Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha stages a quiet but persistent feedback loop between ancient contemplation and modern technology. A seated Buddha statue faces a television monitor that displays its own image via a live camera. Nothing changes, yet the image is constantly renewed.

The work collapses distinctions between subject and object, observer and observed, past and present. The Buddha appears to meditate on its electronic double, while the viewer is drawn into this circuit, becoming another witness within the loop. Rather than positioning technology as purely disruptive, Paik treats it as a site of reflection.

The closed circuit suggests awareness without progress, duration without narrative, time experienced rather than measured. TV Buddha resists spectacle, its power lies in stillness and repetition. By placing spiritual iconography in direct dialogue with video technology, Paik asks whether electronic media can hold space for contemplation, or whether it endlessly mirrors us back to ourselves.

Ate Von Hes’s video work Tony P. forms part of the ongoing Found Family project, an ever-expanding series of video portraits constructed from collaged facial fragments. Eyes, mouths, skin tones, and expressions are drawn from multiple sources and merged into a single, impossible face, one that feels both unfamiliar and immediately recognisable. Rather than presenting identity as fixed or singular, Tony P. proposes it as something assembled, fluid, and shared.

The figure on screen does not resolve into a known individual, yet it carries traces of many. This tension creates a subtle sense of recognition, inviting viewers to project themselves into the image, to search for likeness within fragmentation.

Tony P. was selected for the 2025 Moscow International Video Art Exhibition and placed at the entrance of the show, where it became an informal spokesperson for the exhibition. Encountered first, the work set the tone for what followed, visible and invisible, see and unseen, and the possibility of connection through difference.

Search @AteVonHes to see some of his works and the Found Family ever increasing collection.

When I was thinking about what I could make for the theme of private/public, nothing immediately came to mind. After some weeks, and all ideas going awry, I became more and more annoyed with myself for not being able to solve the puzzle with even anything half decent. It is often a recurring theme for me that most art projects go very wrong for the first week or so of thinking, trying, experimenting until I reach a moment of utter frustration where I just let go of all attempts to try and just scribble or scream in a maniacal way, snapping one’s paintbrushes or pressing control/alt/delete followed by switching everything off at the plug. Angry emoji. It is at this point of utterly letting go, that allows the art is allowed to flow and spill out in an unselfconscious manner – when I have properly given up all care and consideration.

The idea of presenting oneself in a calm, collected and successful social media shiny manor was not what this video was all about. It was the unseen part of me that, until this point, whilst coinciding with the month prior to an open studio event, when one attempts to tidy and curate the utter chaos that one has allowed one’s studio to become during the previous year of a private studio, that the theme of the video became apparent. Again, it was the frustrations I felt in preparing for this event and allowing my inner thoughts, that tumble round like a noisy clothes drier, to spill out in a crumpled heap on the floor. The result was an audio recording that I shaped into the soundtrack for the video. Following that, the imagery was easy to find and the clutter in my studio and the scribbles in my sketchbook were already there, normally the parts that remain private until I have tidied them up. In the completed video, you will witness the chaos of my mind clutter at 3am – no wonder the cat won’t sit on me.

Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon is a foundational work of American experimental cinema, exploring subjectivity through a fragmented and dreamlike structure. The film follows a woman moving through a familiar domestic space that gradually becomes unstable, governed by repetition, doubling, and circular time. Actions recur with subtle variation, a key, a knife, a staircase, transforming ordinary objects into charged symbols without and real fixed meaning. Rather than unfolding as narrative, the film operates through rhythm, gesture, and visual association.

Deren uses cinematic techniques, slow motion, reversed movement, abrupt cuts, and shifting points of view to revel interior states. The camera does not observe from a distance but participates in the protagonist’s perception, aligning the viewer with her disorientation. Multiple versions of the self-appear, suggesting fractured identity and the impossibility of a singular viewpoint. Meshes of the Afternoon resists psychological explanation, instead offering cinema as a medium capable of visualising thought itself. Its influence endures in experimental film and video art practices that treat time, repetition, and the body as expressive materials rather than narrative tools.