Dan Oki
Absence of Telepresence
2022, 25 min
Personal observations and investigative aesthetics on growing pollution of human brain. Reflections on a fusion of telephone, address book, camera and computer into one gadget from the perspective of ecology of attention. Collage of humouristic, nostalgic and futuristic cinematographic experiences expressed through couple of languages and placed in recent historical contexts of few countries. Cinematographic mixture consists of essay narratives and images inspired by artists whose works are closely connected to communication protocols: Buster Keaton, Sophie Call and Nam June Paik. Director’s photo serials of people with smartphones shot in in Tokyo in 1997 and in Seoul in 2017 are fused with media performances by artists: Sandra Sterle, Gildo Bavčevič, William Linn and Nina Kamenjarin. Technological and artistic concepts of telephone in recent history have been performed and presented simultaneously with political ecologies, nostalgia, futurism and humour.
Dan Oki
(Slobodan Jokić, 1965, Zadar) has been making films since the end of 1980s. He belongs to the generation of Croatian filmmakers which made first films in the context of socialist Kino Clubs in Zagreb. In the 1990s in Amsterdam Dan Oki has made pioneering works with cinematographic databases and interactive video. After spending fifteen years living in the Netherlands and other countries, he returned to Croatia in 2004, where he has produced and directed number of shorts and five independent feature length films. Last couple of years he is working mainly in the domain of documentary film in the context of PhD studies at the University of Amsterdam.
Dan Oki was a head of the Association of Media Artists in Amsterdam from 1997-2001. He is one of the founders of the Association Kazimir in Split in 2010, where he has also produced number of films for other artists and filmmakers from Croatia. Besides being a film director and visual artist, he is also a professor of filmmaking and electronic arts.
