Amber'11 Art And Technology Festival November 10–13, 2011

İstanbul Modern Cinema hosts the International Amber Art and Technology Festival which will be celebrating its 5th anniversary this year. The theme for this year’s festival is “Next Ecology,” proposing to look through a new perspective at all the different relationships humans establish with their natural and artificial environments, and the living spaces and forms they create.

ECUMENOPOLIS: CITY WITHOUT LIMITS, 2011
Türkiye, Germany | Color, 88’ | Turkish, English
Director: İmre Azem
All ecological, economic and demographic thresholds are surpassed and social harmony is upset. Here is the depiction of neoliberal urbanisation:“Ecumenopolis: City Without Limits”. In his first feature-length documentary, İmre Azem aims for a wholesome approach to Istanbul; as much as the change itself, he questions the underlying dynamics. He takes us on a long journey in this endless city, from demolished slums to the tops of skyscrapers, from the depths of the Marmara Sea to the route of the third bridge crossing the Bosphorus, from real estate investors to urban opposition. We hope that you will not be a mere spectator to change, but question it.

AN ECOLOGY OF MIND, 2010
Canada | Color, 60’ | English
Director: Nora Bateson
An Ecology of Mind is a film portrait of Gregory Bateson, celebrated Anthropologist, philosopher, author, naturalist, systems theorist, and filmmaker, produced and directed by his daughter, Nora Bateson. The film includes footage from Bateson’s own films shot in the 1930s in Bali (with Margaret Mead) and New Guinea, along with photographs, filmed lectures, and interviews. His youngest child, Nora, depicts him as a man who studied the interrelationships of the complex systems in which we live with a depth motivated by scientific rigor and caring integrity.

THE SECRET TRIOLOGY, 2008-2010
Germany | Color, 34’ | No-dialogue
3 channels of HD video transferred from 16 mm and photo stills
Director: Reynold Reynolds
Secret Life: A woman is trapped in an apartment that becomes alive. Her thoughts escape from her and come to life growing like plants out into the space around her, living, searching, overtaking her apartment, wild threatening her.
Secret Machine: Secret Machine is the second from a three-part cycle exploring the imperceptible conditions that frame life.The same protagonist from Secret Life encounters an antagonist that is studying her, measuring her body and comparing her to units of space and time.
Six Easy Pieces: The last part of the Secrets Trilogy; a three-part cycle exploring the imperceptible conditions that frame life and is preceded by Secret Life, 2008 (won the 2008 EMAF Festival Award at the European Media Art Festival Osnabrueck, Germany) and Secret Machine, 2009 (3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art 2009, Russia) The work is based on the book “Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of physics explained by its most brilliant teacher” by Richard P. Feynman

McLUHAN'S WAKE, 2002
Canada | 35mm, Color, 94’ | English
Yönetmen: Kevin McMahon
Fascinated by the role technology played in transforming our lives, one of the twentieth century's most famous intellectuals realized, with stunning accuracy, the impact the digital age would have on our social, spiritual, economic and deological selves.