Nearest Neighbor at ICDOCS 2024

Competitive Program #3 / Golden Ratios

Saturday, April 27th, 1:00 PM, Adler Journalism Building (AJB) Room 105

Nearest Neighbor / Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin

United States // 2023 // 0:20:00

Intertwining associated experiments in image and sound generation using AI, Nearest Neighbor focuses on language acquisition and mimicry between humans, birds and machines, asking fundamental questions about consciousness, learning and understanding. The film is a contemporary reflection on the state of technology in relation to the natural world. It asks us to think about what we want from inter-species communication and what we expect from technologies that aspire to substitute for living beings.The film calls into question our investment of resources in these technologies as the natural world falls into further decline.

Black Hole Space Debt, or A Basic Guide to Syncing Sound and Image / Stephen Wardell

United States // 2022 // 0:14:00

An instructional document about making a handmade optical soundtrack becomes a speculative sci-fi narrative about going to Mars. As the film progresses, the nature of the soundtrack comes to speak for the way space exploration is one part of a larger, systemic repetition of colonialism and debt peonage.

When We Encounter the World / Leonardo Pirondi & Zazie Ray-Trapido

Portugal // 2023 // 0:11:00

In 1934 an experiment by an amateur-scientist couple began. Named after a genus of moths, the Automeris Project placed a group of young children in an enclosed forest, leaving them to fend for themselves. On return visits, the couple presented self-made films, accompanied by live music, depicting the outside world. For them, these images were the perfect replica of reality seen in their expeditions. Nevertheless, the films were carefully framed, edited, and manipulated to induce a transformation and provoke the development of a new society.

Parallel Botany / Magdalena Bermudez

United States // 2023 // 0:11:08

Still lives of real fruit meet botanical illustrations of plant galls to expose the paradox of dissection: each time we cut something in two, we merely create a new exterior.

Language Unknown / Janelle VanderKelen

United States // 2022 // 0:06:10

This film embraces plant sentience as fact and speculates how beings of the vegetal variety might approach interspecies communication with humans (who are far more sensorially limited). Leaves, mycelia, and roots playfully examine how humans experience the world, and the (supposedly) silent watchers consider what language those swift blurs of human might possibly understand.

Datura’s Aubade / Jean-Jacques Martinod & Bretta C. Walker

United States-Mexico // 2021 // 0:15:00

A farmer discovers a fallen meteorite in the high Chihuahuan deserts. The Alien Earth and the Earth Alien commingle under the spell of a deadly nightshade.