ATMOSPHERIC ATTUNEMENTS (2025)
Atmospheric Attunements (2025) is a photographic and cinematographic installation that explores cross-temporal relationships and embodied encounters with more-than-human worlds. The work features nine original archival photographs, eight derivative images, a large-scale projection screen made from algal fibers, and an experimental film projected onto an algal bioscreen responsive to breath and presence. Through an intergenerational collaboration with my mother, Georgia Kanic, the installation brings together personal and collective memory: a photograph of me as a child on the brink of war and an experimental film of my adult self free-diving in the same sea decades later. These two selves are placed in dialogue, revealing histories of displacement, survival, and transformation. Referencing Giuliano Torrengo’s theory of entities existing across multiple times, the installation activates a cross-temporal archive where past and present selves converge, and familial memory becomes a shared space of witnessing.
The double-sided algal projection screen is made from fibers of captured carbon and responds to the breath of spectators, its surface warping and shifting according to the atmosphere. As the experimental film plays, the screen’s shape continuously transforms, producing endless variations of the projected image. This dynamic, breathing interface invites viewers into a space of atmospheric attunement, what Heidegger calls “worlding”—an immersion into a moment where human, non-human, and non-living beings co-create experience. Here, breath becomes a language of interspecies communication, forging connections between ancestors, algae, spectators, and atmospheric conditions. The archival photographs and derivative images, alongside the responsive bioscreen, materialize an expanded posthuman subjectivity grounded in ecological entanglement and radical empathy—a convergence of memory, matter, and future-making.
ONLY LOVERS LEAVE TO DIE
AWARD-WINNING FILM & ONE OF TOP TEN CANADIAN FILMS OF 2020
After being screened at Oscar qualifying festivals like Hiroshima, Animafest Zagreb, Ottawa, Raindance, HAFF and thirty more, the film was selected for the EyeCANdy programme as one of top ten Canadian contemporary animations in 2020. The film won multiple international awards and was critically acclaimed for aestheticism that comes greatly off the beaten path, continuous risk-taking and experimental way of playing with the raw material of the cinema. It was also curated for the Big Art Toronto 2020 festival where it was projected on a building as a piece of public art.
CATCHING A LION
SHORT FICTION (2014)
Besides being shown at numerous film festivals including Oscar qualifying BFI London Film Festival, the film was long listed for the Jutra award and was a finalist for Bell Media award in 2014. It was also acquired by Italian Mediaset TV and distributed worldwide. The film was shot on 35mm film and sponsored by Canadian Council for Arts, Kodak and Technicolor.
EXPERIMENTAL VIOLENCE
AWARD-WINNING EXPERIMENTAL FICTION (2010)
After winning numerous international awards and screenings around the world at festivals like Locarno, the film was acquired by Short Shorts TV and screened at Museum of Arts and Crafts and MOMA in Zagreb.
HELIOLA
MUSICAL INSTRUMENT WITH LASER STRINGS (2021)
While being played on the beams of light, Heliola converts hand gestures into photons that create music. This is the first prototype of my photophonic musical instrument which is played on beams of light and acts like an optical synth that can be patched to any musical VSTs. I’ve built it with photocells, lasers and a couple of microchips.
MIRROR WITHOUT ORGANS
MIXED-MEDIA INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION
4x6x1m / 2021
The artwork’s primary concern is deconstruction of the conventional film language while questioning the form and materiality of a film frame. Spectators are invited to move freely around the installation and subvert the projection with their shadows. The subversion creates random film frames of different shapes and sizes made by chance and audience interaction. The photosensitive spheres are interactive in relation to both the audience’s touch and the light from the video projection. They control both the video projection and generation of random sounds while establishing spectators as collaborators in the creation of the artwork.
MEMORIES OF NOW
INTERACTIVE DOME CINEMA PERFORMANCE (2016)
The project visualizes human emotions hidden in the memories of the past in a form of immersive dome videos. Memories are perceived as abstract landscapes and emotions as characters speaking the language of sound, music and colours. The project tends to create a collective ‘memory of now’, resulting from the interaction of the audience with with the interactive interface that controls the immersive dome video. The interface is a separate work of art and represents an abstract snapshot of director’s memory, and it allows spectators to contribute to a collective work of audiovisual art – Memories of Now.
© 2025 VLADIMIR KANIC
THE BEST WAY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE IS TO INVENT IT