Autoimmune
A non-human entity complicates common understandings of queerness and HIV. With agency over data, it distorts images from archives and makes them speak. Composed with AI processes for generative video and sound, including deepfakes, the piece explores uncanny relations between technology, politics, and illness.
Best Sound Design, The Artists Forum Festival of The Moving Image 2021, The Artists Forum, New York City
Collaborative Arts and Design Research Grant 2019, College of Arts & Letters and Department of Art, Art History and Design, Michigan State University
Made in collaboration with Douglas McCausland (music composition, sound design and mixing) and Ian Kirkpatrick (creative coding). Additional support: CCRMA- Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University; Michigan State University’s Colleges of Communication Arts and Sciences, Music, and Arts and Letters.
frames from video
Autoimmune: Media, Computation, and the AIDS Crisis. MAST: The Journal of Media Art, Study and Theory - Media, Materiality and Emergency, Ed. by Timothy Barker, Vol. 1 | No. 2 | 2020 | ISSN 2691-1566 | mast-journal.org | NeMLA - The Northeast Modern Language Association, University at Buffalo, State University of New York
Reagan’s face is grafted onto a gay porn model; famous faces are blended into a blurry, composite human visage; and TV sounds are collapsed into a dark drone that resembles the stochastic compositions of Ligeti and Xenakis. The one relative constant in Autoimmune is poet Essex Hemphill, whose words and face resist complete digitization. If human history is to be organized and preserved by algorithms, Serafim suggests that some people made indelible impressions that can never be calculated away.
Michael Sicinski
Crossroads Festival 2022: Back to Basics, In Review - Film and Music Criticism
2024
17 Days Video Series: Vol. 15, Richmond Center for Visual Arts at Western Michigan University, The Bret Llewellyn Art Gallery at Alfred State College, USA
2022
Crossroads 2022, San Francisco Cinematheque, Gray Area, San Francisco, California, USA
BOGOTRAX//CINEFORO, Teatro Charlot, Bogotá, Colombia
10th Liberation DocFest Bangladesh, Liberation War Museum, Dhaka, Bangladesh
2021
Future Vision Exhibition, group exhibition, Future Vision Animation Festival, Tokyo, Japan
IDKF2021 – Internationales Digitalkunst Festival, Stuttgart, Germany
7th Minikino Film Week - Bali International Short Film Festival, Minikino, Bali, Indonesia
7th Bogotá Experimental Film Festival - Cineautopsia 2021, Cinelibertad, Bogotá, Colombia
We Make Movies International Film Festival, Los Angeles, California, USA
Sphere Digital - World Cinema Carnival
2021, WYND360, Zero Degree Arts and Queer Screen Alliance, Kolkata, India
2020
Ars Electronica .ART Global Gallery, group exhibition, .art Domains, Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria
2nd IFPA – International Forum of Performance Art, group exhibition, Drama, Greece
Material Synthesis, group exhibition, DiffractiveMedia.Space, a White Page Gallery
Courant3D / Immersity, Association Prenez du Relief, Angouleme, France
6th DOBRA - International Festival for Experimental Cinema, Cinemateca do MAM – Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Wild Out Video Festival, thatalright art, Taipei City, Taiwan