ANIMALICIOUS

Here Is Everything \| Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby \| 2013 \| 15:00 min
	Here Is Everything presents itself as a message from The Future, as narrated by a cat and a rabbit, spirit guides who explain that they’ve decided to speak to us via a contemporary art video because they understand this to be our highest form of communication. Their cheeky introduction, however, belies the complex set of ideas that fill the remainder of the film. Death, God, and attaining and maintaining a state of Grace are among the thematic strokes winding their way through the piece, rapturously illustrated with animation, still and video imagery. It is a work that contains specific details about its themes, but sufficiently ambiguous and free of dogma, including religious dogma that, our futuristic visitors explain, is a vestigial leftover from an earlier phase of evolution. And while Death is an ever-present rumination, so are Redemption, Affirmation, and Possibility. Cooper Battersby (b. 1971, Penticton BC) and Emily Vey Duke (b. 1972, Halifax NS) have been working collaboratively since 1994. They work in printed matter, critical writing, curation, sculpture and video.Their work has been exhibited in galleries and at festivals in North and South America and throughout Europe, including The Brooklyn Art Museum, The Power Plant, the Walker Center, The Banff Centre, The Vancouver Art Gallery , The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Hallwalls, The New York Video Festival, The European Media Arts Festival, Impakt, and The Images Festival. In 2011, they were Spotlight Artists at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Their video work has won prizes nationally and internationally, and has been broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Bravo. It has been collected by many university libraries, including those at Harvard and Princeton. The videos are distributed in Europe by Argos, in the US by Video Data Bank, and in Canada by V-Tape and Video Out. Duke and Battersby teach at Syracuse University. They split their time between Lafayette NY and Beach Meadows, Nova Scotia.

Mastering Bambi \| Margit Lukács & Persijn Broersen \| 2011 \| 12:35 min.
	Walt Disney’s 1942 classic animation film ‘Bambi’ is well known for its distinct main characters – a variety of cute, anthropomorphic animals. However, an important but often overlooked protagonist in the movie is nature itself: the pristine wilderness as the main grid on which Disney structured his ‘Bambi’. One of the first virtual worlds was created here: a world of deceptive realism and harmony, in which man is the only enemy. Disney strived to be true to nature, but he also used nature as a metaphor for human society. The forest is depicted as a ‘magic well’, the ultimate purifying ‘frontier’, where the inhabitants peacefully coexist. Broersen and Lukács recreate the model of Disney’s pristine vision, but they strip the forest of its harmonious inhabitants, the animals. What remains is another reality, a constructed and lacking wilderness, where nature becomes the mirror of our own imagination. Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukacs are artists living and working in Amsterdam and Paris. They work in a wide variety of media- most notably video, animation and graphics- producing a myriad of works that reflect on the ornamental nature of today's society. With layers of depersonalization, re-mediation and re-imagination they demonstrate how reality, (mass)media and fiction are strongly intertwined in contemporary culture. This results in a body of work that hovers between ornament and perspective, between a journey and a cul-de-sac. Their work is shown in filmfestivals, museums and galleries and broadcasted on TV worldwide. Recent exhibitions/screenings include: Casa Encendida, Madrid / Centre Pompidou, Paris/ Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam/ EMAF , Germany/ IFFR, Rotterdam.

