Occulting Disk

Occulting Disk Inside of a telescope, the ‘occulting disk’ blocks the sun’s light from view - a self-inflicted technical flaw that grants vision beyond our solar system. A miniature, handheld eclipse, it recentres the user in a far larger and less comprehensible world. In Occulting Disk, inhuman scales and systems thinking are engaged with through methodologies that deviate and obscure, briefly bringing their distant subject matter into close, intimate proximity. Tom K Kemp (UK/NL) incorporates roleplaying game design and animation into filmmaking, exploring systems-thinking, complexity and the eerie consequences of bureaucratic and economic systems on intimate human relations. His works generate unpredictable genre fiction where gameplay and collaborative storytelling are combined into a deviated method of complexity modelling. Recent shows include Universes, Leicester Gallery UK, 2020, Me Gustas Pixelad, La Casa Encendida, Madrid ES 2018, Blood from a Turnip, EYE filmmuseum, Amsterdam NL 2018 Napoleon Complex explores weather models used by global catastrophe insurance, speculating on the consequences of their creation at a series of different scales from the economic to the intimate. In the central film an actuarial scientist appears in a disorienting series of scenes which swing between the investigative, the fictional and the interpersonal. Through a form of roleplay that imitates the repetitive simulation used in weather modelling algorithms, the details of his profession become complicated by unexpected consequences and tangential personal information. An Emperor Moth hatches and is drawn towards the light of the film set - the false eyes on its wings mutating and animating as the relationship between the weather models and their consequences become increasingly indistinct. Works: ‘Napoleon Complex’, video installation consisting of HD single channel video, 17m, with 1m animation loops and props from film set. Excerpt: https://vimeo.com/411398875 Full Film: https://vimeo.com/386226253 pass: NC Loops: https://vimeo.com/463397680 pass: NC2 Aaro Murphy (FI/NL) is a multimedia artist, working across video, sound & sculpture. His practice focuses largely on the possibility of machines and mechanisms adopting a performative spatial potential. Working across media such as sound, animation, light and perfume, Aaro creates sculptural installations and spatial interventions – where the boundaries between the animate and inanimate start to blur. Recent shows include: ‘Vexer’ 2020, Finnish Cultural Institute of the Benelux and ‘Semantic Noise’ 2019, De School Amsterdam For Occulting Disk, Murphy presents a kinetic installation titled, ‘Vessels’ – a hyperventilating mechanised system. The sculptures slowly “exhale” releasing a sigh of air into the space they inhabit. As the air gets released their polished latex exteriors tighten revealing a machine-like interior structure. Over time the pieces transition between something organic to eventually resembling machine parts or architectural models. Microphones embedded inside amplify the sound of air being sucked, producing a melancholic ambient soundtrack into the space the sculptures inhabit. Works: ‘Vessels’, Kinetic sound installation. Latex, pneumatic hoses, air compressor, microphones, wood, scent. Susan Ploetz (US/DE) is an artist-researcher working with somatics, theory, writing, performance, simulation and live action role plays (larping) in different configurations. Her work deals with the overlapping spaces of soma and technos; she uses imagination, magical materiality, and protocol to induce emancipatory emotive dissonances and perceptual expansion. She explores live simulation, game design and play as decolonial story-making to allow for individual agency while creating decentralized community.She has presented work at such instituetz has written a single-player Live Action Roleplay, ‘Anti-Skinship’. Players in ‘Anti-Skinship’ play alien, sensing creatures that detect intelligence through touch, but have entered a landscape where touch is no longer allowed. Through somatic exercises and character creation, players negotiate a form of sensory worldbuilding in an environment of restricted agency. Works: ‘Anti-Skinship’ – printed LARP for 1+ players, edition of 100. tions as the Berliner Festspiele, Oude Kerk, Sophiensaele, ABC Art Fair, Rupert (Vilnius), Documenta 13, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Aoyama Gakuin University (Tokyo), and Performa. Occulting Disk made possible with the financial support of the statutory city of Brno and the Ministry of Culture.