Sleepless Video Art Night 2025
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- Jul 18
- 5 min read
June 21, 2025, Venice, Italy
Sleepless Video Art Night
Where Deeds Echo
June 21, Saturday Night, 00.30–4.00
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Auditorium Santa Margherita—Emanuele Severino, Dorsoduro 3689, Venice
As part of Sleepless Video Art Night 2025 in Venice, CYLAND presents a curated screening of works from its long-standing media art platform, the CYLAND Video Archive, established in 2008. This program brings together video works from various years that reflect on the fundamental dimensions of human experience within today’s evolving technological landscape.
The selected works delve into imagined and remembered realms—distant and intimate, emotional and virtual. The featured artists explore love, the illusory bond between soul and body in digital space, historical and social memory, and the architecture of both past and future. They also venture into speculative, cybernetic landscapes, crafting poetic reflections on the intersections of technology, identity, and perception.
Participating artists:
Mariateresa Sartori, Those Who Go Those Who Stay Behind, 2009, 3 min 46 sec
Mariateresa Sartori recorded people embarking on the boats in Venice during the Sunday summer rush hour. Human traffic is regulated by the mariner who opens and closes access to the boat with a chain, blocking the flow when necessary. Manners, gestures and expressions distinguish those who departed from those left behind. The artist has captured a micro-phenomenon that conveys the universal significance of the human condition, where a specific incident becomes symbolic.
Virginia L. Montgomery, Moon Moth Bed, 2023, 6 min 20 sec
A live-action art film inspired by Dr. Donna Haraway’s ecofeminist writings and panpsychic philosophy, the Moon Moth Bed portrays real luna moths hatching from their cocoons within an ethereal, dreamlike video world.
Francesca Fini, White Noise, 2013, 6 min 04 sec
In the video piece the woman spins a red thread from 1960s television footage: propaganda, commercials, nuclear tests, and superpower rivalries. The work reflects the contradictions of the Cold War era, the Vietnam War, the fight for civil rights, and the fear of terrorism.
Lidiya Rikker, Braces System, 2021, 2 min 30 sec
A video essay in the found footage technique. The film is built on visual metaphor and uses ironic juxtaposition, telling of the strange force that always makes humanity put itself in order, as if it were lining up in even rows.
Sid Iandovka and Anna Tsyrlina, horizōn, 2019, 7 min 14 sec
horizōn is an archival collage and repurposing work, where filmmakers use digital technologies to transform 1970s Soviet newsreel footage into something entirely out of time. These celluloid images are shuffled, recombined, stretched, and illuminated by a ghostly light, creating interactions with the people depicted.
Lera Nibiru, Journey to the Other Side of Dream, 2020, 4 min
Journey to the Other Side of Dream began as a fairy-tale closet installation, evolved into a 2018 book (ArtLeda), and inspired a 2020 cartoon. It tells of a girl who, falling ill, explores her imagination’s dreamscape, confronting inner struggles and finding healing.
Regina Hüebner, Love-Letters for loving, 2024, 2 min 58 sec
silence Digital video of scanned documents. The letters were written by visitors as part of a participatory action within the loving installation at CYFEST 16: Archive of Feelings. A Journey (HayArt Centre, Yerevan, Armenia, 2024). This ongoing participatory element remains a central component of loving.
Anna Sowa, Gohar Sargsyan, Land und Blut, 2022, 6 min
In this audiovisual manifesto, the artist explores the concept of “country” not only as a territory but, above all, as a community of people who are attached to the environment where they grew up, sharing a common history, daily routines, and empathy.
Polina Komyagina, Depleted Reality, 2020, 2 min 44 sec
Depleted Reality is a non-narrative visual poem, aesthetically referring to a nightmare or a psychedelic trip. The artwork explores perverse and borderline states of mind resulting from a personal crisis. A collage film using various animation techniques. A sound automatically generated by computer heightens the lyrical hero’s sense of being lost as he journeys through the debris of his own dreams and thoughts.
Tanya Akhmetgalieva, Disappearing Staircases, 2015, 4 min 28 sec
In the playhouse on the seashore, we meet a young author again and again with images from her childhood to the island in her memories. The external world, with all its coarseness and cruelty, once again emphasizes and accentuates the fragility of our inner world.
Guilherme Bergamini, Plenitude, 2020, 5 min
Dramatically juxtaposes documentary footage of a street performance with the song “Ismália” set to a poem by the Brazilian poet Alphonsus de Guimaraens. The artist declares that the Planet Earth will continue to be a home to the kingdoms of Barbarism and Madness as long as at least one person denies the value of all other human personalities and nations.
AUJIK, Spatial Bodies, 2016, 4 min 06 sec
Using 3D meshes, AUJIK imagines the Osaka urban landscape coming alive, distorting buildings into self-replicating organisms, oscillating between order and chaos. It is influenced by gunkan and metabolism architecture. The music is specially composed by Daisuke Tanabe.
Anton Khlabov, Imaginary Center of a Circle, 2022—2023, 1 min 30 sec
The urban plan of contemporary Yerevan, initially envisioned as an ideal "garden city" with a perfect circle, ultimately emerges as a collection of sectors and fragments—an unrealised dream of absolute harmony. In photo based animation the artist explores the urban fabric—its folds, curves, repetitive circular motifs, and fragments.
Di Hu, Urban Sculptures, 2017, 6 min
The surveillance camera and the smartphone represent two types of societies described by Gilles Deleuze: the disciplinary society and the society of control. The surveillance camera is passive, while the smartphone is active. The artist believes the best way to portray this phenomenon is to take images of these surveillance cameras, to clarify the ways by which they are inserted into the body of the city.
Alek Borisov, Reefs, 2017— 2020, 3 min
In the Reefs series, the artist studies the theme of journeying into the cybernetic future. He uses the mythopoetic image of Reefs (the Riphean Mountains), the imaginary boundary between worlds in antiquity, transforming this boundary into a binary pixel, paradoxically splitting the “atom” of digital material and the constitutive element that forms optical illusions of boundaries of perception.
Juan Poyuan, It Was Just a Virtual Kiss, 2020—2024, 7 min
The love story set in the online game World of Warcraft becomes the basis for exploring how players construct their virtual bodies in the digital world and how these bodies extend into digital form. By crossing to the other side of the screen, players create the illusion of physical and emotional connection, overcoming the limitations of their real bodies. This digital construction of the body is heavily shaped by machinima and computer-generated animation.
Marc Lee, Speculative Evolution, 2024, 53 sec
These hybrid creatures are modeled on real-life counterparts and are based on scientific publications in the field of genetic engineering and synthetic biology, which can be viewed by lineage. In this speculative simulation, robotic sensors are used to run through cycles of perception, calculation and action. You can experience how an AI tries to calculate all the components of an ecosystem in order to control and balance an uncontrollable ecosystem.
Vika Ilyushkina, Cat’s Night Dreams, 2021, 7 min 33 sec
The hearing of animals is more sensitive to the extraterrestrial and otherworldly aspects of nature than that of humans. The fermentation of analogue synthesizer sound into digital sound by artists Thorsten Soltau and Max Kuiper is combined with an unusual visual transformation of a night garden.
Learn more about CYLAND Video Archive
