BEYOND

BEYOND 2015
is "The Dynamic Screen" 

We proudly announce our new partnership with China. Within this framework two Silk Road Awards will be given to the best chinese 3-D programme as well as the most outstanding and latest technical innovation in 3-D. For more information concerning this event please have a look at the press release (english) or Pressemitteilung (deutsch).


In addition to current productions and trends of stereoscopic, multiscopic and autostereosopic films in cinema and television the BEYOND Festival will focus on new narrative forms, of “ space-time narrations”.

„The Dynamic Screen“  is concerned with new dimensions of the “moving pictures ” to space-time stories and the quantum theory of digital dreams. Supported by higher frame rates, higher resolutions, micro-and macroscopic insights, super slow motion and super accelerations. BEYOND also explores the changing design and behaviour of multimedia and information consumption, the dynamic screen: expanded cinema and TV: “3D and BEYOND.”

After surveying and exploring the outer or material world comes the surveying and exploration of the self. The topography of the brain, the anatomical and functional connectome of the various subsystems is being discovered, the neurological correlates of thinking processes and emotional states are on the way of being decrypted. Self-improvement and self-design through antropo-techniques like yoga, meditation and phyical work-out, also involving the aid of supplements, pharmaca, operations and electromagnetic brain-stimulation might become normal and will stimulate not only growth but also vertical tensions and stress on ourselves and others. Superintelligence looms promising and dangerous around the corner.

Hence, three-dimensional presentation of hughe datasets and immersion into such datasets will play an ever more important role not only in entertainment and art but also in scientifical simulations (and creations) of the future – we can no longer afford to fly blind and on autopilot. People will have to adapt to societal changes and changing relations between humans, as well as interrelations of humans with machines, animals, natural and digita networks. And people will have to come to terms with artificial consciousness and sub-consciousness. Virtual network worlds , like Cinema and TV, will become part of human life similar to our dreams, which are a nightly routine, somehow separated from our daily lives obeying to different physical rules. Future societies will also have to find a way to implement the “asynchronous equation” not only in „Space-Time“ but also in gender, multicultural, and multi-ethnic emancipation and in dealing with Artifical Intelligence.

BEYOND will try to give new and critical views on imagination and new insights into reality. Considering not only the chances but also the risks and possible collateral damage connected to new technologies artist have to take a stand for their values openly discussing the potential and the risks and formulate a vision for EUROPE and BEYOND.

- Ludger Pfanz 



Beyond the Imitation of Life

The cinematographic imagination has always operated between two poles: on the one hand as imitation of life, realism, while on the other, as imagination beyond reality, more than the mere imitation of life. The one pole was initiated by the Lumière brothers (L’ arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, 1896), while the other began with George Méliè’s (Le Voyage dans la lune, 1902).

What beyond means today is, above cinematographic imagination “beyond the imitation of life”. But the next step will be the beyond of cinematographic imagination. The cinematographic imagination has shifted closer to the body, closer to the eyes, closer to the brain: it will become part of the body itself. Wearable computing leads to wearable cinema. Google glasses are simply the extension of virtual reality. The cinematographic imagination has infiltrated the car, the house, and the objects in the environment. Cinematographic imagination augments reality. With the help of the computer as universal medium, cinematographic imagination becomes ubiquitous and universal.

Following a series of successful symposia and exhibitions that have brought together leading artists, technicians and producers of digital cinema culture – from computer supported production through to digital distribution – the festival BEYOND will continue to be, especially for Europe, an important element of digital society – above all, to the extent that it continues to present the cinematographic imagination beyond its boundaries.

- Peter Weibel