Rain-sodden crowds meander the streets of Boston, and in the midst of it a festival carries on.
The scene is spread over a patch of concrete underneath office buildings. The place is slammed with shipping containers and a sprinkling of dome structures. Inside each container is an artistic rendering of the theme: fabric painted with bacteria in one, a living room glowing under black lights in another, a science fair project on the neuro-effects of anaesthesia in yet another. If you were looking for a logical narrative thread as you move around the fest, you'd be sorely lost.
So, forget the shipping containers. One of those domes, the Swissnex, is a cinema. Perhaps cinema is a loose term the films showing inside are more like installation art being projected across the entirety of the inner walls in 360 degrees.
The scene is spread over a patch of concrete underneath office buildings. The place is slammed with shipping containers and a sprinkling of dome structures. Inside each container is an artistic rendering of the theme: fabric painted with bacteria in one, a living room glowing under black lights in another, a science fair project on the neuro-effects of anaesthesia in yet another. If you were looking for a logical narrative thread as you move around the fest, you'd be sorely lost.
So, forget the shipping containers. One of those domes, the Swissnex, is a cinema. Perhaps cinema is a loose term the films showing inside are more like installation art being projected across the entirety of the inner walls in 360 degrees.
Outside the dome sits Fabrice Starzinskas, a jetlagged Frenchman clutching a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the lid in the other.
“Right now, this is not coffee,” he says as he blows on it. “It is some hot mass of liquid. But when it cools, it will be coffee and it will be delicious.”
Starzinskas carried this cup in from a Seven-11 down the street. Surprisingly, neither of the two food trucks on site sells coffee, which seems like a terrible oversight looking at the current state of this man. He travelled across six time zones with his co-filmmaker for this: to show a film he helped make using lines of code.
His fellow artist, Sophie Meillour, is inside the dome where another film is being screened on the ceiling. The audience watches from below, lying on cushions on the floor. It’s a cosy sight underneath what is an ever-changing scene above throughout the day. The experience is largely dictated by the authorship of the films, somewhat by the willingness of the audience, and almost invisibly by an element of flooding on one end of the structure.
Rain had come down hard and now puddles have formed around massive power cords throughout the festival, including this movie-dome.
The whole thing could blow up in an electrical firestorm, Strazinskas says smiling.
“Right now, this is not coffee,” he says as he blows on it. “It is some hot mass of liquid. But when it cools, it will be coffee and it will be delicious.”
Starzinskas carried this cup in from a Seven-11 down the street. Surprisingly, neither of the two food trucks on site sells coffee, which seems like a terrible oversight looking at the current state of this man. He travelled across six time zones with his co-filmmaker for this: to show a film he helped make using lines of code.
His fellow artist, Sophie Meillour, is inside the dome where another film is being screened on the ceiling. The audience watches from below, lying on cushions on the floor. It’s a cosy sight underneath what is an ever-changing scene above throughout the day. The experience is largely dictated by the authorship of the films, somewhat by the willingness of the audience, and almost invisibly by an element of flooding on one end of the structure.
Rain had come down hard and now puddles have formed around massive power cords throughout the festival, including this movie-dome.
The whole thing could blow up in an electrical firestorm, Strazinskas says smiling.
While the dome opens up possibilities of exploration for filmmaker, it is not the final destination for Starzinskas and Meillour.
“The dome, it’s a tool for us,” Meillour says. “It’s a tool, but our universe. The drawings with the creative coding for us, is the most important thing. We want to explore a lot of mediums.”
She and Starzinskas are looking into virtual reality and augmented reality along with sculpture and screen-printing to carry their artwork forward. As much as it's about programmed death, the artwork itself is very much alive.
The collaboration was born from a chance meeting at a party two years ago. Sophie was VJing at the time.
“It was actually pretty impressive given the lo-tech aspect of it,” Strazankas says. “After that we didn’t see each other until a festival in Belgrade last April. After one week we knew we wanted to do something.”
So, they set about creating this film within two months before coming to Boston.
