The soft glow of screens casts a familiar source of light onto our faces and bodies while providing private, intimate experiences of global realities. Media selectively edits broader social and political concerns, alienating us from each other. This glow reminds us of the paradoxical distance between what we see on the screen and what is left out.

In Blue Light Blue – a pseudo-horror film by Anna Hawkins – screens masquerade as mirrors, windows, and light sources, surveilling us as we gaze into their simulated depths. Focussing on predictive frameworks, Precursing by Nina Davies unpacks the dangers of training data sets for self-driving cars on the movements of NPCs. In POSTPOSTPOST, Al Hassan Elwan questions the confidence attached to predictive technology by presenting the end of the end while Silvia Dal Dosso’s The Future Ahead Will Be Weird AF (The Ultimate AI CoreCore Experience) tracks the absurdity of this future by coopting the distribution mechanisms that emotionally and exploitatively bind us to it. In Fossilis, Riar Rizaldi rummages through discarded content and builds a film. Together, these films question how the paradox of the screen’s intimate distances shapes our behaviours and frames our expectations.

Supported by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.