Acid-burned visions of landscapes like falling in and out of sleep in an airconditionless ride in August midday heat. A journey can take many forms. Some happen to reorient a person’s mind, offer inspiration in moments when inspiration is hard to come by; others reveal themselves as allies with the mundane and obsequious, draining those already burdened by the ins and outs of life’s small tedious obligations. Few take the route of challenging the foundations we tend to rely on.
Inspired by the tradition of Dragon Hunting described in Samuel Delany’s novel Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Dragon Hunt by Marko Gutić Mižimakov, combines machine learning, dance, and travel as tools of unencumbered ideation. The experimental short film takes on the genre of a road trip movie, inscribing it with abstract and fantastic elements that weirden and complicate the depicted landscapes of the Dalmatian Hinterland – developing them as scenes of queer exploration of mimicry, media translation and friendship. Amid these algorithmic visions, a language of shapeshifting, areal and land becoming, and dedication to the subtlest rhythms of one’s (self-)asserted jouissance.
Marko Gutić Mižimakov (1992) is a visual, performance and text based artist living between Brussels and Zagreb. They are interested in shaping sensory materials through intimate, collaborative and social processes. In their work bodies, as well as digital and palpable objects, are animated, choreographed and sung into non-orientable forms via different media and processes of translation. Often borrowing from queer science fiction they see their work as a speculative technology of mutual transformation. They have an MA in Animated Film and New Media from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. In 2022/2023 they were an artistic researcher at a.pass. Currently they are an adjunct faculty member at Paris College of Art in the department of Transdisciplinary New Media.
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