Art Events Data Table

Paulo Nimer Pjota’s work is developed based on the nature of collectively originated phenomena. His research and practice concentrate on a profound study of a kind of popular iconography which can only be developed through complex processes conducted by countless sets of hands. We can thus think of his body of work as the representation of a dialogue that is pluralist and unsettled, whose understandings are in constant transformation, spanning multiple streams of consciousness. A conference of many voices with open channels of research in a time and space that is not homogenous, nor linear.

In the award-winning Human Study #1 series of performative installations, a human is drawn live by several robots during a 20-minute session, Both audiences and participants often mention the robot’s attention as a striking element. It is conceived as such, a camera mounted on the pan and tilt system enables the robot to observe the sitter with tiny saccades, occasionally comparing with the drawing, and most of the time following the pen’s movements. Although these movements are theatrical, they effectively convey a character and give the impression of the system paying attention to the human in an animal mammal-like way. Furthermore, the robot’s eye following the pen’s movement gives the impression that it is looking at what it is doing.

I have been researching a forthcoming series of installations for the past three years, including developing a new robot (RNR). Instead of being strongly influenced by human behaviour that is perceived as familiar like the human study #1 robots, I am exploring ways to make it [RNR] perceived as alien, unfamiliar, and foreign.

The RNR is an intermediary work, where I will specifically explore how having a robot looking at us with a different unfamiliar perceptual system affects our perception of it. As an animal, if attention is directed toward us, it needs to be evaluated instantly: can we eat it? Is it going to eat us? As humans, the way we are observed triggers a wealth of emotions. What if we can’t decode the intention of the observer? And what will the robot draw if it sees differently?

The aim for the final installation would be for the emotions in the human being drawn during ten-minute performances to progressively move from unsettled to intrigued, reassured, captivated, and charmed.

Every 15 minutes, a robotic percussion instrument performs a new generated composition that is the result of an ongoing negotiation between virtual agents. Each composition lasts between 3-5 minutes.

Role Model performances pose the question: What can Dubai teach the world?, while the installation shows answers from shows done in Russia and Brazil.

What does clean water bring us and why should we tell the story of its loss? Functionally, without water, we cannot drink, bathe, cook or clean. Essentially, it is indispensable for empowerment, health, dignity and economic security. Water is a human right, yet 10% of the world’s population, mostly living in rural areas, lives without safe water. While globally we use 70% of our water resources for agriculture and 10% for domestic use, catastrophic droughts are devastating parts of North and South America, Africa, China and Southeast Asia, worsening universal access to water.

Run Dry is a film project told through personal stories, investigates the significance of water and reveals the systems of power that govern water distribution. The project addresses how water is accessed and resourced, what systems govern water resources, how they have developed over decades, and how they impact human well-being today. Audiences will learn specifically about the water crisis in Central California as a model for understanding how race, class, migration, water policy, hydrology and agricultural history combine to create this crisis.

Collectively harvested data and an interactive AR presentation of the History of the Electronic Arts over the period of last four decades.

During her residency at Eawag, Zahrah Alghamdi has accompanied the Stream Ecology research group on three excursions to the Roseg Valley in the Engadine. Taking her inspiration from the activities of the scientists in the midst of the mountain terrain with its countless rivers and streams, she captured her impressions in the form of works that make use of found materials, directly intervening in the landscape. She created the pieces either by hand or using simple tools, and made use of materials that she mostly picked up in the Roseg Valley — such as sand from a river bank, or dried plants. This process enabled Alghamdi to tune in to an unfamiliar landscape and leave her own imprint on it while at the same time offering up these imprints to the effects of impermanence. Having been documented in a series of photographs, the works represent a moment in time, as do the scientific data collected in the Roseg Valley.

The immersion.

Same, Same, but Different is a transdisciplinary collaborative project between the Laboratory of Art and Science at Durban University of Technology (South Africa) and the Interdisciplinary Interactive Laboratory (LabInter) at the University of Santa Maria (Brazil). This project brings together people from Fine Arts, Engineering, Computer Science and Video to create an interactive electronic artwork that uses water as a conceptual metaphor for access to internet bandwidth and information as a human right and commodity which should be widely available without restriction, as essential to human life, and to which every person is entitled. This project seeks to bolster existing collaborative transdisciplinary initiatives along a South-South axis between South Africa and Brazil, in light of the two countries facing similar artistic, cultural and socio-economic challenges.