I may have lost forever my Umbrella \| Johan Grimonprez \| 2011 \| 02:54 min.
	In the spring of 2011, during the Photomonth in Krakow, the artist collective Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin invited me to be part of ALIAS, an exhibition with artists who inhabit alternative versions of themselves. An artist and a writer were teamed up with the aim to create a non-existent third persona. The outcome was that none of the artists in the exhibition existed, as those fictional characters took over the creative process. I was assigned to inhabit the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. ‘Him and his 240 heteronyms,’ Broomberg and Chanarin laughed, ‘an idea not unfamiliar to you!’ And indeed, Fernando Pessoa wrote much of his oeuvre under multiple, alternative identities. Not so much pseudonyms or aliases but what he termed ‘heteronyms,’ invented personalities with detailed biographies and interweaving histories. More specifically Pessoa’s ‘The Book of Disquiet’ became then the point of departure for this film project. All the footage was shot on iPhone recapturing selected details from YouTube endless growing archive, a world where ‘heteronyms’ abound. Images of the earthquake and the tsunami that recently hit Japan in March that year dominating the net, resonated quietly with the world of disquiet I was envisioning. In addition, I imagined an added female voice to Pessoa’s many male heteronyms while also staying true to the original language of ‘The Book of Disquiet’. So, I invited Portuguese writer Isabel Sobral Campos to narrate the selected passages. Johan Grimonprez is an internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker. His films include Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), and Double Take (2009). Acquisitioned by NBC UNIVERSAL, ARTE TV (Germany/France), and CHANNEL 4 (UK), his productions traveled the main festival circuit from SUNDANCE to BERLIN. They garnered several Best Director Awards, a ZKM International Media Award, a Spirit Award and the recent 2009 Black Pearl Award (Abu Dhabi). His curatorial projects were host at museums worldwide, such as the HAMMER MUSEUM (LA) and the PINAKOTHEK DER MODERNE (Munchen). His work resides at major museum collections, including CENTRE GEORGES POMPIDOU (Paris) and TATE MODERN (London). He is published with Hatje/Cantz (Germany), and in distribution with Soda Pictures and Kino International. He spends his time between Brussels and New York, where he lectures at the SCHOOL OF THE VISUAL ARTS.

The Moon Goose Colony \| Agnes Meyer-Brandis \| 2011 \| 20:56 min.
	Agnes Meyer Brandis’ poetic-scientific investigations weave fact, imagination, storytelling and myth, past, present and future. In the "Moon Goose Colony” the artist develops a narrative based on Godwin’s book, “The Man in the Moone”, by bishop Francis Godwin, in which the protagonist flies to the Moon in a chariot towed by ‘moon geese’. Meyer-Brandis has actualised this concept by raising eleven moon geese, giving them astronauts’ names, imprinting them on herself as goose-mother, training them to fly and taking them on expeditions and housing them in a remote Moon analogue habitat. Neil, Svetlana, Gonzales, Valentina, Friede, Juri, Buzz, Kaguya-Anousheh, Irena, Rakesh, Konstantin-Hermann Agnes Meyer-Brandis lives and works in Berlin. She studied mineralogy for a year, then transfered to the Art Academy in Maastricht, the Düsseldorf Art Academy and the Cologne Media Art Academy. She comes from a background of both, sculpture and new media art. Her work, exhibited worldwide and awarded, is at the experimental edge of art and science, exploring the zone between fact and fiction. Agnes Meyer-Brandis is the founder of the “Forschungsfloss / Research Raft FFUR, a small institute whose chief aim is to explore and confirm subterranean phenomena and unknown lifeforms. Since 2007 her focus of investigation moved into higher altitude with their connected realities. She realized an artistic experiment in weightlessness in cooperation with the German Space Agency DLR. Since 2011 she is breeding moon geese. www.ffur.de

The External World \| David OReilly \| 2010 \| 15:00 min.
	A boy learns to play the piano. David OReilly (21 June 1985, Kilkenny) is an Irish animator based in Berlin. At 15 he began working as an assistant at local animation studios, teaching himself 3d software in his spare time. He discovered cinema in 2005 when he was given the keys to an unused private theatre with an enormous film library. Since then he has created a wide variety of independent short films. Noted for his disregard of conventions his work is regarded as a groundbreaking force in contemporary 3d animation.

Magic for Beginners \| Jesse McLean \| 2010 \| 20:00 min.
	Magic for Beginners examines the mythologies found in fan culture, from longing to obsession to psychic connections. The need for such connections (whether real or imaginary) as well as the need for an emotional release that only fantasy can deliver are explored. Jesse McLean is a media artist and educator whose research is motivated by a deep curiosity about human behavior and relationships, especially as presented and observed through mediated images. She has presented her work at museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Venice Film Festival, Transmediale, 25 FPS Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Images Festival, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, Impakt, CPH:DOX, Kassel Docs, Interstate Projects, PPOW Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.

