AWARDS

 

Best Experimental Feature at Beyond the Screen Festival, Antwerp (Belgium), February 28th, 2024.

 

Best AI Film at CineTech Future Fest, Opole (Poland), January 31st 2024.

 

Best Experimental Feature and Best VFX at Dreamachine International Film Festival , Los Angeles, December 31st 2023.

 

Programmer’s Prize-Exceptional Filmmaking at Sherman Oaks Film Festival, US, December 1st-8th 2023.

 

Best Experimental Feature Film at Cuzco Underground Cinema Festival, Peru, October 2nd-5th 2024.

 

Best Experimental Feature at Moondance International Film Festival, Paris (France), September10th-15th 2023.

 

Best Experimental Feature at Vilnius Alternative International Film Festival, Lithuania, August 29th-30th 2023.

 

Best Experimental Film at Hong Kong International Film Carnival, China, August 26th 2023.

 

Creativity Award at Lytham International Film Festival , Lytham St. Annes (UK), August 25th-27th, 2023.

 

Best Surrealist Feature Film at Retro Avantgarde Film Festival, Venice (Italy) August 22nd-26th, 2023.

 

Best Experimental Animation at Experimental Film Festival, Barcelona (Spain), July 31st, 2023.

 

Best Experimental Feature at 8th Sacramento Underground Film & Arts Festival, US, July 25th 2023.

 

Best Experimental Feature Film, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Sound Design and Best Soundtrack at Experimental Brasil, Rio De Janeiro, July 9th-10th, 2023.

 

Best Experimental Film at Montreal Indipendent Film Festival-Seasonal, Canada, May 2023.

 

Best Experimental Film at Cult Critic Movie Awards, Kolkata (India), March-April 2023 Session.

 

Best Director for The Bytes Dreams are Made Of at Influx Magazine Film Awards, US, March 31st 2023.

 

Best Animation Feature Film at Festival Internacional de Cine Indipendiente de Madrid, Spain, March 23rd 2023.

 

Best Experimental Film at World Film Carnival, Singapore (China), March 28th 2023.

 

Best Feature Film and an Award at Art Experimental Screenings Film Festival Fresh Stream, Tbilisi (Georgia Republic), February 17th-18th 2023.

 

 

SELECTIONS

 

Philip K. Dick Science Fiction and Supernatural Film Festival, New York, April 4th-7th, 2024.

 

Sound on Screen Music Film Festival, Cape Town (South Africa), March 29th- April 7th 2024.

 

Beyond the Screen Festival, Antwerp (Belgium), February 28th, 2024.

 

CineTech Future Fest, Opole (Poland), January 31st 2024.

 

Rivercity Underground Film Festival, San Antonio (US), January 13rd, 2024.

 

Dreamachine International Film Festival , Los Angeles, December 31st 2023.

 

International Avant-Garde Film Awards, New York, December 14th 2023.

 

Sherman Oaks Film Festival, (US) December 1st-8th 2023.

 

Polish International Film Festival, (Poland), December 4th-8th 2023.

 

Octopus Marquee Independent Film Festival, (US) November 29th-December 3rd 2023.

 

Fotogenia-Festival Internacional de Cine Poesía y Narrativas Divergentes, Mexico City, November 22nd-December 2nd 2023.

 

Festival Internacional de Cine con Medios Alernativos (FICMA), Mexico City, 18-26 November 2023.

 

The International Experimental Film Festival, Institute for Experimental Arts, Athens (Greece), October 26th-29th 2023.

 

The Psychedelic Film&Music Festival, New York, October 20th-23rd 2023.

 

Split Film Festival-International Festival of New Film, Croatia, October 12nd-21st. 2023.

 

Cuzco Underground Cinema Festival, Peru, October 2nd-5th 2023.

 

Vancouver Indipendent International Film Festival, September 12nd-16th 2023.

 

Moondance International Film Festival, Paris, September10th-15th 2023.

