INTO THE ETHEREAL
Short Experimental Film
University of Arts London
2021
Short Experimental Film
University of Arts London
2021
A short experimental film that takes you on an atmospheric journey of finding yourself caught up in a strange ritual.
The film Into the Ethereal is a materialisation of an atmospheric journey where you find yourself caught up in a series of strange rituals. It explores myths prominent in Polish culture and re-shapes them to examine ways we can think about technology and the spaces we occupy. This practice-based film was a process of thinking-through-making, and an attempt to take the theoretical ideas I have developed and translate them into narrative mediums. The film became a driving force behind Into the Ethereal: The Desktop Experience. It poses the initial questions regarding physical and digital traces, haunted objects and eternal memory; whilst also initiating debate about what new values and relationships with technology might emerge in the light of new crises. The black and white aesthetic intended to create an experience out of time and was later carried forward onto the films in the interactive fiction.
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The three chapters explore three different technological myths. With focus on memory and the externalisation of it, the three parts investigate places where we are haunted with memories and where technology intersects with that. We also witness the use of objects to try to reflect upon oneself and we might come to question how the tools we use to store these memories can have their own memories and attribute new meaning. Chapter III was inspired by Apocryphal Psychotechnologies by Anthony Enns (2019) with the aim to open debate on the technological imaginaries, the fantasies, hopes and believes we put into our machines. I became increasingly interesting in framing ghosts as futures that failed to happen, spirits or events that were not quite realised and existing as a presence of absence.
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Part I
Abandoned and haunted by past desires, values and lifestyles, now not fitting the age, they remain in a failed future.
They don’t cease to exist. Our steps on the ground once stepped on, are just layers stacking on one another. Our files overwrite the unused clusters that came before us, never truly deleting the whole, as traces and fragments escape through leakages.
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Part II
Our creations and the traces we leave behind, are the futures of haunting, coming back to us to realise that we overwrote so many memories, mindsets, voices. I am taking agency of my haunting.
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Part III
I feel through the machine. I look towards it to see myself for what it is not; non-mechanical, compassionate and capable of feeling.
Review by Dr. Rachael Finney:
“Throughout ‘Into the Ethereal’ Nella Piatek takes the viewer on an atmospheric journey where we find ourselves encountering a sequence of rituals. Divided into three chapters the film poses questions regarding physical and digital traces, haunted objects, and eternal memory. In the films opening scene a painting is revealed to us via an electrical light. Unable to view the image as a whole we merely glimpse portions of the domestic scene depicted. As the light scans the image it is as if Piatek is rediscovering some past activity now held motionless and inert via paint or print. As the film continues we witness only fragments of the artists body as they walk through grass, smooth their hands along door frames, lay their head down atop an empty desk, and browse CDs. Piatek’s slow and sensitive movements are viewed here as gestural echoes repeating those movements and encounters that may have gone before. Piatek’s rumination on eternal traces continues in the closing scenes where we see glimpses of past webpages neither defunct nor fully functioning. Shot in black and white the film appears almost out of time neither past nor present but caught in a loop between the two.”
The three chapters explore three different technological myths. With focus on memory and the externalisation of it, the three parts investigate places where we are haunted with memories and where technology intersects with that. We also witness the use of objects to try to reflect upon oneself and we might come to question how the tools we use to store these memories can have their own memories and attribute new meaning. Chapter III was inspired by Apocryphal Psychotechnologies by Anthony Enns (2019) with the aim to open debate on the technological imaginaries, the fantasies, hopes and believes we put into our machines. I became increasingly interesting in framing ghosts as futures that failed to happen, spirits or events that were not quite realised and existing as a presence of absence.
Part I
Abandoned and haunted by past desires, values and lifestyles, now not fitting the age, they remain in a failed future.
They don’t cease to exist. Our steps on the ground once stepped on, are just layers stacking on one another. Our files overwrite the unused clusters that came before us, never truly deleting the whole, as traces and fragments escape through leakages.
Part II
Our creations and the traces we leave behind, are the futures of haunting, coming back to us to realise that we overwrote so many memories, mindsets, voices. I am taking agency of my haunting.
Part III
I feel through the machine. I look towards it to see myself for what it is not; non-mechanical, compassionate and capable of feeling.
Review by Dr. Rachael Finney:
“Throughout ‘Into the Ethereal’ Nella Piatek takes the viewer on an atmospheric journey where we find ourselves encountering a sequence of rituals. Divided into three chapters the film poses questions regarding physical and digital traces, haunted objects, and eternal memory. In the films opening scene a painting is revealed to us via an electrical light. Unable to view the image as a whole we merely glimpse portions of the domestic scene depicted. As the light scans the image it is as if Piatek is rediscovering some past activity now held motionless and inert via paint or print. As the film continues we witness only fragments of the artists body as they walk through grass, smooth their hands along door frames, lay their head down atop an empty desk, and browse CDs. Piatek’s slow and sensitive movements are viewed here as gestural echoes repeating those movements and encounters that may have gone before. Piatek’s rumination on eternal traces continues in the closing scenes where we see glimpses of past webpages neither defunct nor fully functioning. Shot in black and white the film appears almost out of time neither past nor present but caught in a loop between the two.”