She opens her arms wide: “I want to go home, do my dreaming.” Crossing from an unbearable reality to the world of magic sometimes takes only the snap of a finger, sometimes several press-ups. Gudrun Krebitz’s poetic combination of video and animation recommends pushing the gravestone aside and descending into one’s subconscious: with overpaintings and superimpositions.

An abandoned amusement park offers a secret real-life retreat for young people in Casablanca. They escape their restrictive society digitally into the Internet to soak up international trends and amplify themselves. A camera floats through the tableaux vivants they have formed. Their eyes are frozen, the self-chosen poses seem undead.

The gaze follows a line of trees and tries to visually order near and distant branches. A jumble of lines sketchily leaves behind what is and sketchily captures what can be assembled from the remnants of perception. Hand-drawn lines conquer the third dimension with digital crackling. A pylon waves its tentacles.

A film projection shows a woman sitting by the water. In “her back” is the shadow of a female figure who conjures radiant golden clouds of dots and balls of lines into the frame with her hands and is even able to blot it out. The magical trailer for the “Tricky Women” festival was made by manually editing the image and sound sequences recorded by Moïa Jobin-Paré when she was artist-in-residence in Vienna.

Celtic cult sites communicate effectively with the cosmos, the terrestrial darkness is churned by energy fields and sunrays. Even in one of his earliest works – a video clip for breakcore pioneer Venetian Snares – David OReilly dissects the myth of a homogenous CGI world, revealing the abrasions of a vulnerable digital DNA.

An Instagram user surface ripples, turns into a feedback vortex and attempts to impress in virtual space. Every segment is an aesthetically arranged repetition. We catch a brief glimpse of the alleged visual content: in a film studio, equipment and a white background are lurking for their photographic object. Absence is staged as a motif that feeds the vain social media channel.

You need momentum to escape it all. Vonfelt packs the necessary energy into unstoppable pop beats and verbal images. On a backdrop of fleeting nocturnal city lights, Michelle Brand creates a refreshingly dynamic slipstream of fading forms and intense colours. You let yourself fall gently and with a smile into the rush of acceleration.

Sphere, cuboid and potato figure hang out in the playground of grey everyday life. After a literal short trip of the spherical fellow into the gaudy, psychedelic cosmos where colours and forms blur, the only thing to do is to bring along the friends. The three of them pool all their skills in a rubber ball and jump into the new timeless world.