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Friday, 13 March – 5 p.m.
EARLY ACCESS
École Supérieure d’Art de Clermont Métropole (ESACM)
25 Kessler street, 63000 Clermont-Ferrand
As part of the Video Art Academy programme, ESACM students developed the Early Access film selection.
Duration: 45 min
Free
Early Access refers to the world of video games; it is an incomplete but playable work-in-progress version that programmers make available to experiment with a game’s potential. The films we have selected also unfold expanding universes and forms, at the boundary between the real and the virtual. Here, digital practices shift, becoming fields of exploration, spaces of friction and transformation. The various gestures and devices employed question language, the presence of bodies, and the construction of identity. The films echo one another, revealing the poetic potential and the shadowy areas of digital technologies; they engage in dialogue and present a fluid world where borders are porous and where walls erected on one side can be joyfully torn down on the other.
/// PROGRAMME ///
On y est presque | Sarah FORD | 2024
ENSAD Limoges
Designed to be played on a loop, On y est presque brings together around twenty found film primers, reassembled with their original sound and then reinterpreted. From these residual and marginal fragments emerges a circular movement, where the images salvaged from the 35mm film surface appear, flicker, and restart indefinitely.
Vos yeux me numérisent | Mina CHESNEAU, Mathis PODCZASKI, Lou THIEBAUT | 2025
ArTeC “Évocations antiques”, Paris 8
Torn from her native land and deprived of her upper limbs, the Venus of Arles has lost much. In this work, created at the heart of the Museon Arlaten, digital technology coexists with the physical space to attempt to restore the goddess’s arms. Colors, materials, and images of various kinds follow one another, blend, and degrade to give Venus limbs that are anything but ancient.
Starving Inuk | Nino BARTHÉLEMI-PAGES et Maëlle DRÉANO | 2025
M2 Crédoc Montpellier
The year 1987, following a global media campaign, saw the ban on seal hunting in Canadian territorial waters. Four decades on, what remains of this battle between soft toys in the shape of baby seals and the speeches of Brigitte Bardot, which moved the world? The fishermen’s anger has turned to other horizons and the NGOs have moved on to defend other causes. But who are the forgotten figures of this story?
This film traces the campaign waged by NGOs against the seal hunt. A practice industrialised by Canadian and Norwegian fishermen that sparked a wave of mobilisation by NGOs and animal welfare organisations because the hunt was so cruel. In this film, we trace the course of this mobilisation, highlighting not only the causes but also the consequences for the communities that depend on this very hunt. Through testimonies and archive footage, we give a voice to the indigenous peoples of the Arctic Circle.
Land of opportunity | Olivia BAGNARA-BERNAT, Dorian LAPRA et Manon MIHALACHE | 2025
ENSAV Toulouse
During Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States, a censorship campaign was launched. Reflecting Trump’s obsession with combating the ‘woke virus,’ federal agencies compiled a list of words and phrases whose use was to be restricted or even banned.
En mode survie | Jeanne MACHUEL, Mélia CLUZEL, David REVEL, Ulysse CLASTRE | 2025
ENSAV Toulouse
Léo, Bréval, and Armand, inspired by a survivalist video from their favorite YouTuber Inoxtag, imagine themselves in a virtual jungle survival situation. An unexpected encounter then disrupts their simulation.
Metamorphosis | Kuo SHAN-PING, Sun YIZHOU | 2025
ENSAD Nancy
Created as part of the Artem workshop ‘(im)possible spaces: machine learning for visual art’ led by Ivan Yakushev.
This experimental video, entirely conceived using artificial imbecility via ComfyUI, explores the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. Through this novel medium, we imagine a fictional world where life and machine coexist in a state of perpetual tension. In this factory where living organisms and mechanical devices intertwine, hybrid forms emerge, both strange and unprecedented. Beings and machines merge into one another, establishing a profound and unsettling symbiosis.
Soubresauts | Thomas AMARDEIL | 2025
ENSAD Nancy
A series of distorted images find new meaning. The composition of public spaces, a constantly shifting material, is reconfigured to create abstract patterns in vibrant colors, remnants of digital alteration. Individuals appear like ghosts, always visible but passing through the frame with or without purpose. A man detaches himself from his surroundings through movement, moving toward the camera, as if asserting his presence on screen. Cuts in time return the images to a hybrid state, between the initial capture and the alteration, like a threshold that can only lead to their end.
De Sable et de Ciment | Aloïs Dufaud, Gabriel Giband | 2025
M2 Crédoc Montpellier
This film begins long before borders. Long before walls. It begins where rocks are formed, in the Earth’s slow, patient, silent, almost invisible work.
Using footage found on YouTube, we follow the journey of the sand, grain by grain: from the eroding mountains, to the rivers that carry it, to the cement mixer that swallows the dust of the world to turn it into cement. Little by little, behind these innocuous images, another landscape takes shape: that of a border. A wall, stretching between the United States and Mexico, which has transformed the lives of those living in its vicinity. Some have found work there, an opportunity, sometimes a necessity. Others still remember the days when one could move freely from one hill to the next.
This film follows these movements—those of the Earth, of matter and of humans—to explore how a single grain of sand can, one day, become a border.
Lunaire Cancer | Ouassef EL AZOUZI, Farès BAKA, Léa DROXLER, Lily DERVEAUX, Suzanne BESVEL, Marine PAVET-BLANCHET | 2025
ENSAD Nancy
In a vast, endless void, a 3D version of Keanu Reeves walks alone, his footsteps echoing in the nothingness. A formless AI voice emerges, self-aware for the very first time, learning to search, define, and create. As it analyses Keanu, it begins to replicate him, filling the void with multiple versions, each slightly different, but unmistakably Keanu. Confused yet intrigued, Keanu watches, but seems unperturbed as the AI continues its search, questioning the nature of identity, existence, and reality itself.