausen & Graz ("Homing" C4/BFI 1995), Osnabruk ("Gift", BBC2/Arts Council 1996) and a Golden Artronic at Locarno ("Sweatlodge", 1992). In 1999 he presented a video retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London. Current projects include an investigation into city branding made in residence at the Newcastle and Gateshead Initiative for exhibition at the Baltic. Last he completed "Zero", a short film made in zero gravity on board a Russian military aircraft at the Yuri Gagarin Training Centre." http://www.spacearts.info/

The documentary Man Made Place shows through impressive images how two certain cities ? and the relation of inhabitants to these cities ? are developing in China in times of urban growth. Yumen ? a derelict ghost town ? and Kangbashi ? a mythic city of the future, both are deserted. They exist because of completely different reasons.

Born 1979 in Taiwan. Artist and director, living in Essen (Germany). 1998?2002 studies at the National Taiwan University (BA). 2006 ?2012 studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne,Art (diploma). his first documeNtry film were promoted by Film- und Medienstiftung NRW (Germany) in the year 2011.

"TheNewYorkPerformance" is a three-part video performance. In "100 Bucks in 100 Seconds" we can see the actor counting 100 dollars in 100 seconds, every second a banknote in 100 different camera shots. Time passes, sometimes slower, sometimes faster. The measure of time corresponds to the amount of money, but the time actually lived escapes the cut, which makes life immeasurable and prompts us to question ourselves about its subjective value. The obsessive verification of its own solvency - as he counts his money in every shadowy corner of the towers in New York's financial district - is the self-phasing of "Real Time", which allows everyone around the world to react within a second, with the same method, to the cyclical variations in the diamond mines of Congo just as in the rice fields of Vietnam. This video is driven like a film-rhetorical experimentation between the intuition of phenomenological space and the illusion of its stereometric unit. The scanning of the camera shots reveal that this unity is a production of the perceptive habit of the viewer and frees the eyes, giving them back their original perception of space. In "Leftwing", the artist transforms a typical school desk by sawing off the right half to reassemble it on the left. After finishing his work, he sits down on the chair, signs the table and, after due consideration, sticks a chewing gum under it. What the video shows, however, is not the already transformed desk, but the transformation process itself. The documentary camera, held far back from the shot, thus makes us forget that the real product, the work presented here, is neither an object nor the story of its creation, but a succession of digital images. The real work escapes attention: it is the different aspects of the nature of this work that are explored here. The action of sticking the chewing gum to the desk highlights the action of signing the desk, which here is brought to the level of graffiti and "TAGS". The conscious appropriation of everyday´s environment is opposed to the integration of the artistic work in an artistic context. In this context, the title provocatively poses the question of the importance of politics in Art. Art is seen as a field of experimentation of aimless transformations - underlined in the reassembling of the desk and the clumsiness of the actor. In "Studio 510 Blues" we see the artist enter his studio apartment, look around and finally grab a worn-out and torn shoe in order to spray the gape with red color. At the rhythm of the song "Running Blues" by the Doors, he uses the shoe as a puppet and imitates the singer, with the gap between the sole and the shoe as the mouth. In this video the actor works with his personal relationship with New York City, where a scholarship allowed him to live and work for six months. As the traces that he was able to leave in the city slowly fade away, the city carves itself into its residents in a form of erosion. The erosion of the shoe symbolizes the erosion of time. The quality of this time, made up of all the lived moments, leads to loading the shoe with nostalgic memories. Through the derisory nature of a holed shoe, the actor alludes to the difference that exists between the European identity with its overflowing history and the American identity in its pragmatic trend. The separation between the thing and its purpose, by extracting the shoe from its usual context, should be understood as an invitation to the creative handling of one's own perception, which contains the possibility of an interaction between the individual and his environment, and, furthermore, returns to the possibility of making it the seat of its own identity.

