Calendar

This screening of the Aurora Digitalis Series brings together artistic works that use digital landscapes and speculative architectures as mirrors, critiques, or visions of social orders. The selected films explore virtual cities, game worlds, and algorithmic narratives as spaces of political negotiation, revealing how monopolies, power structures, and financial systems continue to manifest in the digital realm. Between post-apocalyptic luxury visions and capitalism-critical simulations, the works offer glimpses into dystopias, historical continuities, and the potentially destructive effects of digital systems on bodies, cities, and communities.

Aurora Digitalis is a screening format dedicated to time-based digital films that create alternative worlds with game engines, among other tools, and renegotiate these worlds in their identities, virtual bodies and socio-economic structures. Through speculative narrative forms, the understanding of game mechanics and avatars, they question the ideological foundations of digital technologies and open up critical perspectives on power structures and future concepts. The screening includes films from international positions as well as HGB alumni.

Organised as part of (Un)Learning Digitalities - Programme on the Practice and Theory of the Digital with Clemens von Wedemeyer(Expanded Cinema class) and Eliza Goldox (Office for Digital Teaching) at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig in cooperation with the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig.

The project is co-financed by the European Union and co-funded by public funds allocated by the members of the Saxon State Parliament.