Loukia-Alavanou-2023-140X148-English-for-web

for the refugee camps/prisons, restricting movement, as opposed to the open spaces that the Futurama film envisioned the future to look like. An absurd court scene from a postwar US radio adaptation of Alice in Wonderland is played out, while the VR viewer is "imprisoned" inside the bird cage. "Sentence first, verdict after," cries the voice of the queen. The film ends with fragments from the voice of British far-right politician Jonathan Bowden explaining the role of "lines" in Anglo-Saxon creativity in an almost performative radio act of self absorption, while abstract propaganda shapes from the Futuristic film To New Horizons are being appropriated and incorporated in a VR space. In a darkly humorous way, the work speaks about the tendency of the Western world to forget and wipe out its recent history, through the images of the animated, imprisoned birds, onto which I superimpose "superegotistic" voices. Taking into account that Futurama’s 1940 film clearly emphasized movement as a vehicle of progress, New Horizons – Pilot poses questions such as: how can one picture the horizon in today's opaque, global landscape of "'walls" and "borders"? Drawing on the prewar film’s utilization of the latest trends in the cinematic experience of its time (early Technicolor), I use today’s trends of "home cinema" and gaming industries, namely "virtual reality" in order to allegorically echo the film’s emphasis on the "horizon": When one looks "through" or "in" a VR viewer, the horizon becomes utterly illusionary. In addition to this highly personalized visual experience, while also drawing on Futurama’s approach of delivering the power of mass communication through the use of "propaganda speakers" integrated into the participants’ chairs, the film is an experiment with sound that is literally and metaphorically "transmitted" directly into the "inner ear" of the participants. The film’s soundtrack is an assemblage of found propaganda sources; postwar Foley