Art Events Data Table

From the Edge is one of a series of audiovisual installations by Teresa Connors that explores the environment of Newfoundland, Canada. The work expands on Connors’ use of environmental data-sets as an artistic device to create nonlinear artworks for public engagement. The creative system is coded to live-stream data off the SmartAlantic St. John’s Buoy, which is located 1 kilometre offshore of Cape Spear, NL. The buoy is capable of measuring and transmitting a variety of atmospheric and surface conditions, including surface temperature, wind speed and direction, wave height, period and direction, as well as ocean current speed and direction.

From the Edge is coded to stream and parse these data-sets to trigger and shift parameters of this nonlinear work, which includes a visual particle system, audio and visual field recording material captured off this coast, a live streaming hydrophone feed from the St. John’s SmartBay Buoy and improvised musical motifs. Developed in Max/MSP, the work continually evolves depending on the transmitted measurements. This work builds on the author’s notion of Ecological Performative, which considers the context and creative process and the resulting artifacts as a responsive embodiment of larger structures of phenomena.

The Fusion: Landscape and Beyond series explores the nexus of nature, urbanization, and artificial intelligence (AI), reimag-ing “AI Memory” as a participatory archive, where AI trans-cends from a mere tool to an integral participant in crafting synthetic memories that resonate with the collective cultural narratives. Beginning with “Synthesis of Time and Terrain (V1),” the series juxtaposes traditional Chinese landscapes against AI’s modernity, reflecting on environmental and urban shifts. Utilizing animations and augmented reality generated through advanced self-fine-tuned Stable Diffusion model, it examines the tension between natural beauty and urban expan-sion. The subsequent phase, “Calligram of Contrast (V2),” introduces an interactive installation merging AI-generated cityscapes with traditional brushworks, invoking a philosophi-cal pursuit of harmony amidst environmental concerns. Through Clip Interrogator technology and infrared tracking sensor, the 2D canvas is transformed into a 3D space that is interactive and intrusive. The finale, “Illuminating Urban Scars (V3),” critically scrutinizes China’s halted urban projects, rep-resenting the repercussions of unchecked development and human cost. This trilogy highlights AI’s ability to fuse historical artistry with contemporary issues, positioning “AI Memory” as a critical medium for cultural discourse and digital heritage.

What are the changing conditions for Archaeology in underwater ecosystems? Can challenges be predicted and solutions imagined using Machine Learning?

With the passage of time, underwater artifacts are encrusted with coral, algae or other marine organisms. How do human activities and pollutions undermine these natural environments? What will our underwater heritage be like in the future?

The project: “Future Memories of Deep Water” explores how algorithms can be used for predicting new entanglements between underwater artifacts and the changing environment where they are discovered. We reflect on current problems and dangers for marine environments, such as “plasticrust” and plastic pollution.

Built upon experimental speculation, Future Memories of Deep Water calls for the protection of threatened marine ecosystems and aims to create awareness and encourage preservation of cultural heritage.

single channel HD video, duration 5 minutes

“When you cut into the present the future leaks out” – William Burroughs
Future Plants is an elaborate manipulation of media – a neon noir, rain spattered window into the near future; a love letter to science fiction with a utopian ambition to affect the future itself. Immersive virtual installations of techno-orientalist botany pulsate in infinite darkness. [Source: Vimeo]

Gambiocycle is a Mobile Broadcast unit. It is a tricycle containing electronic gear for interactive video projection and digital graffiti in public space. The vehicle is inspired by anonymous ambulant salesmen who ride on wheels through Brazilian cities, mostly selling products or doing political advertisement. Gambiocycle subverts this logic by gathering elements of performance, happening, electronic art, graffiti and “gambiarra” (makeshift, kludge): what it advertises is only a new era of straight democratic dialogue between people who participate in the interventions and their cities.

The human fascination with the mystical power of vision and sight is a recurring theme in world mythology, resonating in legends like the petrifying gaze of the Gorgons or the ominous “evil eye” across various cultures. Despite the rich landscape of sight-based magic in myths, these concepts often fall into oversimplification, missing the broader narrative context. Our project pioneers an eye-tracking-based virtual reality experience, inviting participants to immerse themselves in global mythology from a first-person perspective. Journeying through tales from Arabian folklores to Asian spectral stories, players engage in a unique blend of storytelling and remembrance.

Our design transcends traditional textual storytelling by immersing participants in captivating visuals and interactive narratives, empowering them with supernatural vision power. We move beyond mere replication of narratives, fostering playful and open-ended interactions that ignite the audience’s imagination and invite diverse interpretations. Enabled by generative AI, each space presents players with a single-lined poem upon completing a mythic journey, offering fresh perspectives and unraveling open threads of possibilities. Players’ personalized journeys contribute to a shared mosaic of poetic expressions, co-created by explorers on unique paths. Through the integration of gaze interactions, immersive storytelling, and generative AI, our work encourages collective reimagination of myths, rekindling our connection with profound visual themes resonating across ages.

Artificial intelligence and human designers come together in this generative, participatory ‘cloud art’ work made with mathematics and Darwinian evolution by Draves’ Electric Sheep open source code. The essence of life is created in digital form in the artwork’s cyborganic mind comprised of 450,000 computers and people who vote on their favourite designs which reproduce according to a genetic algorithm.

Gendernaut is an English term that we could translate as “navigator of gender”, and that invokes Jason’s argonauts. The term appears for the first time in the documentary Gendernauts: A Journey through shifting identities (1999), directed by Monika Treut, to refer to people who travel through shifting gender identities.

This artistic research project questions, in a first phase entitled “Queering the software”, the forms of construction of the hegemonic archive through the design of a plugin that allows the collective creation of archives through an online interactive multimedia experience and, in a second phase entitled “Queering the archive”, proposes new ways of visualizing narratives based on transfeminist and queer genealogies through transmedia and performative experiences that conceive the archive as a living interactive space, free of heteropatriarchal codes, inhabited by multiple bodies and subjectivities that relate past, present and future to come. The series articulates an extensive historical investigation through a diversity of thematic threads that the feminist, queer and trans movements have been weaving during the last four decades in our political and artistic context. These genealogies link a whole series of historical, artistic, collective events, actions, campaigns, exhibitions, interviews, fanzines, performances, etc. forming a complex amalgam of relationships between art, politics, memory and activism.

Gendernaut is a trans-temporal and trans-spatial traveler that will invite us to travel through time through a genealogy of key events in the memory of the feminist movement and the LGTBI movement in our context. During this journey, he will show us the archive through a transmedia and performative experience to understand how the representation of the future in history has been imagined from a transfeminist and queer perspective. Queering the future…

Focus Québec Exhibition. Forum des Images, May 16 – 21

A Generative Adversarial Network
This work takes its name from the software framework used to create its imagery as a self-referential point in order to reveal not only how the images are created, but also how the idea of the public has shifted in a so-called free society. The parameters of what constitutes an adversary are constantly shifting depending on the context and perspective, but within machinic perception, they remain fixed within the biases of its programmers and the dataset, or society and their polity. For ‘A Generative Adversarial Network’ a machine-learning algorithm was trained with a dataset gleaned from millimeter-wave security scans. Rather than using it for security screening as intended, the algorithm creates new images of imaginary people. This methodology of AI creates new images from random noise by continually updating and re-evaluating the imagery, at times breaking down, becoming confused and starting over – not unlike our global security apparatus.

Two Native American geoliths on the California/Arizona border and a NASA site in Arizona are scanned in 3D, rendered, and animated as flyovers as islands in deep space. An apocryphal story of an encounter between a Navaho tribal elder and the Apollo 11 astronauts is narrated by Desmond Bovey.

Screen images for “Geometries of the Sublime” transform the poetry of algorithmic pen & ink drawings into a poetry of architectural light.

(bpm production)

Glaciers are sentinels of climate change. They are the most visible evidence of global warming today. This series of works embodies the stunning beauty, rapid change, fragility, destructive power, and magnificence of glaciers. At the same time, they challenge the audience with the dramatic, irreversible ecological damages from climate change.

In Glacier’s Lament, we used data from glacier melting in the past 60 years to compose music and dance with local musicians who have witnessed the recession of the Mendenhall glacier over their lifetimes in Juneau, Alaska. Each note is one season in a year. In the winter, the glacier is frozen, so the pitch is low. In the summer, the melting rate rises, so the pitch is high. Towards the end, the melting overflows into spring and autumn, and the melting in the summer becomes faster. We filmed the artists performing the piece on the glacier, collaborating with the glacier’s own sounds.

There are four color cards in PANTONE for glacier blue. However, in real glaciers, this blue color is variable and dynamic. As glaciers are disappearing, this unique blue is also disappearing. We sampled and blended the blue color from glaciers in Alaska and hung them in recycled glass vials. When one glacier calving happened, one color vial fell down. At the end of the exhibition, all 60 vials fell down, forming a painting on the canvas beneath.

Through a networked camera placed overlooking Loch Faskally, Scotland for 2 years and programmed to record images a pixel a second, Glenlandia addresses the relationship between the natural and the man-made, and our perception of landscape and technology over time.

The project uses digital practices and processes to blur the lines between photography, data visualization, textile design, and computer science.

Fusion of the Possible, Topographie de l’art, April 15 – June 15

2023
Poly(methyl methacrylate) sculpture, LED, painting, engraving, video mapping, stereo sound.
Courtesy of l’Adagp

Executive production: Crossed Lab / Julien Taïb
Creation of the sphere: Rhizome association
Video design & production: Joan Giner
Motor development: Jean-Baptiste Guedon
Sound production: Marc Behrens.

I convey the natural order and regularity of forms in a landscape. In my computer generated plots the non-verbal signs: balance of line, color relationships and light can conceivably serve as an enlargement of the natural rhythms, patterns and repetitions that make the very essence of our aesthetic experience, as we contemplate the landscape.

I feel the regularity of shapes and events in nature can make a strong aesthetic stimulus for a viewer, which evokes an emotional response, because the viewer has the experience of correctness of the natural order. I feel that similar correctness of order causes an aesthetic experience while creating or contemplating abstract art: where the mode of the work be abstract expressionism, geometric abstraction, or computer art graphics.

Golem was a two channel video installation where the two monitors were arranged like the pages of an open book. The imagery was derived from medieval illuminated books so the overall effect was of an electronically illuminated manuscript. The work took as its theme the ancient Jewish myth of the Golem, a human-like creature created to do the bidding of its creator, the genesis of the Frankenstein story. The work deals with the issues around contemporary technologies such as Genetics and Artificial Intelligence.

Golem included a two channel video installation, structure, 24 framed prints and a 12 channel audio environment (audio by Hans Peter kuhn, featuring the voice of Marc Camille Chaimowicz).

Computer Graphics Research Group, Ohio State University: Student Work

The algorithmic project, Google Village (2012), was originally an AutoComplete clock to present various topics around the world. It utilized the Google AutoComplete feature to break its inherent limitation. Even though the AutoComplete words can manipulate users’ perspectives and activities on the Internet, they were reversely able to help users broaden their views by visiting another country’s Google website. However, in 2017, Google started showing users the same AutoComplete words based on their location regardless of a variety of countries’ Google sites. A new version of Google Village (2018) explores Google users’ isolation by AutoComplete words in the World Wide Web.

