VIDEO PROGRAM ARCHIVE
For each CYFEST, the video archive’s curator Victoria Ilyushkina selects works for the international competition video program whose concept corresponds to a current slogan of the festival. This program is a philosophical statement of sorts; it aims to reflect the changes that take place in our mind and perception of the reality around us and the virtual reality as affected by digital technologies. The artist’s outlook is a sensitive barometer of those changes.
The CYFEST video program is curated by Victoria Ilyushkina.
Co-curated special screenings and video programs: “A Short Term Effect”, 2010, curator Olga Jürgenson (Great Britain); “Not So Distant Memory”, 2011, curator Boshko Boscovic (USA); “Action Planning: Reaction”, 2011, curators Natalia Prikhodko (Russia) and Yulia Garbuzova (France); “Cross-Over”, 2012, curator Miguel Petchkovsky Morais (Brazil-Netherlands), “Digital Revolution”, 2017, curator Leah Stuhltrager (USA-Germany); “Voyage”, 2024, curator Gabriel V. Soucheyre (France); “Beyond interfaces”, 2024, curator Mu Tuan (Taiwan); “Korean VR & Video”, 2024, curator Seungah Lee (South Korea).
For more information, please visit the official website of CYLAND Video Archive.
Alexandra Lerman (USA), The Return of the Return of the Giant Hogweed, 4 min. 47 sec., 2018. Digital Fermentation of the Moving Image, CYFEST-14 Video Program, NPAK, Yerevan, Armenia, 2022. Photograph by Anton Khlabov.
«Since the very beginning, video art has played an important role in the festival. Year after year, the festival video program, a living organism like all the other sections of the festival, has offered its viewers a wide range of artists’ videos from all over the word. Bringing video art into the cultural arena of a festival is always a challenge, not only because, as in all time-based works, viewers are asked to invest their time according to the length of the works shown, that is to say, they are less free to move around as they like, but also because video is based upon a “psychological model”. By its nature it is a “portal” to the inner self. Art, contemporary art in particular, is never a passive experience. Contrary to the cinema which absorbs the spectators into the picture, video art keeps them at a distance, a condition necessary to think actively, to engage ourselves in a dialogue with the work before our eyes. As a matter of fact, watching video art always implies a double perception: perceiving oneself (the viewer’s mind at work) when perceiving the other (the images shown on the screen).
Pertinently, the video art programs (and consequently the archive) are a strong and powerful visualization of the prefix “cyber-” from the festival name. Usually, “cyber-” is commonly associated with the word “computer” and, by extension, with digital technology. However, notwithstanding the digital character of the great majority of works showed and discussed, here “cyber-” is more like a short form for “Cybernetics”, the science of communication and control theory that, through a transdisciplinary approach, explores structures, limitations, and possibilities of systems that use technology. Ultimately, they accomplish the educational mission of exploring and analyzing the world of today without surrendering to the laws of the entertainment industry.
The video programs and archive condense the founding principles of CYLAND, which, undoubtedly, are very similar to those of the pioneers of video art of about half a century ago: the non-commercial nature of all the events; the bold challenge of old-fashioned preconceptions of the artist’s function in society and what his or her art should be about; the ability to open the viewers’ eyes and let them see reality with all its beauty and constraints; and above all, the tangible explanation that the true spirit of art lives on as a perpetual experiment... flirting with the present.»
— Antonio Geusa, curator, art critic
From CYFEST, the video challenge and the first flight of the butterfly
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CYFEST CO-CURATED SPECIAL PROGRAMS
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