Steven Bode

Familiar Phantoms

Familiar Phantoms is an experimental documentary short film about memory, history and trauma.

Ahead of the Curve

Einstein proposed that time might not flow linearly, suggesting that spacetime bends and warps under powerful matter, seen as gravity's fluctuations. During the pandemic, people experienced this concept firsthand: shrinking horizons made time seem to both stand still and race forward. Daniel Cockburn’s video Ahead of the Curve reflects this surreal period when norms vanished, and internet rabbit holes drew people in—either as black holes for doomscrolling or wormholes to discovery. Through a darkly comic narrative, Cockburn spins a tale full of unexpected twists, linking past and present with disorienting shifts in tone, setting, and tempo, offering hints of what might lie ahead.

Echoes from the Void

The echo chambers of contemporary conspiracy theories alongside the mythic, subterranean topography of the cave.

BXBY

BXBY is a year-long performance project that merges forms of semi-fictional documentary and ritual practice, following Chang as a hybrid, shape-shifting being trying to learn to reproduce. Drawing from chimeric figures within creation stories of the British Isles and the diasporic cultures of Chang and her collaborators (Choulay Mech, Jade O'Belle, Anika Ahuja, and Aditya Surya Taruna a.k.a Kasimyn), Chang positions her own hybrid body – part animal, part woman, part alien – as a site of technological interaction and as a locus of ongoing experiment.

You Know Nothing of My Work

A multi-chapter rumination on the cultural dilemma of the disgraced popular icon. Considering how collective, systematic failure led to cases of abuse from powerful figures in the cultural scene, this work proposes a conflict between the enjoyment of and respect for their creative work and what we now know (or at times failed to recognise) about their behaviour.

Walkout 1

Some time after a mysterious weather event caused a cloud of sand from a faraway desert to settle over an unnamed city, this miasma of dust shows no sign of lifting. Clogging up the eyes and choking off the horizon, it has become a fact of everyday life. In a nondescript apartment somewhere in the city, a woman convenes a gathering at which a group of young people are present. Like every young generation, they are a repository of hope for the future – albeit a future that seems equally murky and obscured.

Don't Look at the Finger

Don’t Look at the Finger follows a ceremonial ‘fight’ between two protagonists, a man and a woman, in the grand architectural setting of a church. The way the characters communicate is a feat of choreography that combines Kung Fu with signed languages to express a ritualistic coming together.

Geomancer

Heralded by the futuristic computer-generated cityscapes that have become a signature feature of his work, Lawrence Lek’s mini-opus Geomancer is less inclined to map the building blocks of the urban architecture of tomorrow than to try and summon up the spirit of our rapidly dawning age - one whose characteristics, Lek implies, include the growing ascendancy of the cultural phenomenon of Sino-Futurism. As the geopolitical axis tilts further to the East, and as once-dominant economic/technological models are cast into doubt, Lek alights on a longstanding tension between the place of the human and the role of the machine, sharpened by contemporary hopes and anxieties around the rise of East Asia, and by speculations that new forms of artificial intelligence, already outperforming mere mortals in matters of automation and aggregation, will challenge us in more creative skills as well. (fvu.co.uk)