In Gradual Slip, a peristaltic pump drips water onto thermal electric cooling plates (TEC) to form mini “glaciers”. After a time of buildup the system shuts down and the plates role rapidly reverses. The plates heat up and the ice slides off onto a tray of dirt and seed. From this point the seeds grow into grass flourishing in the melt water or drying out in its absence. Here the natural element is coping with artificial stresses that are introduced by anthropomorphic forces. The natural environment has evolved into a system in equilibrium. In ecosystems there is a threshold, a limit where the system can no longer function when pushed beyond this boundary. Gradual slip acts as a model of a natural system, exploring this boundary, opening itself up for a dialogue around climate change.

At the SISEA Art Exhibition site Cindy Vermeulen’s Amiga-2000 animations were shown that formed her graduation work for Minerva Academy, the visual art department of the Groningen Polytechnic.

Shown are:
Zeven Spreekwoorden (Seven Proverbs):

I. Tegen de lamp lopen (literally ‘hit the lamp’; english equivalent ‘blow the box’)
II. Te veel hooi op de vork nemen (literally ‘taking too much hay on the pitch fork’; english equivalent ‘too much assets on my hands’)
III. Het hoofd boven water houden (‘keep the head above water’)
IV. Tegen het hoofd stoten (literally ‘hit somebody against the head’; english equivalent ‘breaking eggheads’)
V. Een klap van de molen (literally ‘a blow from the mill’; meaning ‘gone crazy’)
VI. Schoon schip (literally ‘clean ship’; english equivalent ‘cleaning house’)
VII. Jong geleerd oud gedaan (literally ‘learned young, practiced old’; english equivalent ‘catch them young’)

Short Animations:

Men & Women
Education
Men & Women 2
No title
Jealous
Commercial: Dancing
City
Depressing Manic
Heart beating buildings

Experience the excitement, glamour, fear, violence and mayhem of a genuine Middle Eastern battle!

Better yet, get your fat shooter-playing ass off the console and onto the revolutionary Borgcycle™, a sensor equipped bike that allows / forces users to get a heart-pounding workout while hunting down some baddies.

Mount the Borgcycle™ and suddenly you are riding through a 3D recreation of a desert city. Choose between the roles of an insurgent, an invader or an onlooker. Change sides if you feel the urge! Ride through the chaos and join in on the hunt for the main targets: George Bush, Tony Blair, Steven Harper, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il (among others).

Kick some lying white boy ass or take out some fascist terrorist woman haters! Your choice. Won’t it feel good to nail those bastards; and with the endorphins pumping hard on the Borgcycle™ you’ll experience the physical thrill of really being there.

Grand Theft Bicycle is coming to a venue near you. Prepare to ride your way to victory!

In Grass, Scrub, Woodland, still life is created with organic specimens gathered at the Seven Sisters National Park in Brighton, England; in Fauna, a still life that expands and contracts indefinitely. The works from the Seven Sisters Series National Park Series act as animated scanograms.

In this work, the subconscious problems of a daughter who rejects going school is observed by the function of C.G. Jung’s psychological concept, the Great Mother. The subconsciousness of the daughter is shown on the screen of the monitor in the scenes. When the daughter becomes violent, how does a personified great mother function?

I have several memorable images from early childhood. On the day of my 8^th birthday, I received a polaroid camera as a gift. I was overjoyed to be able to capture a permanent collection of memories and visual images. However, by the time I turned eight, I had already developed a clear sense of communication and language. The prospect of recording a pre-language form of vision had already dissolved.

In Metaphors on Vision, filmmaker Stan Brakhage states, “How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of “Green”? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?”. Looking back on my childhood, it seems impossible to access a comprehensive realization of “the untutored eye”.

In contrast, my son, Atticus, was born in 2018. At the age of one, he developed a recognizable curiosity for the mobile phone. His linguistic skills had not yet developed, yet he had a noticeable capacity for capturing photos and videos. Over the course of several months, he composed a large collection of still and motion images. Upon reviewing the visuals, the notion of an “untutored eye” began to emerge. Within these photographs, it became evident that Atticus had not yet conformed to the accepted laws of perspective or logic. In short, he was immersed in an adventure of perception.

Green before “Green” considers the relationship between technology and memory. It is an inquiry into the existence of childhood vision. Namely, to what extent does technology allow for the reconstruction of childhood memory? Furthermore, does photography provide insight into the evolution of pre-language vision?

Green Corn Dance is a real-time responsive animation in live performance. Six microphones, one for each musician, are connected to a computer rendering the visuals in real time. The sound of the performers trigger the rapid transitions between line drawings and appearance of film sequences, all of which are procedurally generated. Music composition by John Luther Adams (1974), performed by students in the OSU Percussion Ensemble. Riffe Center Capital Theater, April 3 & 4, 2015.  The documentation of the performance was included in the 360 Gallery at ISEA2016.

This is an 18-line poem that will be projected onto a sand dune (if outdoors), or on a wall (if indoors), with accompanying short video(s) adjacent (or nearby).

Live-link video-installation environment and 20′ performance

Parramatta Riverside and Alun Alun Kidul, Yogjakarta – 14th & 15th June 2013, College of Fine Arts and Alun Alun Kidul, Yogjakarta – 16th June 2013

Feeling peckish – and chatty? This intimate exchange between cultures and cities dishes up a live fusion of food, film and dance between Australia and Indonesia. A fleet of ‘gerobaks’ – traditional Indonesian food carts – is linked between Sydney and Yogyakarta (Central Java) through multi-channel video streaming, alongside in-cart video art and a multimedia dance environment. Exploring qualities of openness and connection, Grobak Padi centres upon a mode of relating that is open to life, to things both being themselves and belonging together. The gerobaks are the life-blood of Jogja’s streets, while images of the padi, or rice field, come to evoke a sense of gratitude, for appreciating the abundance we already have. Don’t miss this chance to share a meal, and more, with our closest neighbours!

Created by Michael Hornblow, Tony Yap and Agung Gunawan. Hornblow, Gunawan and Yap have been working together since 2008.

Choreographed and performed by Tony Yap and Agung Gunawan
Creative Director, Producer and Video Installation Artist: Michael Hornblow
Video Streaming Producer: Martin Renaud
Production Manager: Michelle O’Brien
Technical Director: Ian Andrews
Community Liaison and Online Media: Rully Zakariah
Indonesian Production Managers: Bimo Suryojati and Altiyanto Henryawan
Cooks: the Indonesian communities of Sydney and Yogyakarta
Produced and presented by 5 Foot Way, ISEA2013, Parramatta City Council, Metro Screen and Multicultural Arts Victoria

Exhibition. Centre Culturel Canadien, May 16 – 20

Gui, the Ghost is a graphic novel style text adventure survival game – combining various retro aesthetics such as vector graphics, ASCII art and pixel art – in which we play the role of the protagonist, Gui: a dead young woman, stuck in this world and who must overcome a series of challenges to cross over to the afterlife. As players investigate what happened to her, and collect memories of her “past life”, Gui unlocks new abilities by becoming more and more transparent until she can finally disappear forever.

Inspired by Korean folklore “Cheo-Nyeo Gui Shin (처녀귀 신)” – which literally translates to “virgin woman ghost” – the game’s narrative features this specter caught in purgatory and unable to enter heaven or hell, because of this burden related to her tragic death. Some Korean scholars argue that this figure has remained famous because of its roots in a misogynistic culture. It can also be seen as a parallel to witches in the folklore of Western cultures. Gui, the Ghost allows us to revisit this story with a feminist perspective in order to help rewrite the future.

Created as part of a perte de signal residency.

An interactive story box, Hafth Al’a-Almswadih Da’iman (always keep the negative clean) is a video object designed by the artist to share a collection of repurposed family negatives. Where the viewer’s get the chance to animate chapters of her past and bring them to life through a hands on experience directed by them.

The interactive installation Happy Go Lucky demonstrates how specific, immediate and intimate medial manipulation can be, by influencing how people _feel_.

Hard Disk Paper Series is an initiative to safeguard against magnetic attacks of all kinds, a reflection on the fragility of our digital civilization.

Excerpt from the immersive and musical film of the piece “Harmonielehre” by American composer John Adams, performed by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kent Nagano.

Exhibition at 36 degrés and Galerie Charlot, June 6 – 18

Generative & Interactive Sound Installation
400 x 160 x 180 centimeters

Connected to sensors making it possible to broaden the threshold of human perception, the receiver of a needle telegraph reacts to variations drawn from its immediate environment. This approach consists of training artificial intelligence to analyze imperceptible phenomena – the evolution of electromagnetic waves present in space in different forms – in order to detect meaning: words, words, sentences, etc.

Sitting in front of this device, the spectator is first invited to listen to the sound produced by this strange machine, which transposes the flow studied by the neural network into audible frequencies: a sort of fluctuating white noise, whose modulations sometimes resemble to the formants of the voice. When occurrences are found by the voice recognition program, the telegraph activates to transmit these messages from the invisible – whether they are understandable or not. All machine activity is recorded in a logbook which traces the history of the information deciphered by the neural network.

Thanks to a capture system which filters the audio signal to isolate the dominant frequencies, the visitor can interact with the work and contribute their presence in this quest for something beyond – a way of paying attention on what normally escapes.

If we seem prisoners of the illusion of a single world, this installation attempts to reveal the imagination of other possible worlds, parallel or underlying this one, by relying on the technological promises of the future to propose a new reading of the present.

Design and Production: Véronique Béland
Computer Programming – Sound Processing & Interactivity: Alexandre Burton
Computer Programming – Deep Learning: Léo Dubus
Design Sensors & Telegraph Mechanization: FabLab Les Usines
Drawing Scenography Plans: Sophie Laroche
Scenography Coordination: FabLab Factories
Ironwork: Strukenfer

Heart Band is an interactive sound installation in which twelve painted hand drums are activated by the motion of visitors. Each drum has a heart beat sound that increases in intensity and volume the closer the participant gets. Ideally, the drums would be played as an instrument by dancers.

xhibition. Galerie Charlot ,Paris, April 6 – June 17

It is in search of a treasure that my gaze wanders along the lines, spinning along the walls, sliding on the ridges, on the summits, crossing the woods hanging from the cliffs, sliding on the peaks studded with rocks collapsed. My eyes and my camera make a fortune out trifles that accumulate in my heart. Slowly, without thinking, without desiring, they forget and discover a wonderful adventure in life.

The harmony of a celestial land, vibrant and alive, where the waters of the oceans shine noiselessly with millions of blues, where the forests are free of their colors, where the mountains are coated in white, where the opalescent glaciers descend into the valleys and where the plumes of birds have the sky on their side, nourishes the dream of a world that we are exhausting.

If my images sing however, it is because the romanticism of our prospects of bankruptcy enchants the vertigo of our steps. But it is not this imbalance that I want to point out.

If the mountains rise so high in our memories, it is because since the dawn of our times they have been a luminous world, the world of a magical world above, a little closer to the stars, which points towards the infinity of the universe.

These images lead us to see fully from the depths of the heart, in the freedom of an unconditional gaze where each blink of the eye seems to reveal to us the essence of our existence, the source of all life.