 

Silicon Beach Film Festival, Los Angeles (US), September 7th-15th 2023.

 

Vilnius Alternative International Film Festival, Lithuania, August 29th-30th 2023.

 

Hong Kong International Film Carnival, August 26th 2023.

 

Lytham International Film Festival, Lytham St. Annes (UK), August 25th-27th, 2023.

 

Retro Avantgarde Film Festival, (Online), August 22nd-26th, 2023.

 

Experimental Film Festival, Barcelona, July 31st, 2023.

 

Sacramento Underground Film & Arts Festival, July 25th, 2023.

 

Experimental Brasil, Rio De Janeiro, July 16th, 2023.

 

Montreal Indipendent Film Festival-Seasonal, Canada, May 2023.

 

Philadelphia Indipendent Film Festival, Philadelphia (US), May 16th-20th 2023.

 

Cult Critic Movie Awards, Kolkata (India), March-April 2023 Session.

 

Alpha Arts Film Festival, Alpha Arts Institute, Sussex County Community College, Newton, NJ (US), May 4th-6th 2023.

 

World Film Carnival, Singapore, March 28th 2023.

 

Festival Internacional de Cine Indipendiente de Madrid, Spain, March 23rd 2023.

 

Experimental Screenings Film Festival Fresh Stream, February, Tbilisi (Georgia Republic), February 17th-18th, 2023.

 

Snowdance Indipendent Film Festival, Essen (Deutschland), January 28th-February 5th, 2023.

​

RECENSIONI/REVIEWS

The Bytes Dreams Are Made of -Movie Review

Fabricio Estevam Mira (Experimental Brasil)
Is filmmaking easy? Yes. From the worst camera phone to the worst drone, you can record anything, put a title on it, and call it cinema. Is it easy to make good cinema? Absolutely not. Infinite possibilities in audio and video to be polished and transubstantiated into a cohesive piece. Is there a cinematic genre that is easier than the other? Not necessarily. It is more a question of how far the author wants to go with the work. How deep he wants to go. But while within the palette of each genre there are its own difficulties and masticated paths, there remains one genre, where the struggle for the birth of the film is characteristically more exhaustive: Experimentalism. In Experimentalism the only rule is also the most difficult rule of cinema (and Art): create your own reality and make, with your bricks, your own path to arrive at your truth. And while most experimental filmmakers, in their lifetime, will not be able to exude a minute of creativity, Alessandro Amaducci, with his The Bytes Dreams are Made Of, has forged, in one hour and seven minutes, a delicious silicon delirium that floats and dances in a DMT atmosphere. It's a wild, absurdly authorial electronic dream, where Amaducci not only creates tons of visual delights, but also, the excellent soundtrack, which ranges from breakcore to arabic themes. He mixes retro style CGI with real women in filters that, if in the first seconds can cause strangeness, quickly are accepted by the mind, which starts to inhabit the world built by Amaducci. It is a work of incredible energy and passion. A master class in experimental cinema, made by a highly differentiated artist.

https://fivelocks.wixsite.com/experimental-brasil/about-4-2

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Dal catalogo del Festival Internacional de Cinema Indipendiente de Madrid, Marzo 2023