Here Is Everything \| Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby \| 2013 \| 15:00 min
	Here Is Everything presents itself as a message from The Future, as narrated by a cat and a rabbit, spirit guides who explain that they’ve decided to speak to us via a contemporary art video because they understand this to be our highest form of communication. Their cheeky introduction, however, belies the complex set of ideas that fill the remainder of the film. Death, God, and attaining and maintaining a state of Grace are among the thematic strokes winding their way through the piece, rapturously illustrated with animation, still and video imagery. It is a work that contains specific details about its themes, but sufficiently ambiguous and free of dogma, including religious dogma that, our futuristic visitors explain, is a vestigial leftover from an earlier phase of evolution. And while Death is an ever-present rumination, so are Redemption, Affirmation, and Possibility. Cooper Battersby (b. 1971, Penticton BC) and Emily Vey Duke (b. 1972, Halifax NS) have been working collaboratively since 1994. They work in printed matter, critical writing, curation, sculpture and video.Their work has been exhibited in galleries and at festivals in North and South America and throughout Europe, including The Brooklyn Art Museum, The Power Plant, the Walker Center, The Banff Centre, The Vancouver Art Gallery , The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Hallwalls, The New York Video Festival, The European Media Arts Festival, Impakt, and The Images Festival. In 2011, they were Spotlight Artists at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Their video work has won prizes nationally and internationally, and has been broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Bravo. It has been collected by many university libraries, including those at Harvard and Princeton. The videos are distributed in Europe by Argos, in the US by Video Data Bank, and in Canada by V-Tape and Video Out. Duke and Battersby teach at Syracuse University. They split their time between Lafayette NY and Beach Meadows, Nova Scotia.

Mastering Bambi \| Margit Lukács & Persijn Broersen \| 2011 \| 12:35 min.
	Walt Disney’s 1942 classic animation film ‘Bambi’ is well known for its distinct main characters – a variety of cute, anthropomorphic animals. However, an important but often overlooked protagonist in the movie is nature itself: the pristine wilderness as the main grid on which Disney structured his ‘Bambi’. One of the first virtual worlds was created here: a world of deceptive realism and harmony, in which man is the only enemy. Disney strived to be true to nature, but he also used nature as a metaphor for human society. The forest is depicted as a ‘magic well’, the ultimate purifying ‘frontier’, where the inhabitants peacefully coexist. Broersen and Lukács recreate the model of Disney’s pristine vision, but they strip the forest of its harmonious inhabitants, the animals. What remains is another reality, a constructed and lacking wilderness, where nature becomes the mirror of our own imagination. Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukacs are artists living and working in Amsterdam and Paris. They work in a wide variety of media- most notably video, animation and graphics- producing a myriad of works that reflect on the ornamental nature of today's society. With layers of depersonalization, re-mediation and re-imagination they demonstrate how reality, (mass)media and fiction are strongly intertwined in contemporary culture. This results in a body of work that hovers between ornament and perspective, between a journey and a cul-de-sac. Their work is shown in filmfestivals, museums and galleries and broadcasted on TV worldwide. Recent exhibitions/screenings include: Casa Encendida, Madrid / Centre Pompidou, Paris/ Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam/ EMAF , Germany/ IFFR, Rotterdam.