The Hekateris Dance is a playful interactive Augmented Reality Artwork to prompt audiences to imagine how humans may evolve in the distant future as we are impacted by climate change. Artist Charlotte Gould uses speculative fictioning in her artwork to develop 3D animated future beings using Augmented Reality. Having downloaded the Adobe Aero Applicationand scanning a QR codedancing avatars can be viewed through a mobile phone and participants can join in to see each other dancing with the characters. While the avatars dance in a contemporary stylethe artwork references the Hekateris danceborrowed from Greek mythology as a celebration of nature. The project draws on the past and presentthrough mythology and natureto imagine what we may be in the process of becoming for survival on a planet impacted by climate crisis. The artwork aims to celebrate the natural world beyond the human and to foster hope through discussion on tangible actions that can contribute to a solution to reduce global warming.

This film imagines the concept of personal computer quite literally as possessing life-like qualities of human companions, by embedding a human being inside one.

Discover glitch and lack of data on Google Maps, between digital error and social rules of representation.

In the United States “precision farming” is the term used to describe the processes of using technologies and sensors to gather data to target resources to crop production. These technologies are tools understand, monitor, and control organic systems. Johnny DiBlasi’s work is an ongoing inquiry into these invisible data structures within the landscape. He creates public interfaces where all these various inputs—specifically data signals, the public, and the broader ecology—are connected, and a tension with and awareness of the invisible digital architecture is explored through the public’s experience.

hidden layer is a site-specific and interactive installation that utilizes sensors to gather data from various spaces both in the natural environment and the constructed urban spaces around the site of the artwork. Various biosensors are setup within the space that capture organic and environmental information and transcode this data into physical form and light. This data will drive the representation of a large physical grid or mesh comprised of strands of light emitting diodes while live sound waves create a sonic representation at the site. Codec explores how can this bio-data can be captured and its potential to generate a new interactive aesthetic experience of the local ecosystems.

A (magnified) photograph of cherries, video images projected on semi-transparent screen, noises of ice, and the smell of oranges are all in the same room. The atmosphere of the room stimulates our five senses and reminds us of the senses of ambiguity and frustration in our daily life,

Created via fusing aspects of spatial sound, sculptural form, and interactive methods, HIVE is an interactive art installation that explores the notion of sentience and agency in the sonic medium. It is argued that species evolve to establish and maintain their own vocal bandwidth, so that their voices are not masked by other sounds. In other words, sonic spectrum is partitioned in a given biome and each bandwidth is claimed by a certain species as their vocal territory. Many species rely on these territories for mating or survival. Today, human generated noise dominates the sonic spectrum of many ecosystems, even those we consider untouched by our activities. And yet, there is very little research or policy efforts on this, especially compared to other (non-acoustic) types of destruction of the environment.

In reaction to this, our inquiry started with the question, can we conceive of an organism that exists in a purely acoustic umwelt? An organism whose only way of sensing, observing, reacting, and communicating with the world is through sound. An organism with a body whose morphology is based on picking up and sending sound signals. A pseudo ‘being’ who can learn from its environment and evolve in its response.

Hongshan Experiment II: Celestial, is a multi-channel interactive video installation. Its creative process aimed to draw a visceral artery between deep time mining of archeology and surfaced evidence on climate change using meteorological data, 3D reconstruction of Hongshan excavation site and planetary database.

Hongshan Experiment focuses on the coupling of scientific data visualization and artistic world-building to experiment with the equilibrium between human and non-human; culture and nature; past and future. Curiosity and concern around archeology, environmental science and astrophysics were raised by audiovisual abstraction, translation and generation. As the second iteration of Hongshan Experiment I: a Possible Outcome, HE II: Celestial takes a space voyage in search of the “outcome” through computer vision.

The animation adopted the rich affinity with carbon allotropes. Radiocarbon gives a time tag to archeological diggings. Carbon footprint helps people understand the impact of personal behaviour on global warming. As an essential building block of living beings on Earth, carbon represents human’s signature in communication with possible extraterrestrial intelligence. Energy transformation was also articulated by a customized shader simulating the ice melting and freezing.

HOP ON played with the ideas for a participative design of future public transport and cultural place making in Durban. During a public intervention at the „wreck“ of “uShaka Marine World Durban” by the PS2-Team, the HOP ON Team: Sibonelo Hlanganani Gumede, Researcher at “Urban Futures Centre DUT” and Paul Jones, Director at consulting agency “Lumec”, and “Elektro Moon Vision”, visitors could get an insight into the people´s need of a new bus system and HOP ON’s research for a participatory re-design of the Durban public transport system that is thwarted by corrupt taxi businesses. For HOP ON participative urban development means also to create culturally public spaces out of non-spaces and to link the different parts by public transport – the HOP ON bus shuttle system – mobility for all people in Durban.

Hope to See was conceived form a desire to engage creatively with graffiti produced by the Tanzanian stowaway community in Durban. Finding their way to Durban is but a leg of their journey, in large their intended destinations vary and boil down to chance and experience. The basic premise of a stowaway − in these cases− is to leave Africa via a perilous journey of stowing away on commercial shipping vessels in the security lax ports of South Africa. The stowaway graffiti stands as a public showing of their stories, records, an indelible mix of; desperation, adventure, aspirational drive and existential change. The lives of the stowaways can easily be amassed within the simplistic brackets of illegality, promoting a negation of a shared human identity. This defining tar brush of othering runs the risk of perpetuating positions of domination and subordination. A reality already pervasively entrenched within a city rapidly reconfiguring itself to the momentous influx of African migrants and its gradual shift toward a decolonized space. In an attempt to counter these inherent pitfalls whilst not discarding the need to actively tell snippets of the stowaway stories, the artistic project Hope to see envisages utilizing the creolized nature of Warwick Junctions markets by amalgamating naturalized crafted products and elements of stowaway graffiti already present in the market spaces.

This AR Styly platform leads to my interactive version of ‘How to Knit a Human’ online.‘How to Knit a Human – the Interactive Version’ was created with choice-based digital storytelling, through the Twine platform. The creative process for the interactive version began with my adaptation of my memoir manuscript. As I developed this piece of electronic literature, I incorporated the visual along with the text, creating my own animations, drawings, and scans for an immersive experience. The reader can engage in these parts of my story and actively participate in the losing and regaining of agency through my narrative perspective, to gain a better understanding of my experience. As a result, this work could also benefit mental health professionals as an important resource, to empathise with one example of a patient’s journey through the psychiatric hospital system. Through the digital form, I allowed my experience to travel beyond what a traditional text can do by utilising multiple choices that link to different alternatives and possibilities that exist in my memory. By taking power in my own valuable lived experience, I aim to reduce the stigma in wider society, and institutions. My memoir ‘How to Knit a Human’ was published with NewSouth Publishing in 2024.

Each bottle contains Kasia’s tears and North-Sea algae accompanied by a date, a reason for crying and the name of hosted algae. There is a log of her diet from the period of the research, accompanied by a log of presence of chemical elements (N, P, K) important for healthy growth of algae. These elements can be regulated by diet. The artist wanted to know how she could use her bodily waste to care for the environment, which we have destroyed? The main question she posed here was: “Can I look after my physical and mental health in order to be of “use” to other life forms? Or can environmental health be an indicator of our own health?”

From Winter of 2019 until recently Kasia has been collecting her tears – first when she cried after losing 3 loved ones in the Autumn 2019. Then, with the start of COVID-19 she “trained herself” to cry in order to relieve her anxiety. This led to her exploring the chemical composition of human tears to see how they could make a healthy tiny marine ecosystem. To use her own tears to host a sea life became a form of catharsis and a constructive way to deal with personal and also then environmental loss

As Yeats asked his readers to tread softly on his dreams, Walton perhaps prompts participants in her interactive projections to consider the weight of their footfalls upon the earth. In this work the contours of an urban laneway are repurposed as a canvas for a series of vibrantly animated interactive projections, creating a paradise of verdant growth. Flowering vines twine up pipes and moss and ferns spread across walls, while vividly coloured butterflies alight on window ledges. Echoing ages before human habitation, this scene entices viewers to move closer – only to see the new life wither and slowly die, destroyed by the human presence. The habitat is renewed once more in a riot of foliage and motion as viewers move away. Tread softly …
In collaboration with animator Tobias Edwards and software developer Jayson Haebich.

‘Human Effect‘ presented by Vivid Sydney as part of Experimenta Speak to Me and ISEA2013.
Sydney will once again be transformed into a spectacular canvas of light, music and ideas when Vivid Sydney takes over the city after dark from 24th May – 10th June 2013. Vivid Sydney will colour the city with creativity and inspiration, featuring the breathtaking immersive lighting of the iconic Sydney Opera House sails, performances from local and international musicians at Live LIVE, and a free large scale multimedia outdoor exhibition of interactive light sculptures and building projections around the harbour precinct.

Humming Mississippi is an interactive sculpture, sonification, and visualization of the Mississippi River.

Fusion of the Possible, Topographie de l’art, April 15 – June 15

NFT

Created with DALL.E based on the prompt: “albertine meunier is eating sausages and chips”. Images chosen with the sharp eyes of Albertine. Target: 1001 tokens.

Exhibition. Forum des Images, May 16 – 21

With ISEA2023 selected artist Vidya-Kelie Juganaikloo

The work takes the form of a visual search engine, and is naturally introduced into mobile phones by inviting habitual practice. The hypercodex.org is an invitation to engagement, an action is needed to implant blues cells in a codex of knowledge moving organically in real time.

It is about feeding the hypercodex.org platform with artists/ philosophers/ politicians/ researchers/ actors who share their resources as well as visitors with their references.

Hypercodex.org proposes to use lines of code for a collective gesture, to give voice to heterogeneity, and the possibility to inscribe on this map, its url(s) to link them to others.
No hierarchy, no subscription, just benevolence and sharing.

This gesture, which today seems completely senseless, is a performance, the artist opens his server without protecting himself; with confidence and generosity.

“The infinite overflows the thought that thinks it” – Emmanuel Lévinas

What stories could the objects tell if they had their own voice to do so?
How would they narrate the human footprint and all the exhaustion, what would they say about our urgency to invent ways to inhabit the future? HYPER_D is an immersive experience habitable in the present and in the near future, where the user experiences a trip to the spatial excess of objects, the artificial and natural magnitude of our world and the invisible border that exists between them, which forces us to feel through the scale and speculation of some hyper-objects, which for now occupy such a disproportionate spatial phase that it makes them invisible to humans.

My project, departing from a rather whimsical and satirical position, addresses techno-utopian and accelerationist views on computational progress that often picture new technologies such as machine learning as sustainable panacea to social and fundamental challenges of our civilization.
The space-themed environment depicts Earth-like planets in a state of distress, as they are being consumed by infernal aurora borealis. Simultaneously, a plague mask entity, a metaphorical Atlas, protected by its mask, is frantically trying to keep it in balance. Each agent has been trained separately to achieve a different degree of proficiency, illustrating various success rates in real-life. Consequently, some of the agents fail the task, while others succeed. The artwork highlights both the indifference of the ML agents towards their success or failure e.g. keeping the Earth’s homeostasis in literal and metaphorical balance, as well as points out possible results of delegating the agency over tackling “the unsolvable” problems on computational autonomous beings. Ironically, even if such solutions can be found by artificial intelligence, there will be no going back, and we will have to rely on its agency for us to survive. The artwork illustrates in a humorous manner that as soon as the proverbial plug on AI is removed, we could be doomed. This might position humankind in Dave’s position (2001: A Space Odyssey) and autonomous systems in a “too big to fail” role. The use of Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra” as soundtrack for the spectacle that also appeared in the mentioned movie, aims to reinforce these connotations.