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Lo scienziato e zoologo Nikolaas Tinbergen, vincitore del Premio Nobel per la Medicina nel 1973,
con il suo studio sul comportamento istintivo di Gasterosteus aculeatus, ha teorizzato la favola umana più esplicativa della nostra attuale situazione, in cui i pesci maschi abbandonarono le loro femmine perché ipnotizzati da una una falsa imitazione, rappresentazioni di legno di pesci femmine sessualmente ipertrofizzate e dai colori esagerati, facendo sì che i maschi lottassero fino alla morte per una finzione virtuale e grottesca, creando quella che Tinberg definì la Teoria dello Stimolo Supernormale. Sono stati costruiti ponti tra l'etologia e la neurofisiologia per studiare l'essere umano ponendosi domande sulla genesi del comportamento, sull'ontogenesi, sul valore della sopravvivenza e sul successo riproduttivo.
Il film The Bytes Dreams Are Made Of è un Big Bang della fantascienza, perché, come in La Casa di Asterión (1947), Jorge Luis Borges non si preoccupa dei fili di Arianna o della spada di
di Teseo, ma della claustrofobica reclusione del Minotauro. La prospettiva di Alessandro Amaducci è unica, poiché si chiede e si interroga su come le macchine vedono l'essere umano. In un esercizio estremamente lucido e intuitivo, ogni tipo di logica e di ragionamento abituale viene distrutto, poiché una macchina non comprende né il desiderio di sopravvivenza né il significato della riproduzione, trasformando il suo film in un esperimento inedito e ineffabile. Come uno scienziato che cerca di ricostruire fisicamente un dinosauro da un minuscolo osso, i computer nella loro sete di conoscenza lanciano ipotesi infinite nel tentativo di comprendere l'animo umano, raccogliendo pezzi sparsi di informazioni disarticolate, generando immagini ibride favolose e mostruose, creature stranamente riconoscibili, angosciose e soffocanti.
Anche i computer, con il loro eccesso illimitato di informazioni, generano il proprio inconscio, e con esso le proprie paure e i propri desideri nascosti, ossessivamente impotenti nei confronti della loro sessualità con una strana ammirazione e una malsana invidia per la corporeità, per le viscere, il sangue, la carne.
Gli uomini non fantasticano di essere macchine, ma sono le macchine a sognare nostalgicamente di essere esseri umani. La coerenza scompare a favore di una narrazione disarticolata, dove gli esseri umani appaiono minuscoli come nani, strani, arcigni e sconosciuti: una sottospecie. Attraverso un travolgente estetismo, l'horror è interiore, intimo e psicologico, ma mai terrificante. La dimensione raccapricciante è unita a quella cerebrale come in una storia di vampiri senza alcun tipo di romanticismo. Un'opera cupa e tenebrosa dove il significato del male o della bruttezza viene eliminato in una fonte inesauribile di incubi. I circuiti elettronici sono filmati come maestose città distopiche, le nuove città eterne, le nuove Roma. Un invito a perdere la coscienza e la salute mentale per godersi il processo. La speleologia della mente cibernetica è verticale con colpi di scena e svolte, ma sempre in movimento verso uno strato più profondo.

La proposta di Alessandro Amaducci, così genuina e puramente creativa, di attraversare radicalmente il confine mentale, di spostarsi su un altro piano dell'esistenza, separandosi dalla naturale percezione del mondo, è unica nella storia del cinema, ma è simile alla prospettiva dello scrittore inglese di letteratura fantastica, il “naufrago” William Hope Hodgson. Insieme all'atmosfera straziante e opprimente di The Night Land (1912), è nella frontiera psichica abissale di The House on the Borderland (1908) dove appaiono le similitudini più incredibili e stupefacenti, con forze terrificanti provenienti dall'altro mondo, anomalie blasfeme che sorgono da abissi segreti e gli orrori vaghi utili a rinchiudere speculazioni psicologiche e spiritualità nei confini della mente. Forse non è illegittimo chiedersi quanto questa profezia possa essere stata mescolata alla poesia.
«Da ogni lato, guardavo e vedevo sempre di più. Le montagne erano piene di cose strane, divinità-bestia e orrori così atroci e bestiali che la possibilità e la decenza negavano qualsiasi
tentativo di descriverli. E fui pervaso da un terribile senso di orrore e paura e ripugnanza; eppure, nonostante ciò, mi meravigliavo oltremodo. C'era dunque, dopo tutto, qualcosa nel vecchio culto pagano, qualcosa di più della semplice divinizzazione di uomini, animali e elementi? Il pensiero mi attanagliava: c'era?».

