Greetings from Petra

Hello everyone, I’m Petra Szemán (sɛmaːn), video artist and train enthusiast. In my work I like to focus on the murky borderlands between the so called “real” and the “virtual”, and the various ways in which human subjectivity may get entangled with things beyond its reach, whether that be sprawling tech infrastructures, a longing for the fictional, or the sublime™. (Related: this Battlestar Galactica scene on the frustration of human perceptual boundaries).

There’s many facets to this, and you can dig around my website and my artwork for more elaborate thoughts, but a big part of my focus is the radical potential of animation as a consolidating technique between many discordant parts, a particular queer/trans* potentiality, and the intensities of fandom (international, cross-cultural, queer).

My most recent video work is titled ‘Border as Interface’, and it’s about borders and interfaces (duh), zones of overlap and connection, languages and large bodies of water. All my videos are available to watch on the internet for free, and I also have a game you can download (about rail crossings, the shape of clouds, and death).

More specific websites

I like to think about ‘the virtual’ in general and grand terms, but on a day-to-day basis I’m also forced to think about the actual pockets of the internet in which many of us live and are sort of forced to live in, amidst all the malarky the Big Corporations overseeing it all are tangled up in, and like everyone I’m also conflicted and confused. It’s interesting how in a lot of Japanese subcultures (in my experience) there’s more individual websites dedicated to very specific things like this very active community of Shinkai Makoto anime fans.

I wonder if this is due to prevalence of old-internet type websites generally like this website for passenger ships in Kyushu, or the official Comiket Comic Market website. Comiket is the largest fan convention in the world, dedicated to fan publications (fanfic, fan comics, or self-published original works). In Japan, it’s more socially acceptable and viable for a website to look like it was made in 2006, and thus more people feel like they can make a website themselves, and so they do.

By contrast in English-speaking fan communities I often see a tendency to gather solely around social media without an independent website things feed into, or these days with the slow death of Twitter, congregate in elusive Discord communities. I love Discord but I do also increasingly worry about so much information in there being closed off, as opposed to being on publicly searchable forums that we used to flock to in the early online fandom days. But I digress. I hate downloading new apps though, so I haven’t made a Bluesky account yet. Maybe one day.

Model collapse?

AI – do I have to talk about it? I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to touch genAI with a 10ft pole if I can help it. I’m sick of perfectly good video artists all starting to use genAI these days, it flattens one’s visual imaginary so distinctly, and the environmental impact isn’t insignificant, etc etc. I wonder how the digital contemporary art scene will evolve amidst the apparently impending model collapse. (According to Wikipedia: “Model collapse is a phenomenon where machine learning models gradually degrade due to errors coming from uncurated training on the outputs of another model, including prior versions of itself.”)

You can probably tell I have many thoughts about many things, and will happily go on about them if given the opportunity. In my contributions to this blog, I hope to bring you a curated and distilled selection of such thoughts, as well as things relevant to video and game making, because that’s what I do best, and always want to share the knowledge to get others into it.

In the meantime, if any of this sounded interesting to you, you may also like my monthly newsletter, the latest entry in which includes a long tangent about technological essentialism in media analysis.

Do you have a favourite comic or anime? It's always a hard choice, but on the top of my list is 5 Centimetres Per Second.