For ISEA 2024, I designed a customized version of the artwork that adheres to unique affordances of Styly. Specifically, I created an environment that serves as an “extended reality” platform that offers an ambiance and feel and look characteristic of the original work that is displayed on three virtual screens.

I am Echoborg is a challenging, thought-provoking participatory online show created afresh each time by an audience in conversation with an artificial intelligence. This is a pioneering, innovative use of AI as a tool to deliver genuine audience agency in the creation of an experiential exploration of the impacts of automation on what it is to be human. I am Echoborg provokes audiences; it opens up a lot of questions.

Since 2016, experienced interactive dramatist, Rik Lander and conversational systems designer Phil D. Hall have been developing a conversational system for the show that gives a very strong impression of sentience. It is designed, for example, to be able to have in depth conversations about subjects such as consciousness, the climate crisis and emotions. Human beings are highly prone to project “theory of mind”; to attribute mental states – beliefs, intents, desires, emotions, knowledge, etc – on to entities that we encounter. Perhaps it is not necessary to build an AI with sentience when it is enough to build an elegantly and deviously designed pattern matching engine which people project as self-aware. A human weakness is that we see sentience where it is not.

Fusion of the Possible, Topographie de l’art, April 15 – June 15

Algorithmic video installation
Screen: 0.95 x 1.70 m (with computer)
Production credit for video software: Claude Micheli
Courtesy of the artist and Adagp, Paris.

Merging and confronting AI generated human faces with real ones. For this installation, Pascal Dombis collected thousands of images of faces, half belonging to real humans, the other half being generated by artificial intelligence. From this base of faces, he develops an algorithmic distribution system which mixes these images randomly by juxtaposing them, blending them into one another, hybridizing them, while producing flickers and glitches. This infinite video stream, without any beginning or any end, is projected on 3 vertical screens and questions the relationship between man and machine.
[Translated from french by Google Translate]

An interactive image/sound installation by Tamiko Thiel (image) and Christoph Reiserer (sound), 2016. Give us your face, and we will transform it into a personal music composition and cubist video portrait. A multi-media portrait for the Selfie Generation.

We are living in the age of science fictional world and instability now!
Audience type in their name (* Audience will automatically generate an avatar with their name and time, then exists in virtual Hong Kong. Even the audience quits the experience, the avatar will stay there), then put on their virtual reality goggle to experience the re-created slow self-destructing meta-Hong Kong cityscape, together with all of the other accumulated virtual audience who experienced it in a different time.
They are experimenting with the idea of Hong Kong disappearing cityscape, collective memory, virtual identity, multi-verse and non-linear social interaction by interactive VR technology. And they are using the game engine, to create the immersive real-time experience. Gaming is always positioned as a sub-culture or virtual/ fake reality, in contrast to our so-called “reality” that we live in. But now, everything is gamification. Avatar or idealization has become everyone’s daily practice. They social and interact with everything, while at the same time we have isolated ourselves even more in comparing to our parent’s time.
Visitors share a similar experience, while they participate and interact together at different time spot. They hear the recorded sound from the location now, but they see and experience the space and time by a reconstructed reality, and their mind will at the same time connect with their own memory and emotion attachment to the particular space & time of the event. Gaming is no more just a sub-culture or an individual experience. There is no clean cut between gaming and reality. We are living in a more complicated social environment now. In the age of digital humanism, social isolation and interaction is a hybrid concept now. There is no more separation between real or fake, reality or virtual reality, everything is a hyper-reality! Everything is an In-between!

Hacnum Exhibition. various locations, May 16 – 21
Fusion of the Possible, Topographie de l’art, April 15 – June15

Take a few minutes, lie down, close your eyes. Breathe deeply, relax your muscles, and let yourself merge with the mattress… The sounds around you fade away, and images appear under your eyelids. You feel yourself being gently carried away to another reality as you fall asleep; a journey begins.

It is no secret that dreams, in all their aspects, have always been a mystery. Neuroscientists are still learning about it, while philosophers are questioning the boundaries of reality. On a personal level, they can even influence our decisions. The dream is the most intimate thing we have and yet it is so limited in terms of knowledge; Marion Roche is fascinated by this paradox. She sees the opportunity here to take an artistic approach and establish a dialogue between art and science; her project “Je viens de te voir en rêve” (I just saw you in dream) is a sculptural experiment with a touch of 4D technology.

Artist, researcher and philosopher, Marion is interested in the notion of process. Sculpture is her predominant practice, but she finds it increasingly difficult to focus on fixed forms. She has been working on the idea of “becoming” for some time now, but it is the new formula of the MAIF prize for sculpture that catches her attention; Since 2020, candidates are asked to take on a new technology that they have not mastered. She takes up the challenge; her sculpture will not only be in motion, but also in the process of becoming.

Things get tricky when she has to find a technique that meets her criteria. Then she remembers an anecdote about glass: To the touch, it feels solid, but on a microscopic scale, the atoms are not fixed, just like in a liquid state. Inspired by this astonishing fact, she starts looking for the existence of similar materials and ends up discovering an experimental process that is similar to this phenomenon: 4D printing.

We already know how 3D printing works: it consists of stacking layers of material successively until a volume is created. 4D adds a temporal dimension to the 3D printed object. An object can then react over time according to external factors, such as humidity or temperature, and will therefore be mobile.

And it is precisely in Lyon, Marion’s home city, that one of the few research centres for 4D in the world is located; the 3d.FAB. They specialise in medical research, for example by creating autonomous heart valves that react to heat.

Marion is very pleased with this technique, as it fits perfectly with her philosophy and subject. She presents her idea to one of the scientists of the Neuroscience Research Centre of Lyon, and starts her journey to the realm of dreams. They are produced by a ballet of neuronal connections, which puts our brain in a state of ebullition; our body remains inactive, hence the notion of “REM sleep” (Rapid Eye Movement). And it is by looking at the intensity of the electrical activity of our brain that scientists can determine when we are dreaming.

Together, they established a protocol: Marion would sleep for a given time, her dream would be transcribed into an electroencephalogram (or EEG) and described immediately upon waking, to produce a 2D vision of it. She will take five naps in total.

Once these elements are in hand, Marion works with Benjamin Petit at the LTBL studio (of which she is herself the artistic director) on the design of the 3D object, whose form corresponds to the activity of the dream, stratified in time.

The creation then goes through the 3d.FAB, where Marion collaborates with a post-doctoral researcher to find the ideal combination of materials; she imposes aesthetic choices such as transparency or rigidity for example.

And this is what we should see when the project comes to an end: a visualisation of the artist’s dreams. The forged aluminium base takes the form of a tree trunk, but in fact represents a neuron, which supports five structures, the five dreams. Each one has an inscription that evokes the dream at its origin. They open and close according to one factor: hydration.

Fusion of the Possible, Topographie de l’art, April 15 – June 15

Let me relax you by touching works of art convokes ASMR in order to experiment with post-internet artworks from the point of view of their manipulation and their power of relaxation. Caroline Delieutraz have entrusted works – hers and those of several artists – to Behind the Moons, the pseudonym of an ASMR artist who shares their videos with a large online community. Using different techniques specific to this practice, they explore their soothing potential.

By hijacking the classic prohibition of “touching artworks”, Let me relax you by touching works of art is a reaction to the anxiety-provoking context of the pandemic and the closing of exhibitions. The project plays with the constraints imposed by the current situation and puts the body and physical sensations back at the heart of the art experience in a way that is as strange as it is new.

Artists and works presented in the video:
Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Return of the Broken Screens, 2015
Gwendal Coulon, I lose followers everyday, ongoing series
Caroline Delieutraz in collaboration with Vincent Kimyon, Trolls Just Want To Have Fun, 2020
Carin Klonowski, HS, 2020 – ongoing
Fabien Mousse, artist created by Raphaël Bastide, Real Internet Art, 2012
Claire Williams, Spectrograms (50°36’35.7″N 3°23’34.3″E), since 2014

In collaboration with Behind The Moons A production by Studio 13/16 – Centre Pompidou Courtesy of gallery 22.48 m2

No statement available.

I Sit Inside You Crying transforms images from a domestic environment into three-dimensional glitch artifacts. Images of a house in Sydney are refracted and simplified until they become abstract structures. The work explores how we make meaning in a contemporary mediascape awash with imaging platforms and their inherent glitches.

Digital archiving strives to compensate for the rapid decay or obsolescence of digital platforms, material substrates, and displays on which these works depend. Digital materials seem to have a shorter half-life than even the unstable materials used in the early eras of film-making. This condition raises key ontological and epistemological questions: What is the essence of a work? What is permanence? What is solid? How must we rethink these notions when our works are inherently fluid — when they even melt into air?

This project engages with these problems by replaying an early work of cinema on a broken contemporary device. The project consists of eight sequences from Fritz Lang’s 1931 film “M”. The series begins with “Index”, a sequence shot in Berlin’s police archives, where a fingerprint provides the first clue in the hunt for a killer. Through subsequent sequences “The Hand”, “The Hunt”, “The Cell”, “Protokoll”, “The Stairs”, “Before the Judge”, and “Cower”, the film offers a meditation on the tension between our attempts to capture, protect, preserve and place before the law on the one hand – and on the other, to escape, to elude logos.

These sequences were filmed from a malfunctioning computer monitor; the malfunction superimposed successive frames of the footage, blurring or dissolving anything which moves. The malfunctioning screen thus renders two distinct architectures: that of the moving body, fluid; and that of its spatial and material frame, super-solid.

“M”, like most of Lang’s films, is known for its use of architecture. The project translates Lang’s use of architecture, which intentionally located that medium in relation to the medium of film, into a new dissolving or reworking of architectures provoked by contemporary conditions of media, existing somewhere between digital and analogue materialities.

In considering various questions embodying the possible, we find resonance. “How to fight climate crisis and global warming?” Performance of this work serves as a time-based contemplation. It provides a space to consider how to slow, stabilize, or even reverse the effects of human behavior on climate conditions and the consequences. As the work represents shifting states of water and the language we use to name natural phenomena, we are asked to consider the interdependence of our actions to the conditions of nature as nature ourselves.
How might we relate with nature in order to transform our world so as to support continuance of its inhabitability? In relation to the witnessed realities of climate change, foregrounding “the possible unfinished real in front of us” as distinct from fostering ingrained doubt or disbelief, the work encourages the perception of current environmental challenges through rigorously focused consciousness, awareness, and iconography. Put more directly: if we don’t change we will perish; if we don’t pay attention, we’re doomed!

Considering our current circumstances,the possibleoffers an opportunity to cultivate an understanding of data-driven scientific approaches only if we sensitize ourselves to the consequences. Forced human migration, plant and animal displacement, extinction, and cultural collapse are realities we face. Data and persuasive writing may inspire intellectual engagement and artistic production, or else, at the other end of the spectrum, bring into question what many (most?) witness and experience to be normative.

The creation and performance of this work foregrounds both aesthetic and lived observation with an openness to experiential understanding. It attempts to untether us from strictly data-driven arguments, from stubborn political and contrarian opining, from self-defeating impossibility thinking, to a positive possible we can embrace.