 

From the catalogue of the Festival Internacional de Cinema Indipendiente de Madrid, March 2023

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The scientist and zoologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1973, with his study on the instinctive behavior of Gasterosteus aculeatus, theorized about the most

explanatory human fable of our current time, in which fish abandoned their females hypnotized by a false imitation, sexually hypertrophied wooden fish with exaggerated colors, causing the males to fight to the death for a virtual and grotesque fiction, creating what Tinberg called The Theory of Supernormal Stimulus. Bridges were built between ethology and neurophysiology to study the human being by asking questions about the genesis of behavior, ontogeny, survival value and reproductive success.

The movie The Bytes Dreams are Made of is a Big Bang in science fiction because, as in La Casa de Asterión (1947), Jorge Luis Borges was not concerned with Ariadne's threads or Theseus's sword but with the claustophobic confinement of the Minotaur, Alessandro Amaducci's perspective is unique since he wonders and inquires into how machines see the human being. In an extremely lucid and intuitive exercise, any kind of usual logic and reasoning are destroyed, since a machine understands neither the desire for survival nor the meaning of reproduction, turning his movie of him into an unprecedented and ineffable experiment. Like a scientist trying to physically reconstruct a dinosaur from a tiny bone, computers in their thirst for knowledge launch endless hypotheses in their attempt to understand the human soul by picking up scattered bits of disjointed information, generating fabulous, monstrous hybrid images, strangely recognizable creatures, suffocating anguish. Computers with their unlimited excess of information also generate their own unconscious, and with it their fears and hidden desires, obsessively impotent in their sexuality with a strange admiration and unhealthy envy for corporeality, for the viscera, the blood, the flesh. Men do not fantasize about being machines but it is the machines that nostalgically dream of being human. Coherence disappears in favor of a disjointed narrative, where men appear dwarfed, strange, surly and unknown, a subspecies. With an overwhelming aestheticism, horror is interior, intimate and psychological, but never terrifying. The creepy is joined with the cerebral in a vampire story without any kind of romanticism. A gloomy dark opera where the meaning of evil or ugliness is eliminated in an inexhaustible source of nightmares. The

electronic circuits are filmed as majestic dystopian cities, the new eternal cities, the new Romes. An invitation to lose consciousness and sanity and enjoy the process. The speleology of the cybernetic mind is vertical with twists and turns, but always moving towards a deeper layer. Alessandro Amaducci's proposal, so genuine and purely creative, to radically cross the mental border, to move to a different plane of existence, separating itself from the natural perception of the human being, is unique in cinematographic history, but it is similar to the perspective of the British writer of fantastic literature, the nautical William Hope Hodgson. Along with the harrowing and oppressive atmosphere in The Night Land (1912), it is at the abysmal psychic frontier of The House on the Borderland (1908) where incredible and astonishing resemblances appear, with terrifying forces from the other world, blasphemous abnormalities arise from secret abysses and the horrors vague ones serve to close psychological speculations and spiritualities in the confines of the mind. It is perhaps not illegitimate to wonder how much prophecy may have been mixed with poetry.

«On each side, I looked, and saw more, continually. The mountains were full of strange things—Beast-gods, and Horrors so atrocious and bestial that possibility and decency deny any further attempt to describe them. And I—I was filled with a terrible sense of overwhelming horror and fear and repugnance; yet, spite of these, I wondered exceedingly. Was there then, after all, something in the old heathen worship, something more than the mere deifying of men, animals, and elements? The thought gripped me—was there?»

INTERVIEWS

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Interview with Alessandro Amaducci by Jerry Toth, Director of International Avant-Garde Film Awards

In Alessandro Amaducci’s The Bytes Dreams are Made of, the dream world of the digital machine manifests itself on the computer screen as a stream of images and sounds that spreads over the network. In other words, a streaming of digital consciousness.