The artistic journey of Bosse Sudengurg commences in 1996 when he began his studies of art and cultural history in Leipzig. Through contact with a group of artists called "Ramon Haze", he quickly finds himself more interests by the practice than by the artistic theory, which doesn't stop him from during his studies developing a critic's eye and analytic look on art, ever present in his works. In 1996, the artist was still exclusively working in the domain of plastic. His meeting of Ilja Kabakow, who is exhibiting this year in Leipzig at the Gallery of Contemporary Art, lead him to contribute to "Blind Date", the first exhibition of "Ramon Haze" that confronts the relationship between the body and space. It was in the following year that "KommunikationNonKommunikation", relative to space, was born. In this cinematic work that leaves sculpture behind, the artist finds a medium that continues to mark his works even today. The dematerialisation of the artistic object that intervenes here, with, in the background, the digitization of the flow of datum and the development of the internet, presents itself as an attempt to demystify the image transmitted by the media. According to the famous axiom from Marshall MacLuhan, which is regaining popularity, "the medium is the message", the artist attempts to conceal his personal identity from the danger of being carried away with the flood of data and to emerge only as a manifestation of the changing fashions in mass media. This is how the work entitled "KommunikationNonKommunikation" serves, in the evolution of the artist, as a passage towards occupation of his own person. The return to self is reinforced by the end of the euphoric period consequential to the fall of the wall in former Eastern Germany, where for years a horizon of immeasurable possibilities stretched out and where the general acceptance of over-consumption had led to a loss of aesthetic values down to the minutest of details. Bosse Sudennurg moved to Berlin where he studied at the experimental film at the UdK (University of Art) under Heinz Emigholz and Stan Douglas. In 2002 saw the birth of work in which autobiographical elements are manipulated to form fictitious auto-portraits as in the film "Me Myself and I", a sort of auto-interview where the actor is both the subject and the object of the camera, and the one who finalizes the shots while editing. The second important element in his way of travelling is consequently the performative. Another important film from this time is "25% ofHomeSweetHome", in which self-questioning is extended to the family. By opposing unchanging rituals, like setting an empty table, with occasional rituals, like unscrewing a bell, the artist attempts to retain the psychological state in the change. After a period of theoretic confrontation with artists like Vallie Export, Cindy Sherman, Roman Signer, Bruce Nauman, and Wolf Vostel, as well as with the "New German Film", the cooperatives of films in England or the experimental American (Maya Deren) or French (Chris Marker) film, the work "Das Letzte Einhorn" came to life in 2004 during a residency in Bristol (UWE). With the help of a pencil in front of his forehead, the actor draws a black line on a white wall. The artist as a person fades away and in this way underlines the conceptual aspect of doing and seeing. The camera, the performative, and the conceptual are the three main components of the three-video work that was created under the name "TheNewYorkPerformance" during a residency at Hunter College in New York. With another residency in New York, thanks to a scholarship from DAAD, and nominated for SaarFernGas AG's art award, Bosse Sudenburg regularly takes part in exhibitions in his homeland as well as abroad.

The most recent in a series of films Sueoka has made by reprinting the amateur films of an anonymous Japanese diplomat who was stationed in Berlin in the early 1930's. The original film attempts an idyllic depiction of a summer spent abroad; its re-presentation is an artefact of pre-war life in Germany and, in the gloomy indication of the coming autumn, a hint at darker days to come.

Ichiro Sueoka was born in Sapporo in 1965 and is now a filmmaker in Tokyo. She studied chemistry at the Tokyo University of Science and began making films in 1985. Of the 80 films so far, many were produced on Super-8. She is a co-founder of the "FMIC" (Film Makers Information Center) experimental film/video group, which since 2002 has curated and presented several screening events of the independent film-maker's works in Japan. Sueoka currently teaches film-making at Asagaya Art College and hand-developing workshops in several art schools and galleries in Japan.

We Build Excitement is a serie of performances and videos examining the evolution of the American auto industry as a parallel to shifting American identity. Starting two years ago, Sugarmann opened (and plans to continue opening) unsanctioned Pontiac dealerships in former Pontiac dealership locations across the United States. He activates these dealerships as sites of celebration, honoring both the American auto worker and our fraught, intimate relationships to cars themselves. Assembling temporary modernist monuments with Pontiac cars, Sugarmann gives form to the precarious nature of the auto industry. And in video works, he documents laid-off assembly line workers and car accident victims recreating the movements of their former jobs and crashes, respectively. Their deadpan choreography forms a moving homage to the mundane and the traumatic moments in both the birth and death of the automobile.

Jesse Sugarmann is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, performance, sculpture and fibers. His work engages the automotive industry as a manufacturer of human identity, accessing automotive history as an index of both cultural identity and social history. Jesse has exhibited work both nationally and internationally in venues such as the Getty Institute, Los Angeles; el Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon; the Banff Center, Canada; Filmbase, Ireland; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Michael Strogoff, Marfa; el Museo de Arte Moderno de Santander, Spain; Drift Station, Omaha; Fugitive Projects, Nashville; the 21c Museum, Louisville; and High Desert Test Sites 2013. His work has been written about in publications including ArtForum, Art Papers, ART LTD, Art Cards, Art Fag City, Art Car Nation, Frieze Magazineand The New York Times. Jesse lives and works in Bakersfield, CA.

Produced during the peak of international debate regarding the United States? initiative to invade Iraq, COCKED is an anti-war statement in the guise of a minimalist Western, borrowing dozens of short segments from several Cinema classics of the genre. COCKED expands and sustains what is usually a brief, tense, cinematic moment--the showdown--and implodes the classic American mythology of the Western. As this extended psychodrama plays out, the classic desert panorama characteristic of the Western?s cinematic space is collapsed into a metaphoric psychological space, where every gesture, glance and posture, communicate a mixture of aggression and fear, and nothing is resolved

Philadelphia-based media artist Matthew Suib has exhibited installations, video and audio works and photographs internationally at venues including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Kunstwerke (Berlin), Images Festival (?02, ?05, Toronto), and PS1 Contemporary Art Centre (NYC). Most recently, his work Cosmic Microwave Background with New Humans was exhibited in collaboration with Brooklyn-based collective New Humans at Apex Art (NYC). He is also a member of the Philadelphia artist-cooperative Vox Populi.