Pink Twins’ The Eternal (2021, in featured image) and Matti Harju’s El Centro (2021) were selected for the New Point of View European Online Competition of THIS IS SHORT festival. The Eternal is streamed at THIS IS SHORT platform from April 1-8 2022, El Centro is scheduled for April 11-18 2022.

Chinese classical gardens are a synthesis of a thousand years of landscaping, architecture, poetry and painting. The idealized artificial terrain of the gardens have influenced artists for centuries to create architypal landscapes images, which in turn have inspired garden design. The gardens are trancendental spaces, providing artificial landscapes and virtual oases to silence the surrounding megalopolitan overload. In their new work The Eternal, chaos animators Pink Twins distort the views of gardens with a crystal-like caleidoscopic tunnel, adding a psychedelic layer to ancient harmonic panoramas.

In Matti Harju’s El Centro, young Anon discovers the digital, binary root of everything during a school trip to New York and comes to a surprising conclusion. An associative and abstractly structured video about the boundaries of communication in the hinterland between analog and digital – a study at gaps between looking and understanding. The mixed form of the work reflects the current space of apparent intangibility and connection: How the past is encoded in the specific recording media and how it behaves after the radical equalization by the internet. The image, with its combination of an analog video signal with forms of compression, produces a kind of aesthetic that emphasizes nostalgia and alienation.

THIS IS SHORT is a collaborative project by the European Short Film Network. It is a central access point for mainly European short films: with joint programming, shared programs, and one common gateway to the online presentations of four European film festivals.

THIS IS SHORT, April 1 – June 30 2022, online

More information: THIS IS SHORT

AV-arkki has promoted and distributed Finnish media art since 1989. AV-arkki’s promotional efforts have made the artists’ participation in this event possible.