IAG: In a film festival that saw a large number of trippy and imaginative films, Bytes was the trippiest and most imaginative. What inspired the idea and what inspired the images?

AA: Thank you, I’m glad that you appreciated my work so much. The main topic of The Bytes Dreams Are Made Of is a metaphorical question: do computers dream? Turned on for hours and hours during the day and night, connected to the network, computers are assimilating our world in the form of streams of images, sounds, music, texts, words. They transform our archetypal imagination into data, developing their gaze on the world and at the same time their own collective consciousness, and a technological unconscious. In the perennial man-machine exchange, the two worlds inevitably meet, and collide, generating hybrids in which organic and inorganic mix incessantly. In a creative process that takes place beyond the screen, full of possibilities but also of dangers. Poised between an osmosis capable of generating new worlds and a symbiosis that annihilates the two dimensions. So, yes: computers dream, but The Bytes Dreams Are Made Of, through connected episodes, asks questions regarding various issues related to the main theme, without giving real answers, avoiding becoming a driven-thesis film. My inspirations are very varied: contemporary art, video art, new media art, experimental cinema, contemporary dance, comics, and the iconic universe of science fiction.

IAG: The sheer amount of creative imagery is astounding. Technically, how did you go about creating this film and how long did it take you to make?

From a technical point of view The Bytes Dreams Are Made Of is a combination of live footage (mainly in green screen), 3D computer graphics and a massive amount of 2D compositing. Apart from a few computer graphic sequences realized by a friend of mine with Lightwave, all the moving images are produced by me using Edius for editing, After Effects for compositing/color grading/manipulation/2D graphics, and Poser for 3D computer graphics. I also produced the music tracks with Reason. This film is an original editing of a series of videos collected under the title Electric Self Anthology, screendance works and sequences produced for video installations. The film consists of previously unreleased sequences edited together with others that have already been released. All the sequences of the film were made from 2006 to the present, and the music tracks from 2005 to the present. Thus, there are many years of experimentation in this film.

IAG: I’m the kind of film viewer who doesn’t mind it if he doesn’t understand a film. Sometimes that makes it more intriguing to watch. But I find myself searching for some sort of explanation for this film. The best that I can come up with is this: if robots eventually become sentient and rule the world, this is what their wet dreams would look like. Would you agree with this statement or am I totally missing the point?

AA: You are the perfect viewer that every experimental filmmaker could love to have! I agree totally with your statement, also in regard to my previous answer. The Bytes Dreams Are Made Of offers the viewer a reversed perspective: the human world is seen by the digital world. The robots that appear in the film are the metaphor for the digital world's attempt to resemble us, but they are made of data, and the icon of flowing data is a representation of what the digital world really is. The body is the place of interchange between the natural and artificial dimensions. The human and digital bodies featured in many sections of the video are naked because they are stripped of all historical or social references: they are neutral bodies, covered in digital “fabric”. And they are female bodies because the digital world is essentially a creative world. A world that at the same time is not able to understand deeply the mysteries of life and death, so it creates a dimension full of hybrids, most of them not functioning. The error of the machine understood as the inability of the digital world to reproduce real organic life and to understand the purpose of death, also becomes a creative dimension.

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IAG: What's your next project?

AA: I just finished Wetware, a new episode of Electric Self Anthology, where the main topic is the eroticism of the digital world, and I’m working on other projects where I’ll experiment for the first time A.I. technology. Probably I will also produce some music videos.

IAG: Last but not least, what are three films that have particularly inspired you?

AA: It’s always difficult to choose only three films. Here are my instinctive responses:

• Gaspar Noé, Enter the Void, 2009

• Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy, Ballet mécanique, 1924

• Stan Brakhage, The Art of Vision, 1961-65​

• https://iagfilmawards.com/best-experimental-feature-2023

 

Experimental Brasil - Alessandro Amaducci

With a work as immersive as a cyber-experience with Dimethyltryptamine, Alessandro Amaducci is among the highlights of Experimental Brasil 2023.

