The Milan Machinima Festival is delighted to present a screening of Nicolas Grebe's unclassifiable work The Sunset Special, offering a voyeuristic glimpse into the meticulously crafted world of social media. This interdisciplinary multimedia project, anchored by an animated short film, invites viewers on an eerie journey to a luxurious realm of unfulfilled desire, endless longing, and the boundless promise of wanderlust. Through the project’s exploration of the pervasive effects of reality-distorting imagery and narrative, The Sunset Special offers a critical analysis of the nexus between nostalgia, desire, and the perpetuation of a customized digital product.
Gebbe's work is featured in the Utopia program and can be watched here until March 26 2023.
We strongly encourage you to visit the official website to get a better understanding on the scale and scope of this project.
A Frankfurt-based artist and filmmaker whose work explores the intersection of architecture, everyday spaces, and digital reality, Nicolas Gebbe creates intricate and immersive digital worlds that challenge our perceptions of the spaces and environments that surround us. Gebbe was born in London in 1986, and received his art diploma with a film major from Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach in 2018. Drawing inspiration from existing spaces and our habitual movements within them, his works isolate, alienate, and destabilize.
Matteo Bittanti discussed the creative process behind The Sunset Special with the artist, Nicols Gebbe.
Matteo Bittanti: Your artistic oeuvre demonstrates a preoccupation with facades, both literal and metaphorical. Here's I'm also thinking of a favorite of mine, Urban Dreamscape. In your creative endeavors, photogrammetry is a crucial tool that allows you to reconstruct and distort the surfaces of architectural spaces and urban environments, among other things. Your latest project, The Sunset Special, delves deeper into this fascination with appearances, as you contemplate the manufacture of luxury, exclusivity, and wealth in resort culture, much like that portrayed in The White Lotus, through the lens of social media. Can you elaborate on the origins of this project and the key inspirations that informed it?
Nicholas Gebbe: Key inspirations where video games I played in my childhood, experimental films and pop culture I absorbed through film and other media. The project combines several topics that interested me for a while and brings them together in a virtual hybrid collage. One of the main topics being the absurdities and superficialities of consumerism and advertisement which I enjoy observing in everyday life. Of course, social media amplifies these mechanism by a lot. Spending a lot of time exposed to these digital worlds, I feel the downsides rather vividly myself and care to question their contents. The project started with me experimenting with some found footage and 3D models with all the rough ideas in the back of my head. Through experimenting the simplified narration unfolded itself in a very linear gaming stereotypical fashion and step by step the project pieced itself together.
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Matteo Bittanti
Works cited
Nicolas Gebbe
The Sunset Special
digital video, color, sound, 17’ 30”, Germany, 2022