Polar ice is the most visible yet inaccessible indicator of climate change. The effects of climate change visible in Greenland are a prelude, a four-dimensional window into deep time. The “Ice-Time” cine-installation is a poetic response to the accelerating changes we are observing in Earth’s ecosystem, investigating environmental deep time using polar ice as a unique window onto ecosophic issues of climate change. The immersive, multi-projection video and audio mediascape acts as an architecture of spatiotemporal experience, engaging the body and memory in a somatic montage – in the decoding of a tangible, spatial poem.

Glaciers are crystal tesseracts that contained the time axis of earth’s climatological history. “Ice-Time” occupies a hexagonal architecture echoing the structure of both water crystals and tesseract shadows in three-space. The ambisonic audio occupies the space as a sonic matrix of possibilities – a glacier-like, fluid landscape that changes with the listener’s attention, position, and trajectory. Through a vivid, material presence of image, sound, data, and time, the immersive installation establishes an embodied, dynamic interaction of form and content. The “Ice-Time” mediascape allows the beholder a sentient, intrinsic experience of the environmental implications of polar ice and the essential role ice plays in anthropogenic climate change.

Combining vintage aesthetics with modern flair, each piece offers a unique exploration of this captivating theme. Vibrant colors and creative typography breathe life into minimalist compositions, while After Effects animations add depth and dimension. Embrace a journey where the past meets the present in a symphony of creativity and innovation.

Exhibition. Centre Culturel Canadien, May 16 – 20

The work entitled If U Seek Amy is a role-playing game (RPG) that explores the duality between a pop star’s public persona and her private life, the overlap between the two, and the steps taken to keep them separate. The project also explores the fascination of a young queer person – namely the one who created this game – with this star and questions the boundary between sincerity and performance in this admiration. The two protagonists live a quest for identity each in their own way through what they project voluntarily or not, what is said about them, what they internalize from the perception of others and what they reject.

A true tribute to Britney Spears, this game explores with a touch of humor the different ways in which she has integrated the popular consciousness, whether through memes, unusual remixes of her songs, the legends she generates or her most famous quotes. In this way, the work reveals how people reappropriate an icon to address the special and one-way bond between a celebrity and her fans.

A simple gesture of hand clapping – flickering big and small on the ICC building – creates a mechanical texture of light and is accompanied by sounds of both clapping hands and electronic beats. In the age of overflowing electronic gadgets and sophisticated technologies, even a straightforward expression becomes overcomplicated. All the same, we still become enraptured in the glowing moments of the city and lights.

14 sec towards carbon neutrality or the point of no return With this new series, Diane Drubay plays with colour-psychology to create an immersion that is both fascinating and shattering. She takes the viewer into an idealized vision of a world where interference colours cover the sky, creating a subjugating sense of calm. In this piece, seconds become years. Gradually this mesmerizing world is being transformed into a darker, but equally fascinating vision.

14 seconds to experience the metamorphosis of utopia into dystopia. 14 years to reach carbon neutrality or the point of no return. Her speculative visions are drawn by the aesthetics of social science fiction literature and current climate science discoveries. She advocates for optimistic images interpreting shocking stories of possible futures.

No statement available.

Imaginary Sunset is an AI-generated video that investigates how technology interprets collective memory experience. The machine learning model generates a set of fictional landscape pictures using a dataset of sunset and dusk photographs taken by individuals around the globe on social media platforms in 2020. It explored how artificial intelligence is being used to interrogate between reality and fake and is supposed to recreate memories about the pandemic lockdown from a machinery perspective. The dusk landscape is a typical and commonplace photographic subject. Even so, in the midst of the worldwide pandemic, it takes on a significance that cuts over cultural and political boundaries, as though as a symbol of humanity observing the times.

This project utilizes visualization and sonification of portions of an enormous historical CBC Newsworld data corpus to enable an ‘on this day’ experience for viewers.

This project utilizes visualization and sonification of portions of an enormous historical CBC Newsworld data corpus to enable an ‘on this day’ experience for viewers.

Host imatges. Parasitology of vision and other symbiosis studies artificial vision and its nature of parasite of images. If until recently images were opaque to data extraction, artificial vision tools break down that resistance and operate today behind any image that circulates in a digital environment. We could say that images have increased its thickness; what a camera captures is no longer just an image but also the starting point of all kind of processes that adhere to it to extract their nourishment. Host imatges show these processes by laminating their operation layer by layer and leaving visible only what they extract.

A series of video recordings of an urban environment have been processed with four artificial neural networks –devoted to different tasks: object recognition, segmentation, pose detection and depth inference– isolating the graphic output of each of them. The installation show these images running in sync. Their sum does not reconstruct the original image but only discrete aspects of it –which elements are considered important and which are not is the basis at the design of these tools–. The set of screens allows us to see each of these processes separately, as a first step to ask ourselves about their operations and uses.

Made within the Immaterial 2021 call of Tabakalera – Medialab (Donostia)

iMine was created to help all of us come to terms with the dark material reality brooding behind the luminous utopianism of the digital age. Through a networked game interface, users are brought into the world of mining raw materials for electronic components.

Exhibition, Interactive installation, Forum des images, May 18-21

Designed as an interactive installation, Immaterial Display immerses its visitors in a multi-layered journey that expands on their own actions and is therefore always unique. The spectator is therefore not only an observer, but also an actor who delves into a digital experience of which they have full control. It grants them the ability to roam through space, select, and approach the numerous exhibited objects in two fundamentally different digital models of two past landmark exhibitions: Les Immatériaux (1985, Centre Pompidou, Paris) and Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (2002, ZKM).

The exhibition models were developed by research teams at the institutions where the shows were staged at. A digital model, being an interactive presentation of exhibition concepts, is a novel approach to the exploration of exhibition histories, as well as to the themes, curatorial methods, and engagement with representation and mediation these exhibitions brought about. These models are not “digital twins”, in other words virtual copies of past assemblages of artifacts and the surrounding architecture, but rather the digital transposition of the exhibitions in an experiential manner, in line with their curatorial concept, was set as a goal.

Generating an exhibition through an immaterial constellation on a digital display was previously explored by Jeffrey Shaw through his installation The Virtual Museum (1999), a vital reference for the current project. The Immaterial Display is comprised of a screen as display. The current installation is equipped with a “driver’s seat” – a term used by Shaw to describe a chair that comes with a hand-held controller in which an incorporated self-regulating joystick offers inclusive accessibility. In both mechanisms the system is intuitive and is able to detect front/back, left/right, up/down directions, offering a complete range of motion and visual perspective as a result.

The Immaterial Display establishes a connection between virtual and real space, linking the featured exhibition models, and their respective institution with its own scenography and the area where it is physically located. Moreover it interconnects the two exhibitions with one another, while at the same time bridging the gap across time, space and spheres.

Research team:
Corina Apostol (Tallinn Art Hall)
Philippe Bettinelli (Centre Pompidou)
Julie Champion (Centre Pompidou)
Adela Demetja (Tirana Art Lab)
Lily Díaz-Kommonen (Aalto University)
Felix Koberstein (ZKM | Karlsruhe)
Marcella Lista (Centre Pompidou)
Cvijeta Miljak (Aalto University)
Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás (ZKM | Karlsruhe)

Head of project: Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás (ZKM | Karlsruhe)
Technical management: Thomas Schwab
Display Design: Commonplace Studio
User Interface development: Matthias Heckel

On May 21, team members from Centre Pompidou, Paris and ZKM | Karlsruhe Philippe Bettinelli, Marcella Lista, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás and Marie Vicet will join a panel as part of the symposium program to talk about the exhibition Matter. Non-Matter. Anti-Matter. Past Exhibitions as Digital Experience.

Immemorial is a decolonial virtual environment interpreting my personal experiences growing up near and learning about Ipperwash Beach, Ontario Canada throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Ipperwash is a sacred site belonging to the Chippewas of Kettle and Stony Point First Nation. It is geologically significant in that it contains spherical rock formations known as kettles that seem to hover in the vast expanse of Lake Huron. In the early twentieth century, the area was appropriated by the Canadian government for use as a military base.

In 1997, a peaceful protest by members the local First Nations community became a tragedy when RCMP officers shot and killed one of the protesters, 38-year-old Dudley George. Ten years later, on December 20, 2007, the Ontario government turned over the land to the Chippewas of Kettle and Stony Point First Nation. The scale and enormity of violent injustice inflicted upon Indigenous peoples by White, colonial governments here and around the world will never be fully uncovered or understood.

The news reports and written accounts that shout with finality will be subsumed in the silence of this beautiful, complex place. It is a place that I can only interpret in this fragmentary, incomplete form: one of a constant present, and present simultaneity.

“Immersed” is a video installation specifically created for the Open Sky Project in Hong Kong. This project transforms the ICC LED Façade to a huge water tank where color inks create nice swirling patterns while they get mixed in the water. Audience may feel immersed and relaxed from the dynamic movements of water. We acknowledge immersion as a primary aesthetic phenomenon because the immersive experience is fundamental to our senses, realized through bodily interaction in its wholeness. Immersion in this project means that mind, body and environment interweave and communicate with each other through the technically mediated and illusionary space.

Impossible Evolutions uses generative machine learning models in the design of woven tapestries, which in turn unfold ways of thinking about the entanglements of human and machine intelligences. The project uses Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models to imagine iterations of endangered Australian butterflies and wildflowers. These ‘impossible’ machine-imagined evolutions gesture to the futures we face as biodiversity decreases: there will be no further generations or modulations of these species. The generated images are composed into three textile weavings of place, actual tapestries of the interconnected lives that generate each creature’s ecosystem. By reflecting on the interweaving of conditions that has disrupted each ecological niche, space is opened to think about unseen sensory worlds (Richmond Birdwing butterfly), symbiotic exchange (Bulloak Jewel butterfly) and stewardship (Sunshine Diuris orchid). Each story becomes a fabric both literal and metaphorical, with this ‘textillic thinking’ offering speculative vantage points for approaching the emerging relations between human and machine intelligences. This textillic thinking interweaves creativity, collaboration and care: conditions which are foregrounded in textile-making practices and disrupted in each creature’s ecological story.

In Search of Aztlan… is an intervention-based work that follows the artist as he explores the territory around his childhood home looking for an understanding of his Chicanx heritage and in doing so cracks a window into the US/MX border. By merging dashcam videos, along with audio recordings of radio signals, the work explores how borders, both physical and psychological, shape our individual and collective identities.

In silico et in situ proposes to take the art out of the gallery and into the environment by creating site-specific installations through the use of 3D scanning and printing technology. After manipulating the source material virtually (in silico) with 3D software, the sculptures are physically manifested through the use 3D printing in a variety of materials and then placed back into either nature or the urban environment (in situ), where the source material was harvested (3D scanned) or inspired from. As the pieces become publicly accessible they allow for a playful discovery of the work. The landscape is intricately linked with the artwork, converging in the creation of contemporary voxel sculptures. In silico et in situ fauna habitats (Pollinator waters, Spider Rings and Turtle platforms) are developed via 3D printing to co-exist as sculptures and fauna habitats.

This installation creates a gap in the goal-directed organization of the data world, allowing access to meta-space and offering an immersive meat-verse experience in real space.

There is an interrelation in everything in life and every dimension. This connectedness can be observed in living and non-living beings and our memories. The project “In the Gap of Data World” with its immersive installation will make the invisible tracks of these interrelations visible.

The research art project In the Gap was realized through workshops, in-depth interviews with mathematicians, and round tables with scientists to reveal the invisible workings of life and to develop new practices with an open relationship to today’s digitized technology, in collaboration with Seçkin Maden and Abel Korinsky.

