Organized by a collective of filmmakers as a laboratory of creative thought, engaged in intercultural, bi-communal ethical reflection, SIC is attentive to new artistic reflections and trends. We question languages, their modes of representation and the power dynamics they generate.

SoundImageCulture’s bi-annual Focus symposium aims to open up these familiar critical spaces to the public.

Together, we can open up other debates, welcome other questions and forge a relationship that enlightens us and brings us closer together.

In 2020, we brought “Aesthetics of the Political”, a two-part symposium on how critical political thinking could become one with images, sounds and food.

– Part One “Dinner of Disappearance”
– Part Two “Critical Images“

In 2022 we presented Boundary Encounters, a symposium on hybridization in film, strategies of fiction in films about reality.

In 2024 we are planning Focus Numérique, a symposium on new media and their action, visible and invisible, in the future of our societies. Please read below for further information.

Originating in 2020 as a conspiracy theory positing that online interactions were mostly made up by bots and for bots, and that the internet was almost devoid of any actual human presence, the “Dead Internet Theory“ gained a renewed attention in the wake of generative AI. So much so that some experts go as far as to predict that by 2026 half of the content posted online will indeed be generated automatically by non-human agents. Most of the images published online will soon be made by algorithms targeting other algorithms.

This focus program, curated by artist and filmmaker Nicolas Gourault, aims at investigating the politics and poetics of computer generated images in regard to documentary filmmaking. It will explore some strategies by which filmmakers contend with this growing sea of digital noise that may soon become the world we live in. The first program will focus on the social dynamics and struggles involved in the production of evidence within a world saturated by social media engagement algorithms and generative content. The second program will expend on the visual imaginary of control and fluidity embedded in computer simulation and present some attempts to hack or break this hegemonic discourse which tries to shape how we may envision the future.

Saturday 23 November 2024 | 17:00 & 20:00 at Projection Room (Brussels)

More information

“There is a constitutive movement in modern fiction, which shifts its center of gravity from its traditional core, constituted by the knots of narrative events, to those edges where fiction finds itself at its possible cancellation… edges where fiction welcomes the world of beings and situations that previously existed at its margins: the insignificant events between what happens and what simply happens.

These are also the uncertain boundaries between what is real and what is invented. Finally, these are the edges where the narrative that intends to document the real appropriates forms of overt fiction.”

Jacques Rancière – The edges of fiction.

For more information:
Focus: Boundary Encounters

Politics is about what we see and what we can say about it, about who has the competence to see and the quality to say, about the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.

It is from this that we can pose the question of aesthetic practices, in the sense in which we understand it, i.e. the forms of visibility of art practices, the place they occupy, what they do in the eyes of the common.”  – Jacques Rancière

For further information:

Aesthethics of the Political: Dinner of Disappearance
Aesthethics of the Political: Critical Images