I may have lost forever my Umbrella \| Johan Grimonprez \| 2011 \| 02:54 min.
	In the spring of 2011, during the Photomonth in Krakow, the artist collective Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin invited me to be part of ALIAS, an exhibition with artists who inhabit alternative versions of themselves. An artist and a writer were teamed up with the aim to create a non-existent third persona. The outcome was that none of the artists in the exhibition existed, as those fictional characters took over the creative process. I was assigned to inhabit the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. ‘Him and his 240 heteronyms,’ Broomberg and Chanarin laughed, ‘an idea not unfamiliar to you!’ And indeed, Fernando Pessoa wrote much of his oeuvre under multiple, alternative identities. Not so much pseudonyms or aliases but what he termed ‘heteronyms,’ invented personalities with detailed biographies and interweaving histories. More specifically Pessoa’s ‘The Book of Disquiet’ became then the point of departure for this film project. All the footage was shot on iPhone recapturing selected details from YouTube endless growing archive, a world where ‘heteronyms’ abound. Images of the earthquake and the tsunami that recently hit Japan in March that year dominating the net, resonated quietly with the world of disquiet I was envisioning. In addition, I imagined an added female voice to Pessoa’s many male heteronyms while also staying true to the original language of ‘The Book of Disquiet’. So, I invited Portuguese writer Isabel Sobral Campos to narrate the selected passages. Johan Grimonprez is an internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker. His films include Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), and Double Take (2009). Acquisitioned by NBC UNIVERSAL, ARTE TV (Germany/France), and CHANNEL 4 (UK), his productions traveled the main festival circuit from SUNDANCE to BERLIN. They garnered several Best Director Awards, a ZKM International Media Award, a Spirit Award and the recent 2009 Black Pearl Award (Abu Dhabi). His curatorial projects were host at museums worldwide, such as the HAMMER MUSEUM (LA) and the PINAKOTHEK DER MODERNE (Munchen). His work resides at major museum collections, including CENTRE GEORGES POMPIDOU (Paris) and TATE MODERN (London). He is published with Hatje/Cantz (Germany), and in distribution with Soda Pictures and Kino International. He spends his time between Brussels and New York, where he lectures at the SCHOOL OF THE VISUAL ARTS.

The Moon Goose Colony \| Agnes Meyer-Brandis \| 2011 \| 20:56 min.
	Agnes Meyer Brandis’ poetic-scientific investigations weave fact, imagination, storytelling and myth, past, present and future. In the "Moon Goose Colony” the artist develops a narrative based on Godwin’s book, “The Man in the Moone”, by bishop Francis Godwin, in which the protagonist flies to the Moon in a chariot towed by ‘moon geese’. Meyer-Brandis has actualised this concept by raising eleven moon geese, giving them astronauts’ names, imprinting them on herself as goose-mother, training them to fly and taking them on expeditions and housing them in a remote Moon analogue habitat. Neil, Svetlana, Gonzales, Valentina, Friede, Juri, Buzz, Kaguya-Anousheh, Irena, Rakesh, Konstantin-Hermann Agnes Meyer-Brandis lives and works in Berlin. She studied mineralogy for a year, then transfered to the Art Academy in Maastricht, the Düsseldorf Art Academy and the Cologne Media Art Academy. She comes from a background of both, sculpture and new media art. Her work, exhibited worldwide and awarded, is at the experimental edge of art and science, exploring the zone between fact and fiction. Agnes Meyer-Brandis is the founder of the “Forschungsfloss / Research Raft FFUR, a small institute whose chief aim is to explore and confirm subterranean phenomena and unknown lifeforms. Since 2007 her focus of investigation moved into higher altitude with their connected realities. She realized an artistic experiment in weightlessness in cooperation with the German Space Agency DLR. Since 2011 she is breeding moon geese. www.ffur.de

The External World \| David OReilly \| 2010 \| 15:00 min.
	A boy learns to play the piano. David OReilly (21 June 1985, Kilkenny) is an Irish animator based in Berlin. At 15 he began working as an assistant at local animation studios, teaching himself 3d software in his spare time. He discovered cinema in 2005 when he was given the keys to an unused private theatre with an enormous film library. Since then he has created a wide variety of independent short films. Noted for his disregard of conventions his work is regarded as a groundbreaking force in contemporary 3d animation.

Magic for Beginners \| Jesse McLean \| 2010 \| 20:00 min.
	Magic for Beginners examines the mythologies found in fan culture, from longing to obsession to psychic connections. The need for such connections (whether real or imaginary) as well as the need for an emotional release that only fantasy can deliver are explored. Jesse McLean is a media artist and educator whose research is motivated by a deep curiosity about human behavior and relationships, especially as presented and observed through mediated images. She has presented her work at museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Venice Film Festival, Transmediale, 25 FPS Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Images Festival, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, Impakt, CPH:DOX, Kassel Docs, Interstate Projects, PPOW Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.