Daaphne

Directed by Valentina Ferrandes

“Daphne is waking up, skittish and coming back to her natural shape as a woman and water-nymph. How long have you been down there? Days? Weeks? It's hard to tell. Days have a tendency to blend together when you spend all your time underwater.” What if advanced sentient machines could re-write the foundation myths that cut through the essence of being human? A script written by the AI GPT3, prompted by Ovid, describes the uncanny new world the nymph Daphne wakes up in, after her shapeshifting into a laurel tree. Her fluid body defies gravity, suspended mid-air in a procedural, newborn, virgin, and the ever-morphing planet. The story of Apollo's attempt to rape the naiad, told by the Greek poet Ovid in the Metamorphoses, is revisited through automated writing and CGI. A foundation myth recounted by a computer evokes a struggle between man, technology and nature.

Valentina Ferrandes is a southern Italian visual artist and experience designer. Interweaving a technology-driven approach to image-making with archival found footage, environmental recordings, and documentary video, her work explores issues of displacement in relation to her cultural heritage, geography, and collective identity.
Between 2011 and 2015 she was nominated for Celeste Art Prize, The Italian Cultural Institute's Renaissance Art Prize, and Fabbri Prize for Contemporary Art. In 2016 her work "Other Than Our Sea" was a Jury Selection at Japan Media Arts Festival.
She is the 2021 winner of Emerging Scene Art Prize in Dubai and a member of Agora Digital, a London based network of women in technology and arts.
Her works are screened internationally in festivals such as Visions du Reel, European Media Art Festival Osnabruck, DokuFest Kosovo, Cairo Video Festival, Rencontres Internationales, Alchemy Moving Image Festival, MACRO Rome, 5th Moskow Biennale, Bardo National Museum.

Since 2015 she envisions digital experiences for creative agencies in Berlin and London. She works with generative systems, IoT, data visualisation, voice interaction, and the great unknowns of daily life run by algorithms.

She holds a degree in Humanities from Bologna University and a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design. She is based in London.

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