Artist: Marielle Ingram 

Work: seeker, 2025

Synopsis: seeker is a speculative short film following Caes, a government worker in the near future known as a ‘seeker’, whose job is to catalog and upload any and all information to Wim — a powerful artificial intelligence with a hidden agenda.  seeker asks what ‘memory objects' — CDs, cassettes, photographs, video, 8mm, polaroids, sheet music, postcards, movie tickets, photo slides, and more—are, what they mean, what they offer us, and, in our increasingly digitized and interfaced world, what power they have over us as they begin to disappear.

Credits:

Directed by Marielle Ingram 

Produced by Sarah Yi Fineman 

Cinematography by Bradley Credit 

Starring Alexis Cofield, Axel Newville, Zoe Zien 

With funding support from Black Film Space / CliveRD 

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Artist: John Brendan Guinan

Salvation Machine: A Mass of Abwoon Dominus, 2024

Salvation Machine AMOAD engages with the conditions of subjugation as a broader ontological question: how authority inscribes itself onto humanity and collective consciousness. The film unfolds as a processional mass, tracing the gravitational pull toward hierarchy and the ways in which individuals dissolve into systems larger than themselves. Rooted in Lacan’s Symbolic Father, the Salvation Machine functions as a cipher—less a sovereign than an empty signifier, a presence onto which meaning, devotion, and obedience are projected.

The speculative framework of Abwoon Dominus operates as a constructed cosmology—an expansive world-building exercise that provides a critical apparatus for interrogating belief, power, and subjugation across aesthetic, philosophical, and ideological systems. The name, drawn from Abwoon (Aramaic, “source” or “father”) and Dominus (Latin, “lord, authority”), suggests an entity that is both intimate and remote, a structuring force that does not impose itself but is simply assumed. This ambiguity extends to the film’s spatial logic—the passage from the pastoral into the woods, the forest as a site of dissolution, revelation, or indoctrination, and the inexorable return. The film resists resolution; the congregation does not escape but is absorbed, enacting a cycle that is neither chosen nor fully perceived.

The film also engages with Heidegger’s concept of Geworfenheit (Thrownness)—the notion that human beings do not arrive in the world freely but are cast into pre-existing structures of meaning, ideology, and power. The congregation’s movement through the ritual is not dictated by force, but by the inertia of participation—raising the question of whether free will can exist when one is always already embedded in a system that precedes them. The aesthetic language of Salvation Machine AMOAD is steeped in ceremonial pageantry, baroque excess, and the iconography of power—Roman death masks, imperial regalia, and the performative gravitas of the strongman and the crooner. The gold mask erases the individual while amplifying presence; the white tuxedo jacket reframes control as spectacle, oscillating between seduction and command. The congregants—clad in flowing, monochromatic white robes, their faces obscured by gilded veils and adornments—are genderless, expressionless, spectral. They do not possess identity so much as they embody an aestheticized anonymity, their presence at once solemn and unknowable, absorbed into the processional logic of the mass.