Zoe Beloff

Zoe Beloff Surprise: Bertold Brecht and Walter Benjamin have been reincarnated as an Iranian and an African-American and they roam today’s New York. At times they are a comic duo, at others the voice of our conscience: the babbling couple provides good weapons to attack the world.

Alice ends up in the derelict houses of Coney Island and Times Square. She sinks into a wonderland of decadence and despair, into the no-mans-land of lost souls, charlatans, broken dreams and cheap perversions.

Inspired by J.G. Ballard's novel Crash, the film focuses on Jack and Diana Weston, who, after suffering a car crash, find their lives intruded upon by Dr. de Freis, a chronicler of car accidents who attempts to verify the psychological changes that occur in victims of accidents and the subsequent articulation of their anxieties.

In 1948 the James Agee wrote a scenario for his lifelong hero, Charlie Chaplin. Deeply disturbed by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Agee imagined New York destroyed. In the ruins, Chaplin's Little Tramp builds a shack in Central Park. Gradually a small community of the dispossessed grows up around him. For Agee, his story was a thought experiment about how one might start again in the aftermath of disaster, to go beyond capitalism and just how hard that is in the face of our modern technological world. The film focuses on his imaginative journey and what it might mean for us today.

Beyond is a mysterious virtual world. In a playful spirit of philosophical inquiry, it explores the paradoxes of technology, desire and the paranormal posed since the birth of mechanical reproduction. One might call it an investigation of the "dream life" of technology, from around 1850 to 1940.

(Fictional history) A film by Eddie Kammerer (1972), 16mm sound

(Fictional history): This film was made by in 1937 Arthur Rosenzweig, a member of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society. Here he recreates one of his dreams on film and analyzes it according to Freud's theories.

Our emotions are increasingly being turned into commodities, manipulated by global corporations. This hack of an IBM commercial suggests how. What does the future hold for a world where people are treated like objects, while online objects are being granted agency and becoming increasingly anthropomorphic?