1- How are you? Could you introduce yourself to our readers and tell us a little about who you are,
where you are from, and what you do?

My name is Alessandro Amaducci, and I am a professor at the University of Turin, a video
artist, a director of music videos, a maker of video installations and video-mapping.
Occasionally I also make fashion films. I live and work in Turin, Italy.

2- Your film The Bytes Dreams Are Made Of was selected to enter our festival. Could you tell us a
little about it?

The Bytes Dreams Are Made Of is a film that imagines that  "inside" the computer monitor there is an autonomous and creative world that, constantly in contact with our visual imaginary, has
developed a technological unconscious capable of creating hybrids between our visual archetypes
and the icons of digital language. The body becomes the place par excellence of the encounter-clash
between the natural and artificial dimensions.

3- How does your creative process work?

In very different ways: sometimes I rely totally on my unconscious, sometimes I design very
meticulously. I am also the author of the music for my visual works, so often the music track
becomes the structure around which I visualize the themes and suggestions that form the foundation
of the visual architecture of my works.

4- Why experimental cinema?

Cinema is a tool for creating a world, not for imitating it or mirror copying what we see in the world
we live in. Research and experimentation are the two necessary tools to build a visual universe that
communicates directly with the viewer`s unconscious and emotions: it is a ritual, a celebration of
creativity that can analyze in depth in the world we live in, or foresee a new one.

5- What are your goals within experimental cinema? How far do you want to go?

As far away as possible, still being aware that experimental cinema is, and always will be,
something far from the general audience: it is a small island populated by innovative proposals.

6- How do you see the present and the future of experimental cinema?

The present and the future of experimental cinema depend on how far the authors are and will be
able to go beyond the experimental film stylings of the past, and thus to leave behind the
experiences of New American Cinema and, in general, of the 70s, a period about which a veritable
cult was created that generated a form of academic "tradition" that is very difficult to question.

We need to confront digital technologies above all and begin again to do what visual artists have always done: experiment with the medium (now digital), seek innovations, look to the future and not to the past.

7- What is your advice for those who want to make experimental cinema?

Constantly wondering what it means to experiment and research, to abandon clichés, to listen to
one's unconscious, to be free to investigate new imagery. To be visionaries.

8- How do you see the current panorama of world cinema?

In the world cinema there are interesting things and less interesting things. But there is also the
whole field of video art and New Media Art that constantly come up with innovative proposals. I
think experimental cinema should have these latter experiences as a reference point.

9- What are the strong and weak points in the current Italian cinema? And what could be done to
improve it?

The most obvious limitation of contemporary Italian cinema is the intensive exploitation of regional
dialects, which makes Italian production very local and unsuitable for distribution in an
international context. It is a classically narrative cinema, conditioned by the past, not very visionary
or courageous, dominated by the spoken word and dialect, precisely. But there are isolated cases of
interesting experimentations.

10- How has the repercussion of your film been? Has it been worthwhile?

I only recently submitted this film to Experimental Film Festivals. I am also submitting it to
mainstream film Festivals to understand if it can be selectable or not. It is still too early, but a good
portion of Experimental Film Festivals are selecting it, so for now I can declare myself satisfied.

11- Talent, effort or luck? What counts more?

All three. The first one especially.

12- Who is your favorite filmmaker? Why?

It is difficult for me to single out one filmmaker, because I often like one film by one author, not his
entire filmography. However I find the Gaspar Noé`s "digital period"very interesting, the works made from Irreversible onwards.

13- What are your five favorite movies of all time?

1): Gaspar Noé, Enter the Void
2): Godrey Reggio, Nakoyqatsi
3): Peter Greenaway, Prospero’s Books
4): Shinya Tsukamoto, Tetsuo
5): Luis Bunuel, Cet obscur objet du désir

https://www.experimentalbrasil.com/about-5-1