Machines & Me: A Filmless Festival 2024
Machines & Me: A Filmless Festival 2024
“Machines & Me: The Work of Self Assembly in Global Chinese Art and Media” is an initiative that brings together a diverse range of films and media artworks crossing formal and conceptual boundaries, exploring how machines—cameras, computers, cyborgs, cellphones, A.I., policing, surveillance, structural violence, and the very mechanisms that shape our material and institutional survival—articulate our ways of being, thinking, and doing in the global Asian and Sinophone worlds. Machines & Me: A Filmless Festival 2024, Part I of this global Chinese cinema screening series, features works that do not necessarily rely on traditional filming. Instead, they draw upon materials and elements not typically considered filmic: found footage, family photos, cellphone diaries, virtual reality, experimental animation, sound collages, AI-generated art, home movies and digital video remixes. Focusing on the evolving relationship between labor, humanity, media technology and political imaginaries, the screening series invites critical reflection on their deep imprints in our everyday lives.
Much like the fundamental biological processes of self-assembly—where organized structures appear to construct itself from a chaotic assortment of smaller components—these films help us to unpack how our “selves” are collectively assembled and transformed in an age of networked media, big data, and artificial intelligence. Machines & Me turns to the vast margins and in-between moments of global Asian and Chinese media archives, uncovering ephemeral and personal fragments often left untitled and unauthored, yet vivid in their persistence through cinematic, digital, and multimedia afterlives.
This is an in-person event (with online components on December 9 only), open to the public. Prior registration is required at least 24 hours before the event starts. Please register to receive the virtual program, special viewing guide, and the Zoom link for the artists’ roundtable and Q&A discussion on December 9.
Co-presented by Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Cultures, SLLC at UMD Curated and organized by Belinda Qian He, with the assistance of student assistants: Madison Henn (Chinese program; UTAP), Filippo Grassi (PhD student in Art History and Archaeology), Theo Portner (Chinese), and Ira Valeza (Chinese; Government and Politics). Machines & Me is generously supported by Arts for All, the College of Arts & Humanities, the Center for East Asian Studies, the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, the Language House Program, the Michelle Smith Collaboratory for Visual Culture, and the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Special thanks to our community partners: the Chinese Independent Film Association and the Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.