Bliss Point 2023 plunges us into the ever-accelerating rhythm of food supply and the emergence of new techno-capitalist processes. The film guides us from dark kitchens and food advertising sets to AI-managed warehouses. A delivery driver cycles across the city to a makeshift trailer where workers flip burgers. Algorithm powered robots buzz through a sprawling grid of crates and 3D printers stack layers of computer-generated data to produce food alternatives. Drawing from the concept of optimal palatability, Bliss Point reveals the entanglement of automation and human labour, and the ways in which the aesthetics and the politics of food intersect.
The screening continues with Future Foods 2021, the first chapter in the trilogy, which investigates the relationship between image and food production. Framed against a phone conversation with the CEO of a tech start-up, the film observes the manufacturing process of food props. Juxtaposing the speculative with the artificial, the work explores how food is perceived, made digestible and consumed, pointing towards an uncertain near future of agricultural transformation.
Shot in an industrial greenhouse, Agrilogistics 2022 infiltrates the production line, turning machines and optical imaging robots into cinematic devices. The film takes us into a hypnotic journey where fruits and flowers are processed, regulated and surveilled through cameras, while robot arms and human hands pluck and package the produce. At night, the haze of LED controlled lighting reveals an oneiric world of unexpected, sensory encounters between plants, animals and machines.
The screening is organised in collaboration with Delfina Foundation.
Gerard Ortín Castellví (b. 1988) is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher currently reading a Ph.D. at Goldsmiths University London, funded by an AHRC fellowship. His practice focuses on the relationship between moving images and the technologies and ecologies of food in the context of the current environmental transformations. He is a mentor at UCL Creative Documentary by Practice MFA, and a member of the Ecological Reparation project.
Bliss Point 2023, video, colour, sound, 26 min
Conversation between the artist and Erin Li (Curator, Delfina Foundation) followed by a Q&A
Future Foods 2021, video, colour, sound, 20 min
Agrilogistics 2022, video, colour, sound, 21 min
All Tate Modern entrances are step-free. You can enter via the Cinema entrance, left of the Turbine Hall main entrance, and into the Natalie Bell Building on Holland Street, or into the Blavatnik Building on Sumner street.
The Starr Cinema is on Level 1 of the Natalie Bell Building. There are lifts to every floor of the Blavatnik and Nathalie Bell buildings. Alternatively you can take the stairs.
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All works screened in the Starr Cinema have English captions.
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