COMPETITION
PROGRAM NO.2
This program has concluded
Supernova’s Competition program is the focal point of the annual festival, boasting significant cash prize awards determined by special guest jurors who represent the vanguard of the digital motion art and animation community. Through the competition program, Denver Digerati seeks to showcase artists as animators, leveraging tools and working methods that defy all perceptions behind their creations. Works selected for the competition are considered for a variety of reasons including: artistry, ambition, boldness, intrigue, resonance and even career development. The competition adheres to no specific genre, but simply represents some of the best of all submissions that showcase the strengths and instincts inherent in the medium, with a particular eye on experimentation. The guest jurors selected to determine this year’s competition cash prize awards are Sine Ozbilge, Stefan Larsson / aka Aujik, and Snow Yunxue Fu, all who have been featured in Supernova programs between 2016 and 2020.
The 2021 competition program will be shown in three hour long segments for the first time this year, due to the varying length of animations selected and the opportunity for viewers to appreciate the offerings in depth over the course of a week.
Megalomania
By Eunseo Kim
The main character who was hospitalized for trying to make an extreme choice. While reading his childhood diary in the hospital room, he is sucked into his delusional world. That's where you encounter your own rusted and hardened grief.
Edifice II
By Gregory Bennett
‘Edifice II’ is situated in an art and animation practice that embraces 3D computer animation to explore themes and tensions around nature and culture, and conceptions of the utopian and the dystopian, through the rendering of often complex digital ecosystems. The term ‘edifice’ can refer a long-established complex system of beliefs, a complicated abstract structure that can be difficult to challenge or penetrate. In this work homogeneous human figures appear as often precariously placed performers, performing ritual-like scenarios, engaged in Sisyphean tasks, or unspecified debates or arguments. The individual is collapsed into multiple uncanny digital doppelgangers, placed in uncertain environments, simulating some kind of life, often without obvious purpose. Here the loop is embraced as a narrative strategy, a narrative where there is motion but not necessarily progression. The loop allows for the paradoxical expression of a sense of motion and activity which is also profoundly inert and arrested. The retrieval and mutable configuration and re-configuration of set-in-motion elements is compulsively busy, but is ultimately a closed system, subject to the repetition compulsion of the loop, always returning and repeating, unable to achieve resolution.
Audenie
By Taokan Xu
In this experimental film we follow Audenie who cannot escape her own delusions anymore. Lost in her own mind palace, she watches happy and the deranged scenes unfold. The jumbled images clash into a construction that generates different emotions - behind every delight there disgust, behind every loathing, a new pleasure begins. Audenie surrenders to this lack of orientation without being able to pinpoint if she indeed loved or hated her partner.
Post-Removal
By Yorgos Papafigos & Kostis Spanopoulos
The Post-Removal has been made entirely with a CPU system, 3D scanning data, dynamic simulations, and artificially designed sound recordings. The video portrays the notion of free will and society’s roles between violence and the disarray of a non-human entity that seeks to atone. The hand suggests a Deus-like device which during the detachment from its body is freed from its pain and falls into the tank as a useless inanimate mass production object, but this time instead of bringing redemption it goes off and tries to stay alive and it finally dies. This Project is a social-political comment on a current post-human society, an effort to escape from a dystopian futuristic present. Post-Removal negotiates concepts of man's deification and idealization of things in modern society and new hybrid technologies in an increasingly controlled contemporary capitalistic world. Artificial Intelligence no longer seems to be the enemy of civilization, but the human being itself.
Costume Change Forever
By John Harlan Norris
Costume Change Forever explores the construction of persona through the lens of animated portraiture. Based on Director John Harlan Norris' ongoing series of conceptual portrait paintings, the film uses a variety of animation methods to investigate the complicated and relentless task of presenting self at a time in which our likenesses have become increasingly malleable, fraught, and self-searching.
Soft Rains
By Johannes Duncker
SOFT RAINS is an exploration of human loneliness and the power of artistic creation through the lens of artificial being.
In a post-apocalyptic future, an archaeologist attempts to reconstruct the accounts of an artificial intelligence. In a conflict between humans and machines this A.I. was locked into a computer simulation and finds itself now in an empty world devoid of any living beings. The A.I. tries everything to escape this prison, only to realize that it has to find a new meaning for its existence.
The film's title refers to "There Will Come Soft Rains", a short poem by Sara Teasdale published in reaction to World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic about nature's establishment of a new peaceful order that will be indifferent to the outcome of the war or mankind's extinction.