This project relates to the main concepts of “order and organize.” We can observe the order in life, but organizing is a goal-directed approach. Neumann implied that “order lacks end-directedness, but organization is end-directed.” The way we use technological equipment is mainly for classifying and organizing, which is an end-directed approach. If we aim to realize enhanced experiences, we need an open relationship with technology that can create generative experiences. This can lead us to discover meta-space and experience the invisible aspects of life.

The project was aimed at opening a gap in the data world and creating new practices that integrate with the integrity of life.

While humans are dreaming, the physical human body exists, but does not ‘exist’ in our perception. Human consciousness constantly moves back and forth between the boundary. During this process, we experience surreal and random senses in the virtual space called a dream, and it symbolizes an aspect of unpredictable possibilities of humanity.
In the Gray is a Virtual Reality film that probes into the relationship between error and humanity in human dreams so that artificial intelligence can perfectly mimic mankind. The title ‘Gray’ symbolizes a variable area that cannot easily be dealt with in a world where black and white are clear-cut and that there are numerous random layers that exist between clarity and obscurity. This work depicts a conversation of artificial intelligence and a dreaming human being in the beginning, and it unravels the contemplation on ‘humanness’ that is illustrated through error and incompleteness in virtual reality.

This artwork was created with the support of ZER01NE.

In the Time of Clouds is a mixed-media installation that utilizes the networked “cloud” to explore our collective sensorial relationship to the sky. The project responds to a February 2019 Nature Geoscience article that speculates about rising carbon dioxide levels leading to a possible future without clouds. The project attempts to archive these ephemeral forms and document their influence on our collective imagination before they disappear from our atmosphere forever. Utilizing both social media discourse about clouds and live video streams from public observatory cameras, the project amalgamates linguistic and visual data, mining this data to create an atmospheric triptych of poetry, ice cream, and ceramics.

The installation is composed of three intertwined parts: Part I (The Observatories), a series of videos that combine algorithmically generated poems and livestreams from networked observatory webcams; Part II (Terracotta Clouds), a collection of handbuilt dessert wares based on unique cloud forms culled from the videos; and Part III (Cloud Ice Cream), an ice cream whose flavor profile is derived from social media discourse speculating about the taste of clouds, a “cloud ice cream”.

In Transition is mixed media installation based on slow motion footage captured in many different locations around the Earth.

The project was built around the idea of uncertainty. Both garments are activated by the spectator’s voice.

If the earth beneath our feet could speak … Incompatible Elements: version 02 re-presents the relationship between nature and culture by reconfiguring land as active rather than neutral, verbal rather than mute, and therefore able to comment directly on the impacts of climate change. Building on the long tradition of artists combining text and image to communicate ideas and concepts, poetic texts are digitally embedded into satellite images of landscapes in crisis. In each digital print and video these texts reveal themselves dynamically, growing out of the landscape in different ways, the text design and method of reveal reflecting the qualities of the landscape. The focus is the Asia-Pacific region, with texts sourced from local custodians or appropriate works of literature.

“Industrial Lichen” prompts attention to the impact of industrialization and environmental sustainability on human life through an immersive experience, a profound reflection on theecological changes between industrialization and nature. It provides a space for experimentation and reflection. The work invites the viewer to enter a virtual space where the viewer can observe and feel more deeply the concepts of time and environmental evolution conveyed by the work. And how we can live in harmony with nature in a rapidly evolving technological age. By providing an immersive environment at the STYLY platform, the interaction between the viewer and the art is enhanced. This approach emphasizes WebVR’s potential to deepen understanding of our role in advocating for the protection of the environment and sustainable development. In “Industrial Lichen”, WebVR makes it possible to deepen the connection with the viewer, encouraging them to think about the role of human beings in the natural world and how our actions have influenced the past, present, and future.

The future of the universe is uncertain, but there are many theories on how it may end. The history of mankind is very short and we are just a small chapter in the timespan of the world’s journey across time and space. Against the backdrop of this eternal flow of time towards our end, it is strangely comforting to know that our own human struggles on this pale blue dot are but small and temporary in the scale of the larger scheme of things. We are but specks of dust against the repeating cycles of creation and destruction.

Performance, Focus Québec Programme, Le Cube Garges, May 19-20

You are invited to live this human/ machine symbiosis by participating in this extraordinary robotic performance, Inferno, at Le Cube Gagres, executive producer of ISEA2023. Inferno is a participative robotic performance, an absolutely unique show. In this 75-minute involuntary choreography for 2 x 24 participants, the latter wear an exoskeleton that allows the artists to control their movements in synchronization with the music.

In addition to the 18 exoskeletons, electronic music and lighting, the version presented at the Focus Québec ISEA2023 is augmented, with the addition of video and robotic cameras. The result is a unique immersive experience that participants will not soon forget.

The specificity of the performance lies in the fact that the portable robotic structures or exoskeletons created by the artists are installed on the bodies of volunteers from the audience. The participants become an active part of the performance: sometimes they are free to move, sometimes they are in a position of partial or total submission, forced by the machines to act/react in a certain way.

Inferno takes its inspiration from the representation of the different levels of hell as described in Dante’s Inferno or the Singaporean Haw Par Villa’s Ten Courts of Hell (which is based on a Chinese Buddhist representation). In Inferno, the concept of “circles of hell” is mainly an artistic framework, a general working theme under which the different parts of the performance are grouped.

Focus Québec is presented with the support of the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications, the Ministère des Relations internationales et de la Francophonie as part of the Year of Franco-Quebec Innovation, under the auspices of the Délégation générale du Québec à Paris.

Infodemic is a neural network-generated video that questions the mediated narratives created by social media influencers and celebrities about the coronavirus. The speakers featured in the video are an amalgam of celebrities, influencers, politicians, and tech moguls that have contributed to the spread of misinformation about the coronavirus by amplifying rumors, repeating narratives that are contrary to those of official health agencies, or developing technologies that amplify untrue content.

The talking heads in Infodemic are generated using a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) that predicts the pixels for each frame of a video through an algorithmic process similar to those used by search engines and social media news feeds. Search and content recommendation algorithms that once promised to provide access to more information and enable the public to make well-informed decisions have actually made it more difficult to find accurate information on important and politically-charged topics. There is a disconnect between the optimistic Possibles promised by the technocratic elite and the dangers posed by a power structure that can hide behind proprietary algorithms and circumvent criticism due to a general public’s limited technological understanding.

The cGAN in Infodemic was trained on a corpora of multiple individuals simultaneously. The result is a talking head that morphs between different speakers or becomes a glitchy Frankensteinian hybrid of different people that contributed to the current infodemic speaking the words of academics, medical experts, or journalists that are correcting false narratives or explaining how misinformation is created and spread. The plastic, evolving, and unstable speakers in the video evoke the mutation of the coronavirus, the instability of truth, and the limits of knowledge.

Can data form a habitat for life? “Infranet” is a generative artwork–installed in three international cities since 2018–in which a population of artificial lifeforms with evolutionary neural networks thrive upon open geospatial data of the infrastructure of the host city as their sustenance and canvas. The found data grounds an unbounded, decentralized, open-ended, and unsupervised system in which non-human beings flourish by learning, discovering, communicating, self-governing, and evolving. Born curious, they form spatial networks through which associations spread in complex contagions.

Artificial Nature is a family of interactive artworks by Haru Ji & Graham Wakefield spanning fifty international exhibits since 2007. These installations invite humans to become part of biologically-inspired complex systems through immersive mixed reality, using computation to plunge deeply into what nature is and find our place within it.

Performance, La Muse en Circuit, Alfortville, May 17

Immersive performance with audio-reactive electronics, video and 3D
Annabelle Playe, Marc Siffert & Hugo Arcier, are ISEA2023 selected artists

Passages, crossings and metamorphoses weave the odyssey of InLAND | come back in broad day. These universes are explored live as a 3D video game in which we wander. This exploration is carried out on site or remotely with Discord gamer tool.

InLAND is a hybrid project between electronic lutherie, digital art and video game “let’s play”. The performance draws as much from the tools of creating games as from its abundant visual culture, creating a porosity between the two worlds. InLAND opens the doors to a meta universe, where artists explore the notions of passages, crossings and metamorphoses…
Annabelle Playe will be the guest of Laurent Vilarem for his program ‘Journal de la création’ (France Musique) on Sunday May 14 .

Annabelle Playe: concept, composition, live electronics, voices
Marc Siffert: composition, live electronics
Hugo Arcier: video of audio-generated sythetic 3D imagery
Estelle Bordaçarre: body work
Halory Georger: visual design
Dorota Kleszcz: costumes
Perrine Cado: lighting
Samuel Herbreteau: direction
Production : AnA Compagnie
Coproduction : Scènes Croisées de Lozère, Biennale NEMO, Ville de Mende

Focus Québec Exhibition. Forum des Images, May 16 – 21

Inscape, 2019
Print installation
Inscape is a single channel video mixing 3D animation and video synthesis. By an interplay between points of views, depth of fields and textures, new details are revealed, transforming the space into abstract compositions. Inspired by the paintings of Kay Sage, Inscape depicts a psychological landscape, where perspectives are constantly shifting.
Print installation, 115x172cm
​Installation is on loan from Galerie Charlot

Two years after the Tunnel Under the Atlantic was developed, the Paris – New Delhi Tunnel connected France and India, confronting historical references and languages. In 1995 and 1997, during the digging, a virtual director recorded and edited the process of humans connecting with humans, what MoBen included later under the concept of H2H interaction.

In 1995, when the Web was just emerging, Maurice Benayoun created a virtual underground world using images from the collection of French National Museums and the Museum of Civilizations, Quebec. The work took place simultaneously at the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal – linking the two cities in the world’s first virtual Tunnel Under the Atlantic. Images from the museum collections formed “cultural obstacles” that visitors had to dig through in Paris and Montreal respectively, led by nothing other than sound and music composed by Martin Matalon in order to meet each other.
Unlike the virtual reality technologies prior to this, which worked predominantly with predetermined, fixed virtual environments, the structure of the virtual tunnels are a formless mass of data and uninformed matter until the user makes certain decisions. The users are thus the pioneering navigators of a constellation of information points that shift based on their input. Benayoun had conceived of a society of intelligent virtual agents, each of whom facilitates the user to discover this virtual environment, while also producing artworks within this world. The team consists of:
• The Librarian: a content manager – draws up the images from the museum collections,
anticipating visitors’ desires.
• The Architect: facilitates the digging into these images to form the tunnels
• The Video Director: shoots and edits footage of the entire journey in real time
• The Photo Reporter: captures still shots of the tunnel digging and all the “galleries” created by the participants
• The Composer: composes music and manages the audio mixing in real time
Each agent evolves, improving their skills and changing their topics or their resources, learning alongside the participants.
In his 1995 review of the Tunnel Under the Atlantic published in Le Monde, Jean-Paul Fargier describes the experience of digging as, “indeed entering images. Not only in what they represent, but in their very fabric. Walking, discovering secret channels, curling up in their folds, being lost in their frames, watching them throb, and bouncing from one to the other like playing hopscotch in an infinite curve”.

