White on White

Čákanyová shot this video diary during her stay at a Polish Antarctic station in 2017, where she filmed FREM, featuring an artificial neural network as its main character. In the diary, she converses with an artificial intelligence, exploring film, art, and the meaning of life, revealing a way of thinking free from humanity and emotionality.

'I got to the Antarctic while shooting my debut feature FREM. Out of an intense inner need, I kept an audiovisual diary mapping my experience of this special place. It was a form of mental hygiene, a part of my daily schedule as well as of my cinematographic obsession. The handheld, POV camera mediates my personal physical experience—I am a wanderer in a vanishing natural ecosystem marked by advancing climate change. I document the inexhaustible and suggestive morphologies of matter—glaciers, sea, animals, and weather. Every day, I watch the melting glaciers, fascinated by their unrepeatable structures in the changing light conditions. Providing an absurd opposite to the pure natural landscape, visual fragments of past locations, civilization scenes primarily from location scouting in China, appear in my subconscious mind in the insomnia of polar days, giving me anxiety for the future.' - Viera ČÁKANYOVÁ