Katia Sophia Ditzler

DEAD WATER // LIVING WATER is a poetry film duology created in collaboration with AI tools, drawing on the Eastern Slavic mythological pairing of dead water and living water. In East Slavic tradition, dead water is the term for water used to wash the dead, water that can afterwards be used to curse enemies. Like so many superstitions, it encodes a fear of women's magical potential: the suspicion that women cannot be trusted to care for the dead, that their proximity to death grants them a power that must be contained and condemned. Living water, by contrast, can bring the dead back to life; it must be extracted from beyond the sea, from a place outside ordinary reach. In some myths, the two work in sequence: dead water heals the wounds of a corpse, living water revives it. Destruction and restoration share the same source. DEAD WATER is constructed as a collage of real film elements combined with AI-generated video sequences, inserted into a 3D animated environment. The poem is recited by AI-generated voices, and the faces are AI-optimized portraits of the artist herself. The use of AI is not incidental: the work is interested in what it means to delegate voice and image to a system, to pass representation through a filter that optimizes and smooths, and what residue of self remains on the other side. LIVING WATER is part live action film, part performative machinima, set within a 3D environment that combines scanned real objects with phygital avatars. It was filmed at the thermal spa resort of Methana, Greece, a place built around the ancient belief in water as medicine. The thermal bath becomes a site of meditation on healing, on the body's relationship to landscape, and on what happens when a place formerly dedicated to restoration loses its purpose and falls into disuse. What remains when the water no longer heals? What kind of haunting does abandonment produce? Together, the two works trace the mythological arc from curse to resurrection, moving through destruction, wound, and revival. They ask what forms of care, for the dead, for the body, for place, have been delegated to women and subsequently feared. And they ask what it means to tell these stories now, through technologies that are themselves ambivalent about origin, authorship, and the boundary between the living and the artificial.

About the Artist

Katia Sophia Ditzler is a transdisciplinary media artist, writer, and filmmaker whose work fuses experimental cinema, poetic text, immersive media, soundscapes, performance, and philosophical inquiry. With formal training in creative writing, transmedia arts, cultural anthropology, shadow puppetry, and philosophy from various institutions in Leipzig, Berlin, Moscow, Kyiv, Yogyakarta, Melbourne, and Zurich, she constructs complex symbolic systems that explore political myth, propaganda, memory, and power. Her writing has appeared in various publications across the German-speaking world. Her films, installations, and hybrid works have been presented internationally at festivals and exhibitions across Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania. At 19, she solo-hitchhiked from Germany to Singapore. www.katiasophiaditzler.com