15 и 22 юни
17:30, 17:45, 18:00, 18:15, 18:30, 18:45, 19:00, 19:15, 19:30
Хотел Хилтън
зала „Вихрен“
13 - 28 юни
Полски институт
Вход свободен
The Book of Flowers
„The Book of Flowers“, a short science-fiction film that combines Artificial Intelligence-powered animation with the 16 mm film pre-production, presents an alternative history to the human - plant ecology, where the floral species and humans for millennia existed in a close symbiosis.
In her practice, Agnieszka Polska uses cinematic storytelling and affective technologies to address the perpetually negotiated relationship between human and technology, examining the processes that mutually influence and legitimate this relationship in language, history and consciousness. She is interested in the question of individual social responsibility against the background of technology-driven disorientation and ideologies of technological determinism.
Polska’s works combine historical research, cinematic storytelling and affective communication technologies, seeking new narrative formats that correspond with the rapidly changing requirements of information-driven societies. According to Polska, such formats are available at the intersection of poetry and narration, art and cinema.
A major strand of her current practice and thinking is the construction of a pre-history of an emerging global cybernetic consciousness. The animation The Book of Flowers (2023), devoted to gendered reproductive labor, takes this process a step further - as the pre-history depicted in the film is obviously fabricated.
In the film, deep and enchanting voice of the actress Tina Greatrex guides the listener through the joined history of humankind and flowers. According to the narrator, blooming plants used to be enormous and humans were their main pollinators. A complex symbiosis existed between the species, both humans and flowers unable to reproduce without one another. Over the centuries, humans mastered technologies that allowed them to reproduce without participation of plants and reduced sizes of flowers. Especially one technology played an important role in this morally-ambiguous process: technology of storytelling.
This fantastic history that led to the contemporary state of affairs is told against the backdrop of impassioned Charles-Marie Widor's Symphony No. 5 Toccata for Organ and a succession of dynamic animations of surreal flowers, often equipped with animal- or machine-like textures. A complex process of re-writing early time-lapse plant videos with Artificial Intelligence tools led to creation of material that could be described as found footage - but with not a single original frame used.
“What if what we believe is required of humans by nature is just a story that we told ourselves about what being human is and what nature is? What if who we think we are, what we believe at a gut level about our kinship loyalty and our perceived survival needs are responses to a story we made up and told ourselves was written by our genes?,” writes Alexis Pauline Gumbs on Sylvia Wynter. This “discursive construction of man” echoes in Polska’s film, where the main power and, at the same time, threat to humanity is becoming enchanted in one’s own story, whispered into a human ear by technological mouth. The Book of Flowers, itself constituting a sci-fi story, is designed as a “thought experiment” in immersion and dissociation.