Movie Night

Time as Context

Hyperreality does not understand music exclusively as something present. Even if many of the invited works emerge in the here and now—formally, aesthetically, and socially—the context in which they exist is never limited to the present. Musical practices always emerge in relation: to historical lineages, to archives, to lost or suppressed histories. Time does not unfold linearly. Ideas reappear, shift, are reinterpreted, or remain invisible for long periods. The festival’s film program begins precisely here. It expands the focus on sound through a temporal perspective: as a way of understanding musical practice not only as a current state, but as part of a larger, often fragmented context.

Joy Boy

A central part of the film program is Joy Boy (2026), an experimental documentary about the composer Julius Eastman by Mawena Yehouessi, Fallon Mayanja, Rob Jacobs, Victoire Karera Kampire, Paul Shemisi, and Anne Reijniers. Eastman is one of those figures whose influence is becoming increasingly visible today, even though his work received little institutional recognition during his lifetime. As a Black and openly queer composer, he operated in the 1970s within a musical field strongly shaped by white academic structures. Many of his works were lost; only some were archived or published. He died in poverty in 1990. At the same time, Eastman is now considered a key figure in expanding musical minimalism. While minimalism is often described through reduced, repetitive structures, Eastman shifts this form in another direction: his compositions combine repetition with improvisation, physical presence, and political language. His works are not only musical structures but also statements—loud, confrontational, and formally precise. In this combination of repetition, duration, and intensity, parallels can also be found with later developments in electronic and experimental music. Minimalist principles—loops, micro-variation, time-stretching—still form the basis for many forms of club music and sound practice today. Yet Eastman’s story is not only aesthetic but also structural. It points to a recurring pattern in music history: innovation often emerges outside the institutions that later canonize it. Those who carry this innovation often remain marginalized. Archives are not neutral, and this dynamic is not a closed chapter—it continues into the present.

Similar trajectories can be observed in club culture. The Chicago producer DJ Deeon, who performed at Hyperreality in 2018, is considered one of the key pioneers of Ghetto House. His tracks and aesthetic decisions continue to shape global club music. At the same time, his economic situation remained precarious, and he died relatively young. The structures that generate musical innovation do not guarantee that their creators benefit from it. Against this backdrop, Eastman’s story appears not as an exception but as part of a larger context that becomes visible within Hyperreality—through a program that deliberately focuses on new voices and approaches operating beyond established systems of exploitation, often organizing their practice politically, queerly, and collectively.

Film as Re-enactment

Joy Boy approaches this history not through a conventional documentary form. The film understands itself as an artistic practice. A transnational collective of six artists with different media—film, performance, choreography, text, and archival material—to develop a multilayered engagement with Eastman’s work. Across four chapters, musical performances, spoken texts, and visual interventions are interwoven. Music and image do not exist in an illustrative relationship but coexist, sometimes independently. Eastman’s compositions reveal his formal precision; his texts and recordings make his stance visible—direct, radical, and unmediated. The film does not treat Eastman as a historical figure but as a contemporary reference. His work is not explained but activated. In this sense, Joy Boy itself becomes an act of contextualization: an artistic engagement showing how historical practice continues into the present.

Present as Infrastructure

While Joy Boy reveals a historical line that resonates into the present, UNBOUND focuses decisively on the now. Yet this “now” does not appear as a stable condition, but as a field of tension—marked by acceleration, uncertainty, and the constant need to create new spaces. Club culture operates under conditions of permanent presentness and structural pressure—displacement, economic constraints, and the need for continuous reorganization. This present is not stable but transitional—fleeting, condensed, and marked by uncertainty. Spaces emerge and disappear; scenes form and dissolve. What remains is a practice of rebuilding: relationships, trust, and spaces that are never fully secured. In this condition, the club gains its urgency—as something that must be continuously recreated.

The film, created by the artist collective PXKRW (Ewelina Aleksandrowicz & Andrzej Wojtas), follows protagonists in the London scene, including the platform and club series Inferno. At its center are trans, non-binary, and queer perspectives, for whom the club is not just a place to go out, but an essential infrastructure: a space for care, healing, self-determination, and collective survival. Against the backdrop of a city where many queer spaces have disappeared, nightlife becomes visible as something that must be actively defended and reorganized. UNBOUND understands the club not as a temporary event, but as a continuous practice—a network of relationships, artistic work, and political organization, a form of collective production of knowledge, intimacy, and artistic practice.

The film stays close to its heroes. It does not observe from a distance but emerges from within the scene. What becomes visible is a form of community defined by chosen families, shared experiences, and mutual responsibility—resisting both appropriation and disappearance.In this perspective, nightlife becomes more than a cultural context: it becomes a space where alternative forms of living together are tested.

With the Inferno Showcase at Hyperreality 2026, this practice continues directly in Vienna. What UNBOUND documents is not only shown here but transferred into the space of the festival—as a living, evolving structure. The Inferno Showcase at Hyperreality 2026 was curated together with Lewis G. Burton and features, alongside them: Kavari, Rent, Wax Wings, Brother of Set, and ancious_t.

Rave as Ephemeral Space

A different approach to the present is offered by motionCHOSEN_inpractice by amaaena. The short film follows a surreal, collective space inseparably linked to night and darkness. In contrast to UNBOUND, which makes club culture visible as a social infrastructure, the focus here is on its embodied dimension: dance, intoxication, excess, care, and self-expression as practices that cannot be fully documented but arise in the moment and disappear again. The film understands rave not primarily as a scene or organization, but as a temporary form of community—something that continuously re-forms. Especially in the tension between commercial appropriation and digital displacement, this space appears as something that must be constantly reimagined and reclaimed. What becomes visible is less a fixed structure than a state:
a coming together to celebrate, to create, to occupy space, and to generate safety—ritualized, fleeting, in the dark.

Parallels and Shifts

In juxtaposing Joy Boy, UNBOUND, and motionCHOSEN_inpractice, a connection emerges that is central to understanding the program.

All three films address different moments of the same question:
Who is heard, who is remembered—and under what conditions?

While Eastman’s story is shaped by loss, invisibility, and posthumous recognition, UNBOUND shows a scene actively trying to create different structures. Visibility here is not produced retrospectively, but demanded and organized in the present.

motionCHOSEN_inpractice shifts this perspective further: the film is less concerned with visibility in a classical sense than with states of community that resist full capture. What emerges is temporary, embodied, and often fleeting—a space formed at night, ritualized, and disappearing again. Within this lies a form of resistance: a refusal to fully conform to existing logics of documentation, exploitation, or representation.

Contemporary scenes also operate within economic and cultural systems shaped by inequality. The question of who has access, who can persist, and who remains visible over time is not resolved—it merely shifts. For this reason, club culture within Hyperreality is not romanticized but understood as an ambivalent space: a site of liberation and simultaneously and consciously part of larger structures,

Film as Extension of the Program

If Hyperreality understands sound as a situation—as something that emerges in the moment between bodies, spaces, and time—then all three films show that these situations are always embedded in larger contexts.

They make visible that music is not only made of tracks or performances, but of histories, infrastructures, and struggles for visibility.

Or, put differently:
Not every musical time is archived.
Not every scene endures.
And not every reality is heard.

The film program is an attempt to make these gaps at least partially visible.