The work,Tunnel Under the Atlantic is recognized as the:
· First intercontinental virtual reality installation;
· First virtual reality installation with real time dynamic
· architecture, and;
· First virtual video director;
· First virtual photo reporter;
· First virtual librarian using artificial intelligence;
· First virtual composer;
· First real time video meeting inside a virtual reality environment;
· First user centric content in a virtual reality environment.

It makes through the dream in which scribble and itself saw.

Original work of art: One Hundred Horses by Giuseppe Castiglione

Chinese panoramic scroll paintings were originally designed to be laid on a table and rolled from one end to the other. As a consequence the scroll’s iconographic narrative would gradually reveal itself as it passed beneath the viewer’s gaze. To reconstitute this manner of reading the over seven-meter long “One Hundred Horses” scroll, this interactive installation lets the viewer with handles with which to unroll a full size digital facsimile of the painting across a video screen mounted in a table.

Original work of art: Folding fan with painting by Giuseppe Castiglione and calligraphy by Zhang Ruoai

A 3D computer graphic representation of this fan is shown on a large video screen. It can be interactively folded and unfolded by the viewer by turning a knob mounted on a plynth in front of it.

Interactive Glowing Cube is an immersion experience of Emirati life stories written through Facets Short Stories.

Intersection*ology is an experimental stage piece and art installation-in-motion co-created and performed by artists Lori Hepner and Kendra Ross. The piece consists of lighting, image and video elements designed by Hepner in conjunction with musical compositions by Ross with their collaborative movement throughout. Working at the intersection between art, gender, race, and technology, Hepner & Ross use light, sound, movement, and image to situate memories of the feminine past and corporeality in the natural world into new, technologically mediated locations and spaces. The artists insert sonic and image-based queries at particular points in how they process women’s pasts into future technological landscapes of digital information. In doing so, Hepner & Ross explore how their physical, female selves are adapting, morphing, rejoicing and revolting to/in how they are perceived both physically and digitally, as their digital ecologies grow parallel to that of their physical ecologies in this new space.

Focusing on the Red Sea coral reefs during her artists-in-labs residency at the Integrated Ocean Processes Research Group at the Red Sea Research Center, Sandra Kühne explored ways to showcase different themes of interaction, balance and symbiosis through her art.

When you view fish in an aquarium, don’t you feel as though you were swimming yourself? There are times when we imagine the taste to be delicious. Empathise with the dolphins, and their bray as they fly above the water’s surface. People who watch the males (and females) in the tank have it in their hearts. The ocean. (This happens with fresh water, as well.) When the idea is expressed this thoroughly, the water in your heart erupts. Always remember, the sea is greater. People who think this way are already in the water tank. And the tank is in the ocean. Do you feel it? More or less.

InTouch Wearables is a set of wearables that consist of dresses and shoulder pieces that allow mother and child share remote touches through garments with ambient feedback. This was developed to explore how remote touches can convey emotion and help people stay connected between remote locations. This project was created based on the lead artist’s personal experience with her child. In InTouch Wearables, a parent can increase the vividness of her conversation with a child through contextualized touch, and the loved ones may enhance the affective tone of their communication using a remote touch technology. All the electronic components of the garment for sensing human touches and actuating color-changing garment are integrated on the main fabrics. If accepted, we will be available to exhibit two dresses and four shoulder pieces on mannequins and hangers. Audience will be able to touch and activate interaction between garments.

IN_SIDE VIEW is an installation whereby the viewer, seated in a chair, is able to explore a series of stereoscopic panoramic photos using a Samsung Gear VR head mounted display. Turning the chair rotates these panoramic scenes, which offer a conjunction of photos of Angkor Wat showing foliage amalgamated with stone, and of the interior of a Sydney hardware store after it had been ravaged by fire. The viewer controls these changes of scene using a tongue-operated switch that is held in their mouth.

In IN_SIDE VIEW senses are senselessly conjoined, the world put back together, in side out in the circle of confusion, amongst trees / stone scaled / snake roots // eyed / tongue in cheek / switchback // past / future / present // cable / tie // wrap / around // heady / giddy / techy / tacky / vroom // memory / aromatic / terror // ruination / fervid bedlam. The wherewith-all in_side a pataphysical allegory for the multi-sensory encounter between the body and the perceptual imaginary, between nature, manufacture and ataxia.

Software: Leith Chan
Production: ALiVE/ACIM, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong
Photography: Volker Kuchelmeister, Jeffrey Shaw

The accompanying video is the summary of my iPhone life performance at the ISEA2016 closing party at the Cattle Depot in Hong Kong. The show hk_reload is curated by Ellen Pau.

I propose that the idea of Afrofuturism can be much more than just a visual and academic field of interest, and I want to examine the extent and modes in which Afrofuturism emerges as a black consciousness movement for the upcoming and current young generation. In a context of under-development, displacement of people, the erosion and/ conflation of ethnic culture in the face of transnational corporation determined to extract material and cultural wealth from Africa, I suggest that Afrofuturism presents as a counter-narrative to Afro-pessimism. We live in an age of self-visualization, this visual composite of self affects personality, self-worth and how young African generations see themselves in relation to the rest of the world. I wish to suggest in my research that Afrofuturism has the potential to help many young Africans imagine futures not shaped by colonialism and racism. Through the development of digital art focussed on African futures, I propose on indigenous ways of knowing and being, arts, healing practices and  scientific innovation, to offer an entry point or a lens through which postcolonial futures can be imagined. Through a digital art project, I hope to spark a conversation and debates, not only about what futures are possible but also what aspects of our collective history will survive in such a future.

A variety of images of “chairs made of wood” were projected on a painted walL The artist used the images of chairs not only as a symbol of gravitation but also as a symbol of something opposite of freedom.

Tindrà lloc aquí a Barcelona (It will happen here in Barcelona) is an immersive experience that reframes questions of sea-level rise, migration and extinction, in which familiar places — and the memories and dreams that attend them — are transformed by rising waters; the work gives rise to acts of recognition, utterance and transformation. Viewers travel along the marshlands and industrial wastelands of our local watershed and others worldwide that are shaped by industrialization. The sounds, images and text flow like waters, following a computer-code based system that gathers materials together in ever-changing experiences. Like ocean tides, the code-driven work is always changing. Roderick Coover’s images, gathered over the past decade from journeys on and around shorelines, combine with field recordings, voices and electronic music composed by Adam Vidiksis. Nick Montfort draws from Coover’s logs to create a continually evolving, poetic text.

The remarkable spectacle reveals forces of flow, floods and chemical contamination. Visitors plunge into the imaginaries of times present and future in a work that attempts to put into words the unspeakable threats posed to existence, time and belonging. Disruptions of language, spatial disorientation and fragmented media propel users to refigure history and give utterance to current crises. Written observations and images filmed at local industrial, post-industrial and natural sites are entered into the system to merge like images of other shores to intermingle histories, conditions and consequences as well as suggesting local differences. The music and sound design accentuate the collision of natural and industrial rhythms and the power of irrational forces, evoking imagined futures through dream-like sequences and by moving between surface and submerged realities and sentience. By compressing and distorting the scales of time that normally confound human imagination and undermine human action, the work opens possibilities for recognition, utterance, connection and action.

Itówapi Čík’ala (Little Picture), developed by Suzanne Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta) and Devin Ronneberg (Native Hawaiian descent), interrogates the relationships between human and non-human entities and intelligences. Through Oglála Lakȟóta ontologies, even materials such as metals, rocks, and minerals can be capable of volition. By considering the ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’ capabilities of nonhuman entities, a method of engagement reliant upon mutual respect and responsibility becomes possible. As Itówapi Čík’ala (Little Picture) speaks, listeners may respond to it by bending and moving its braids, affecting the sounds.

This project continues Melikhaya Noqamza’s investigation into transhumanism, the merging of human consciousness with machines, which he sees as the future of mankind. It also comments on the symbiotic relationship of the old and the new. The new is reliant on the old physical form of a human being’s consciousness to become more than glorified remote controls. Transhumanism is the height of machinery, which is artificial intelligence combining with the height of human evolution. Steve Jobs didn’t simply create machinery: he created himself as a machine. Apple products have been based on one man’s visions for a greater part of their existence. The work drew inspiration from Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha, where he places a TV (representing modern day enlightenment) opposite a statue of a Buddha,  representative of traditional enlightenment and self-reflection.

The MAIF Social Club exhibition Le Chant des Forêts presents an additional immersive work, a journey through time, into the Mayan forests.

The Maya are one of the oldest civilizations in America. Their history is marked by many upheavals that could be linked, at least in part, to the relationship they had with their environment. It is considered today that the Maya abandoned their cities because of a devastating drought that took place between 730 and 900.

Itzan is an archaeological site located in northern Guatemala. Produced by digital artist Timothy Thomasson and researcher Benjamin Keenan, the artwork called ITZAN converts biological and geological data collected on site into a film that accurately represents the evolution of the population, vegetation and climate over 6,000 years.

The work also speaks to our own times and the ever-present need for reorganization and resilience.

For a total immersion in the forest, you can enjoy a free visit in the exhibition Le Chant des Forêts.

What happens when an everyday encounter becomes not so everyday? This interactive installation explores the boundaries between what’s OK and what’s not in daily life. Participants become performers in a drama in which they have little control. Animated frame-by-frame using paper puppets and a diorama of a train line, the work is a stand-alone cabinet of wonders. Interact with the work and transform yourself into someone quite unexpected.

Jacob Wrestling With The Angel consists of a video camera attached to a motorized camera mount, a video monitor and a number of objects arranged in a semi-circle around the camera. The motor rotates the camera similar to an airport surveillance camera. As the camera pans around the room, the motor pauses it as it points at each object. The objects are recorded on video tape along with audio tones which start and stop the motor. On play-back the camera pans around the room, stopping at each object as it did when the objects were recorded. To the viewer, it appears that the camera is “looking” at each object and displaying them on the video monitor. However, the camera is no longer on. The video monitor is showing pre-recorded images. The objects have all changed over time. Flowers which were fresh when the video was recorded now lie wilted on the floor; the monitor shows a block of ice in a pan, on the floor there is now a pan of water, etc. A position sensor attached to the motor sends information to an Apple II computer which changes this information to audio tones which are recorded on the video tape along with the video picture. On play-back the audio tones are sent back to the computer, and converted back to position information. The computer compares the position that was originally recorded, with the current position and can speed up the motor that the camera is mounted on, to synchronize the past to the present movement.

Junkspace is a time- and location-sensitive video installation and corresponding iOS App that highlights two forms of waste. Earthbound (electronic waste) are the remnants of the many devices that fill our lives, transformed from objects of desire to trash through a self perpetuating cycle of obsolescence. Celestial (orbital debris) consists of the millions of pieces of junk currently circling the Earth, left behind by decades of satellite and space missions.

From one extreme to another …
By juxtaposing two radically different environments, the Tasmanian wilderness and the extreme urban development of Hong Kong, this interactive installation explores place and representation. In an apparently endless stereoscopic 3D giga-pixel panoramic montage, the two locations merge seamlessly from one into another as the observer manually turns the circular ‘screen’ to control both the viewpoint and the related soundscape.
Supported by  COFA (College of Fine Arts), UNSW, the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research and ASPERA Australian Screen Production Education & Research Association.

Apr 2 – Sep 3

On the occasion of her new exhibition at the Maubuisson Abbey, Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves narrates in her own way the intersecting destinies of man and the cosmos. Most notably inspired by ancient Egyptian stories on immortality and the nocturnal journey of the solar god Ra on his boat, she invites the spectators on a poetic and metaphysical trip to the land of shadows and reborn light.