“The dome, it’s a tool for us,” Meillour says. “It’s a tool, but our universe. The drawings with the creative coding for us, is the most important thing. We want to explore a lot of mediums.”
She and Starzinskas are looking into virtual reality and augmented reality along with sculpture and screen-printing to carry their artwork forward. As much as it's about programmed death, the artwork itself is very much alive.
The collaboration was born from a chance meeting at a party two years ago. Sophie was VJing at the time.
“It was actually pretty impressive given the lo-tech aspect of it,” Strazankas says. “After that we didn’t see each other until a festival in Belgrade last April. After one week we knew we wanted to do something.”
So, they set about creating this film within two months before coming to Boston.
The film they've produced is titled, Apoptose. The name means a "programmed cellular death." It’s a natural process that takes place in multi-cellular organisms, and it happens all the time. Every day, roughly 50 to 70 billion cells die in a single human body to maintain development and functioning. Bear in mind, that’s 0.5% of all cells in the body.
"It seems cruel, it seems savage. Something that is not worth it but if you just take a step back you see it is for survival. It’s multi-cellular survival,” Starzinskas says.
Their brainchild is a minimalist abstract work of art created using 360˚ technology. It’s based on Meillour’s drawings, which Starzinskas animated using coding and gaming software.
“I am really inspired by video games that respect the audience and put you into a universe without any kind of clue; you’ve got to figure out the rules by yourself.”
He set about depicting Meillour's drawings in this way – pulling apart the two-dimensional aspects into three-dimensions, and playing with scale.
“As she works in 2D, we realized that the link between drawings was in dimensions. For example, you’ve got an eclipse, but if you pivot it you see it’s actually a nest that’s vertical. It’s just an illusion that it’s an eclipse," he says.
As the illustrations move in three dimensions, the objects themselves alternate between cells and planets. For the audience, it’s not a linear path; there’s no single camera zooming out from a blade of grass to the infinite cosmos and back again. That would be too easy.
“The concept is to play with the scale between cells and insects, cosmic gravity and planets – so, you never know where you are,” Meillour says.
"It seems cruel, it seems savage. Something that is not worth it but if you just take a step back you see it is for survival. It’s multi-cellular survival,” Starzinskas says.
Their brainchild is a minimalist abstract work of art created using 360˚ technology. It’s based on Meillour’s drawings, which Starzinskas animated using coding and gaming software.
“I am really inspired by video games that respect the audience and put you into a universe without any kind of clue; you’ve got to figure out the rules by yourself.”
He set about depicting Meillour's drawings in this way – pulling apart the two-dimensional aspects into three-dimensions, and playing with scale.
“As she works in 2D, we realized that the link between drawings was in dimensions. For example, you’ve got an eclipse, but if you pivot it you see it’s actually a nest that’s vertical. It’s just an illusion that it’s an eclipse," he says.
As the illustrations move in three dimensions, the objects themselves alternate between cells and planets. For the audience, it’s not a linear path; there’s no single camera zooming out from a blade of grass to the infinite cosmos and back again. That would be too easy.
“The concept is to play with the scale between cells and insects, cosmic gravity and planets – so, you never know where you are,” Meillour says.
As for an underlying message, Meillour says that there’s no hard-hitting take-away for audiences.
“It’s more of a poetic atmosphere. There’s no engaged message,” Meillour says. “It’s not political. It’s not economic. It’s abstract. It’s to forget the problems of life, the problems of the world. It’s six minutes to escape in our world,” she says.
Apoptose will be showing at the Geneva International Film Festival November 3rd through the 11th. This time in another dome, in another time, at another place.
“It’s more of a poetic atmosphere. There’s no engaged message,” Meillour says. “It’s not political. It’s not economic. It’s abstract. It’s to forget the problems of life, the problems of the world. It’s six minutes to escape in our world,” she says.
Apoptose will be showing at the Geneva International Film Festival November 3rd through the 11th. This time in another dome, in another time, at another place.