transmediale studio featured a Film installation as part of silent green’s open house programme, where we presented Onset - a film by last year’s residents Anna Engelhardt & Mark Cinkevich as well as the work in progress The Alluvials by this year’s Vilém Flusser resident Alice Bucknell.

A demon roams through an ominous synthetic environment, reconstructed from satellite images of Russian air bases: Khmeimim in Syria, Baranovichi in Belarus, and Belbek in Ukraine. In Onset, Engelhardt and Cinkevich craft an unholy alliance of medieval demonology, investigative research, and CGI animation to uncover the hidden life of these military outposts. Over the course of the film, the true horror of Russia’s wars coalesces into a parasitic monster that possesses sovereign states and destroys them from within.

The film is co-funded by transmediale Festival x Pro Helvetia and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter.

The Alluvials is an open-world video game exploring the politics of drought and water scarcity. Set in a near-future alternate Los Angeles, The Alluvials explores an alien watery world through the perspective of various animal characters. Situated around the once concreted LA River, the game’s protagonists reside in a series of interconnected worlds of desertified towns, dried up lakes, and the headquarters of a private water company.