Through mirrors and sculptures in which light plays a predominant role, the artist questions the deep fields of space and time. She questions humanity’s relation to the beyond through the cycle of matter within the universe, the birth and death of stars. Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves provides enough to make us dream as well as meditate : of which distant dreams are we the memory ?
Text by Olivier Schefer, writer and philosopher

Between art, astrophysics and mythology, Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves did not want to make a choice. From his many loves was born the exhibition Khépri, going out to the day, which we discover after a trip by RER C to the Abbey of Maubuisson. The art center of 95, through its spiritual past, is charged with a particular energy which gives the cosmic works of the visual artist another dimension.

An invitation to silence, the exhibition alternates spectacular installations, luminous sculptures and colorful paintings to explore the relationship between Man and the cosmos. While the first space invites us to follow the course of the Sun from Mars, a gigantic reproduction of an ultra-photogenic eclipse announces the penumbra and reveals the masterpieces of this exhibition: three Nekromanteion which make the room of the Nuns shine. These large luminous mirrors are transformed into openings on the world which reflect each other indefinitely, revealing dark nebulae. What the scientific world has long taken for black holes actually hides the birth of stars, and it is tirelessly that we watch them come into the world and then die out, to the rhythm of a sound installation by Marc Billon.

Nothing escapes in the end, and we poor mortals are made of the same stuff as the stars. A link highlighted in the last spaces of the exhibition which also question renewal. When a star explodes, a whole universe is created. What happens when it’s our turn to shut down?
_Zoé Kennedylundi in Time Out Paris (17.07.2023)

This artwork uses an EEG headset to provide luminescent biofeedback on a participant’s level of focus and stillness. It measures Beta waves, associated with attention, and Theta brainwaves, associated with drowsiness, and motion with an accelerometer [1,2]. This information is visualized on a custom reflected light LED display, and changes color and pattern based on a deterministic flocking algorithm, shown in the included image. Since each LED’s position is fixed, the flock does not progress through XY planer space but through RGB color space. After establishing baseline values, the participant’s Beta and Theta power influence the alignment and separation of the flock respectively. With high focus the color of the display becomes uniform and monochromatic as each LED tries to align its color with its neighbors. When distracted the colors separate as each LED tries to become unique in color.

A function in the video works, sound are synchronizing with the images. It was an amazing experience for me because I was mainly working with film at the time this piece of work was produced. This work was based on open-reel recorders, however, the editing pro­cess was not so easy. That is why I created this work without cutting anything.

Life on a shelf as a snowman trapped in a snow-globe blizzard can become wearing, especially when you’re surrounded by knickknacks from sunnier locales. When the jaded snowman finally breaks free of his glass house, his vacation plans are cut short.

The artwork seeks to create a peaceful space where we can explore the nature of our universal connection through shared genetic code. DNA is the technology of life, and the piece utilizes modern technology to express our biological code in novel, accessible ways. By transforming the raw DNA sequence data for a set of individuals into music, and sampling a single chromosome from each person to create the final composition, our individuality and collective connectedness are simultaneously celebrated. The stone circle becomes a comfortable womb in which the participants can experience and reflect on the beauty of existence and the core connection we have to each other, with the projected visuals from above making the participants themselves a central component of the artwork while they explore the space. The tactile and multi-sensory nature of the piece reveals what is otherwise abstract in a visceral and universal way that is hoped to inspire discussion and profound wonder… and above all, bring us together

“Kryophone“ is a sonorous and luminous interactive sculpture made of ice reacts to the electrostatic touch of bodies. Sounds and light evolve according to the intensity of contacts. At the same time the human heat will transform and model in a new way the ice sculpture.This fragile sculpture invites audience to question our relationship with the environment.The interaction with the sculpture is necessary in order to generate sound and light, but the heat of each touch will transform, influence slowly it shape. Qualities of shape, density and transparency will evolve according to the unpredictable melt generated by human heat and climatic variations. The sculpture represents an icosahedron: symbol of water, among one of the five solids of Plato. The sonorous feedbacks evoke liquid, organic, fragile and deep matter. This artwork renders visible imperceptible exchanges.

The work is a fragment of a digital image extracted from an exhibition project entitled Poétique D’Un Instant that explores the infinity of a moment lived under a waterfall. Later, as a co-artist, Jaime de los Ríos joined the project, to create a macro project that redefines and expands the physical, intellectual and artistic dimensions of the work.

This work was made by Marie-France Veyrat at the beginning of the project. It refers in particular to the evocation of different textures and dimensions that flowing water offers.

Light. Joy. Playground.
Starry and emotionally warm lights bloom out and reach to your heart. Light, the first thing of the beginning interacts to your motions. It actively responds to you by bursting with positive energy.
LamX is an interactive light artwork that simulates the light talking to you. Physical light bulbs with digital light waves make a mixed reality and unique environment. It is a delightful dialogue, an aesthetic scene, and a beautiful moment. When redefining the light in the artistic language, Lee was interested in how light spreads out and fills the air when it slows down. With the question “How does light interact when considered a living creature?”, LamX was given a personality which is shown through the choreography of lighting.
When interacting with LamX, the light leads and follows the viewer wherever one goes. It is positive and waiting to play with humans. It calls and invites the viewer to the playground and shelter. Lee often brings rain into his artwork as a sample of immersive sound and dynamic reactions. Rain to him symbolizes the power of life that comes alive by its movement. Rain fills the air emotionally like a light. He borrowed it, the result making the analog emotions of light richer. He uses round and line which are 0 and 1, as primary graphic elements. The binary codes are aligned with wires, light bulbs, and ripples. LamX also has two light shows full of emotional scenes and story-telling. It is a 7min-length unique light show that performs at a certain time with motion graphics, lightings, and motivating emotional music that has been composed and performed by Lee.

Interrogating intersecting modalities and technologies of power that reproduce colonial legacies in the everyday, Farouk works towards carving out spaces for playing with, looking at, discussing, speaking alongside/performing alternative and hidden archives. The way in which questions of gender, race, sexuality, class and the body/ embodied intersect with food, eating and foodways, can reveal a great deal about the ways in which colo- niality is reproduced as well as resisted, reimagined and unsettled in the present. Ismail wants to delve into these spaces of the intimate, the visceral, the eaten, the edible and practices of consumption in order to unsettle his own sensory and epistemic geographies of meaning, towards imagining alternate possibilities.

The work submitted was made in a series on the assumption of the viewers taking parts. The first person performs some vague action, and the next person watches a recorded tape only once and does the same action from his memory. The third person watches the second person’s tape and so on. As lapses are repeated, the action develops in outrageous directions.

It is quite funny, but at the same time it made me realize the horror of information.

In 2021 Dement and Brown were awarded an ANAT Synapse Residency and CreateNSW grant to collaborate with Dr. Carmine Gentile and his Cardiovascular Regeneration Group, School of Bioengineering, University of Technology Sydney.

Cardiovascular disease, including myocardial infarction and heart failure, is the leading cause of death worldwide. Dr Gentile’s multidisciplinary team has created a novel way to 3D bioprint heart tissues using patients’ own cells to repair heart damage and regain cardiac muscle function. Cells isolated from skin or blood are used to generate stem cells and then transformed into heart cells. Using state-of-the-art facilities, Dr Gentile has developed a new way to form ‘cardiac spheroids’–clusters of cardiac cells–which contract or beat synchronously to produce patches for damaged hearts.

May 2021 artist George Schwarz died from cardiac failure and Linda recorded his last breaths. Audio values were retrieved to generate sequential images of 2D geometry. We imported these images into 3D Slicer (software normally used to create 3D models from MRI or CT scans)  as if we had run an MRI scan on sound rather than a body.

We printed models first in hydrogel to discover shape, consistency, size, and then with live cardiac spheroids, on a LumenX bioprinter which uses crossbeams of light to harden light sensitive gel, printing upwards in 100 micron layers, substance emerging from liquid under violet light.

Through this project, human cardiac failure, expelled as breath and recorded as sound, is transfigured to 3D form as terra-firma for growth of human yet inhuman life.

This artwork responds to the research of the Cardiovascular Regeneration Group. Their work traverses terrains of life and death, bodies and technologies, human and inhuman, the strained edges of wounded hearts and the stretching extremities of bio-technical possibility.

Every hour since 1999 Stephen Cartwright has recorded his exact latitude and longitude with a GPS to create multi-media art offering a unique perspective of a transit through life.

Lavoro Macchinine is a collaboration between Alexis Grey Hildreth (moving image) and Ora Cogan (sound) that deconstructs the opening credits and reimagines the musical overture in the title sequence from the Italian period drama Il Gattopardo (1963).

Lavoro Macchinine occults the film’s original static text with a mercurial, kinetic typography, built from the very glyphs it is at pains to obfuscate. Through gestation, approximation, replication, and assimilation; Lavoro Macchinine discovers its own alien properties of form and behaviour, while simultaneously exploring the boundaries of its cinematic environment.

The living word produced by Lavoro Macchinine is propelled and propagated by a hunger for and the digestion of, Il Gatopardo‘s diegetic space. It longs to hide within it; to become part of it. The building blocks of language are hijacked: letterforms bifurcate in an imitation of manor gates, logographs elongate into fragile towers, conveyor belts composed of graphemes disseminate across the laneway, ligatures roll out of ideograms to scrutinize Roman busts, alien marginalia breach the balustrade, cedilla scrupulously scale the villa walls, extraterrestrial dingbats lodge themselves into the ruins of a world that no longer exists, ogonek laden emissaries probe the cinemascape in order to become it; to become us.

2010, 8 channel sound sculpture

The Law of the Tongue ~ Symbiosis and Betrayal. For Millennia, Killer Whales (Orcinus Orca) have hunted Baleen Whales along the coasts of Australia, driving them into shallow bays from which they cannot escape. Likewise for Millennia the Yuni people of Twofold Bay near Eden (New South Wales) have formed a spiritual bond with the Orcas (Beowas to the Yuni) whom they considered to be reincarnations of their tribal ancestors and whom they sang; believing that the Orcas responded by intentionally driving Whales to strand in the Bay as a food offering to their tribal members.

The Law of the Tongue installation operates with eight parallel audio tracks, six driving Solid Drive audio actuators that activate the skeletal vessel, and three ship’s oars, the remaining two tracks drive two large sub-woofers buried in the three metre long neoprene ‘Whale’s Tongue’. click below to listen to fragments samples from the sound library ~ naturally these are simple stereo mixes and not actual tracks from the installation but give a good idea of the sonic content which is drawn principally from sonified water quality data, whale recordings and hydrophone recordings

Galerie Sator, May 16-20 

On the occasion of the 28th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2023) organized by Le Cube Garges, we will present the artist’s Cosmorama video in our Marais space.

Shot in the surroundings of an observatory (in a lava desert where the NASA recently tested Martian rovers) and in a primitive forest which gives us an overview of the state of the world 50M years ago, the film uses a near-infrared imagery process with which astronomers usually observe the deep reaches of the universe. It also makes audible the light pulsations emitted by distant stars and galaxies by transposing radio-telescopes data into sound. By disrupting our usual spatiotemporal markers, Cosmorama allows the emergence of a sensitive and collective experience of pure perception.