Open-Air Short Films
Admission is free / a valid exhibition ticket (15/8 euros) for August 22 is required, including registration for the requested program option
Q&A with the filmmakers following the screening
Language English
Film program
Bruce Eesly: Endangered Gestures (2026), 5 min.
Daphné Nan Le Sergent: Silicon Islands and War (2025), 37 min.
Gala Hernández López: Like Moths to Light (2026), 26 min.
Ryan S. Jeffery: An Engineer / Not a Camera (2025), 12 min.
Bruce Eesly: Endangered Gestures (2026), 5 min.
Endangered Gestures is a short film showing hand gestures for concepts currently under threat by authoritarian shifts around the world. Pairing censored words with gestures proposed by AI, the results sit somewhere between speculative sign language and technical error. The hands that appear are almost-but-not-quite-human, their unreliable digits forming gestures that hover at the edge of meaning.
The words corresponding to each gesture belong to a list of phrases that started disappearing from U.S. government websites, documents and archives in March 2025. Ideas related to diversity, climate change and social issues were no longer deemed acceptable and removed by hand or algorithm. Ironically, a large portion of the censored words read like a wishlist for a humane and equitable society.
Asking generative imaging technology to create hand gestures for these words is an ultimately absurd attempt at finding a language of resistance within the ideological constraints of the technology. The increasingly improbable gestures may leave the viewer wondering what strategies and contortions will be required of us to protect these achievements in the age of tech-enabled authoritarianism. Endangered Gestures is a reminder of things worth fostering and celebrating, rendered by the intelligence complicit in their erosion.
Bruce Eesly is a visual artist based in Berlin. Working with photography, archives and generative imaging technologies, he examines how photographic images, classification systems and technological infrastructures shape our understanding of reality. His work has been exhibited internationally at the Rencontres d'Arles (FR), Hangar Photo Art Center (BE) and Hebbel am Ufer (DE), among others. Eesly was named a Foam Talent and awarded for his work Endangered Gestures at the Prix Ars Electronica in 2026.
Daphné Nan Le Sergent: Silicon Islands and War (2025), video-essay, 37 min.
At a time when AI is undergoing unprecedented development, semiconductor technology has become strategic on the global stage. Without semiconductors, the development of artificial intelligence engines cannot take place. Without semiconductors, there would be no advanced weaponry, no digital memory, and not even sensors for our digital cameras. This video essay invites us to consider another history of photography, one in which the resolution of our images has improved as the Asian industry has miniaturized semiconductors, engraved on silicon wafers. But this technological race forward can only be truly understood in the context of geopolitics and the rivalry between China and the US in the Pacific region.
In Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, producing high-quality semiconductors also means asserting a strong position vis-à-vis these powers. How, then, can we not intertwine the story of the evolution of our images with the history of these countries—here called Silicon Islands—as well as their past wars and current conflicts? The impersonal narrative of AI-generated voices is countered by that of a Creole storyteller. The latter challenges the gigantism of digital memory and its excessive flood of images. He challenges it with the tools of oral memory: poetry and song. The narrative unfolds through songs (Nel-K, Seung Hwan Diego Bae, Echo) in which emotional into- nations are modulated: they express pride in resisting the powerful as well as the melancholic blues of having been ruled by them; it recounts the follies of the Anthropocene, where Taiwan cannot relocate its state-of-the-art factories, considered a “silicon shield” against China.
Daphné Nan Le Sergent is a University Professor at the Photography Department, Paris 8 University, Member of the AIAC research unit, Arts des Images et Art Contemporain, Member of AICA-France / the International Association of Art Critics. Le Sergent conducts artistic and theoretical work on the different spatializations of the sensory and on the image as a form of sensory memory in Western and non- Western arts. Her artistic projects explore the photographic image in relation to the production chain of its materials and the economic and geopolitical balances that keep it going.
Gala Hernández López: Like Moths to Light (2026), 26 min.
A woman talks to us from inside a machine that records her brain activity. She describes a mental labyrinth combining an old amusement park called Dreamland, 19th-century dream photographs, contemporary experiments in mental decoding using AI, and Prophetic, a start-up whose goal is to control dreams. But what do our dreams see when they look back at us? like moths to light is a meditation on the future of our dream worlds in the age of neurocapitalism.
Gala Hernández López is an artist, filmmaker, researcher and producer. Her filmography, marked by an ecofeminist sensibility, consists of films born out of research processes that blend materialist critique, dreamlike imagery, and speculative fiction. Her works have been presented at Cannes, Berlinale, Rotterdam, IDFA, Viennale, Cinéma du Réel, Berlinische Galerie and the Palais de Tokyo, among others. Her film La Mécanique des fluides won the César Award for Best Documentary Short Film in 2024.
Ryan S. Jeffery: An Engineer / Not a Camera (2025), 12 min.
The production of a computer chip is perhaps the most complex technical process in human history. But a critical step in producing this cutting-edge technology is photolithography, a process that stems directly from the development of photography. Today, generative AI and computer-generated imagery are near indistinguishable from those made with a camera.
Once a method for capturing an image of the world, the science of optics is now being used to build machines that can make images of the world without needing to see it. As this new virtual world grows richer, the allure of escaping into this elsewhere grows with it. Yet there is no elsewhere. Every image that beckons from an uncanny world somewhere else fundamentally alters our world right before our eyes.
Ryan S. Jeffery is a filmmaker and moving image artist interested in how technology, media, and political economy shape one another. The subjects of his work have ranged from the history of data centers, the financial industry’s collision with online meme culture, the private art collection of the World Trade Organization, and the recent turn in Silicon Valley to so-called “hard tech.”
