Machines & Me: A Filmless Festival 2024 Part Four

On Dec. 9, the following events will take place:

• Virtual Roundtable + Q & A
• Featuring artists’ talks by Ellen Chang, Zike He, Rui An Ho and Guangli Liu

FESTIVAL DATES:

Thu, Dec 5, 2024 - 3:30PM

Fri, Dec 6, 2024 - 4PM

Fri, Dec 6, 2024 - 7:30PM

Mon, Dec 9, 2024 - 1:30PM

About the Festival:

“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 a multi-day festival with three in-person events (with online components on Dec. 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 Dec. 9. Find out more information for part one, two and three to attend more festival dates.

Machines & Me: A Filmless Festival 2024 is:

Co-presented by Cinema & Media Studies and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, SLLC at UMD.

Curated and organized by Belinda Qian He (SLLC, East Asian Cinema & Media Studies)

With the assistance of UMD faculty supporters and discussants/moderators:

Jason Kuo (Art History and Archaeology; Cinema & Media Studies), Quint Gregory (Art History and Archaeology), Marjan Moosavi (SLLC, Persian Studies; Performance Studies) and Neda Atanasoski (Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute).

With the help of student assistants and volunteers:

Madison Henn (SLLC, Chinese; UTAP program), Filippo Grassi (PhD student in Art History), Theo Portner (SLLC, Chinese), Ira Valeza (SLLC, Chinese; Government and Politics), Cecelia Clanton (SLLC, Chinese), Nelson Guachamin (English; SLLC, Chinese), Madeline Leah Yaffe (Cinema & Media Studies, SLLC; Public Relations), Tianen Deng (Information Science) and Serena Mao (International Relations; Psychology).

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 and collaboraters:

Mr. Wo Wang, graphic designer for all event posters; Dr. Van Tran Nguyen (Performing Arts, Georgetown University); Mr. Yuanhong Huang and the Chinese Independent Film Association; and the Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.