Monday Lectures is delighted to present two recent films by the photographer and filmmaker Marte Aas: Francine Was a Machine, and I Am the Weather, produced in 2019 and 2018 respectively. The films, together with an introduction by Aas, will be available to view on our website between 12 and 22 on Thursday 2 April 2020:
www.lecturesandnotesarchive.com
In response to the coronavirus, the Monday Lectures programme is moving online! We have been busy this past few weeks and are delighted to present you this screening as the first in a series of online lectures and events coming up over the next few months.
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Francine Was a Machine
The film's starting point is the unverified story about René Descartes' mechanical daughter, a fable about a man of rationality and science creating a human-looking machine in the place of his dead daughter Francine. During a travel through a storm at sea, the seamen discovered the doll in Descartes' cabin. Horrified by the sight they threw it into the ocean.
The film intertwines this story with images from a workshop producing sex dolls with artificial intelligence. Body parts and electronics, flesh colored silicon and casting moulds are inhabiting this place. The film also shows images of cephalopods from the bottom of the sea, speculating on where Descartes' doll ended her mechanical life and what became of her when she escaped the rational dualist world view of her creator. (HD Video, 13:39 min with sound, 2019)
I am the Weather
The film investigates the connections between the weather, metaphors taken from the natural world and our digital reality. With Munch 's iconic painting The Scream as a starting point, the film takes us on a speculative journey through the infrastructure we take most for granted; the weather. (HDVideo 12:55 min with sound, 2018)
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Marte Aas' main area of interest is the intersection between contemporary image culture, history, technology and landscape. Her work attempts to address underlying structures and gestures that form political and ideological narratives. These different subjects of interest are visualised in the form of films, photographs and installations, folded into non-linear and layered narratives.
The starting point for her works is often a story present in contemporary or historical material, which is being processed through research into different formats and media, although strongly grounded in a photographic practice. Photography's material aspects, the connection between the sign and the signifier and the representational aspects of photography is thus also investigated and processed in her art.
Aas is educated at The School of Photography at The University of Gothenburg and has had a number of exhibitions and screenings in Norway and abroad, her last major exhibition was Francine (was a machine) at Kunsthall Trondheim in 2019. Aas has published several books and catalogues including Marte Aas – Photography and Film, 2010, Torshovtoppen, 2008 and On the Subject of Body and Space, 2013 and is also one of the founding members of the publishing house Multipress.