LabInter is composed by artists, teachers, researchers and students from visual arts, design, music, letters, architecture, cinema, computer engineering and computer science. The lab has developed research projects in game art, interactive applications, augmented reality, mixed reality, interactive installations, visual music, web art, telematic art, and, recently, a Fulldome proposal. LabInter is associated with the Graduate Program in Visual Arts at UFSM/Brazil. Andreia Oliveira, Cassio Lemos, Eduardo Custodio, Evaristo do Nascimento, Fabio Almeida and Indira Richter are members of the LabInter’s team.

The attention spans of users has become somewhat of a commodity to platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and others. Unfortunately, due to the constant bombardment of information and imagery from these sites, not only have the length of our attentions spans shortened, but many of us have become oversaturated with (and even addicted to) the easily digestible and almost comforting stream of distraction that our devices steadily provide us with. This project consists of a desktop PC running a fake YouTube browser. The browser leads participants to a single video made up of 10 overlaid videos playing simultaneous at various levels of opacity. This visual and audible bombard of faces and voices is a manifestation of the effect that this platform has on those who use it. In this way, it mirrors the effect that it has on others back onto itself. It creates a space in which nothing can be retained and focusing on any single aspect proves difficult. It is this state which I find myself in when I have overexposed myself to this sort of stimuli, and it is a state which I aim to not only portray, but hopefully also replicate in those who interact with the piece.

Coding: Simone Beneke-Graham

Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media Arts 2013.

James Newitt orchestrated a mock confrontation between two groups of demonstrators, although it is never clear what they are arguing about. [source: ttps://www.johnmcdonald.net.au)
Say it like you want it is a video of staged protest/demonstration which incorporates signs, slogans and ideologies taken from opposing political positions which have been decontextualised from their original sources. The work was filmed in Liverpool UK within a community theatre space and reveals an artificial social encounter that brings together a group of non-professional actors who were provided with pre-made banners, masks, flags and disguises. The performers were paid an hourly fee for their time. https://jnewitt.com/work/say-it.html

By participating in the ‘protest’ the performers were asked to try to temporarily erase their identity and personal ideologies and perform someone else’s words, which may or may not resonate with their own belief. The work explores the spaces between hearing something, saying something, understanding something and believing in something.

The video is exhibited alongside documentation of an Orange Order march which was filmed in Toxteth, Liverpool – the site of the infamous 1981 Toxteth riots.

SCAMP: Mont Royal is an interactive, non-linear, geolocalized sound walk composed for mobile application on android and iPhone OS. This is the 2nd site-specific version of SCAMP to be created by Heimbecker. The production is sponsored by Sporobole Centre en Art Actuel, who first commissioned SCAMP: lac des nations for Espace [IM] Média 2019, Sherbrooke, QC.

Heimbecker created the project interactivity concept along with the unique ambisonic audio track composed in a palindrome designed to play forward and backward, fast or slow. It is made from 40 layers of stereo field recordings of a forest similar to the forest of Parc Mont-Royal (Montreal, Canada). The composition uses sound filters and layers of harmonic processing that give a synthesized sense of both nature and abstraction together with the companionship of a family dog: her heartbeat and her voice.

Scamp was my dog.
She loved to run.
If I ran, she ran.
If I walked, she walked.
If I stopped, she stopped.
She was a good dog.
She loved to play.
She loved to be outdoors.
She loved to be at the lake.
She loved to be in the forest.
She loved the sounds of nature.
Would you like to go for a tour with Scamp at park Mont Royal?
She would like that too!

Walk or ride your bike… just take the path (with your mobile and headphones).

SCAMP “forward play” starts at the Cartier Monument on ave du Parc.“Reverse play” begins at Le Serpentin path on ave du Pine O. between Redpath Crescent and rue Peel.

Can we imagine how the science of today might shape the world of tomorrow? You are invited to help create the world of X, a woman born in 2045, and be a part of the first demonstration of ‘xquisiteFUTURE’, a custom video software by Ollie Bown inspired by the Surrealist drawing game ‘cadavre exquis’ (‘exquisite corpse’). A mobile FUTUREpod will bring xquisiteFUTURE to the University of Sydney campus (11th-14th June) and feature live storyboarding by visual artist Valentin Manz.

scienceFUTURE is a multi-year collaborative documentary experiment that will provide a dreamlike glimpse of the future in the present. By playing with both the good and bad potentials projected into our future, participants will explore the personal joys and dilemmas extrapoloated from our partly unconscious experience of accelerating change. The goal is not so much to predict the future, as to nurture deeper and more complex attitudes towards the eternal ‘becoming’ of the present. scienceFUTURE is in an early research and development phase.

In a search for the dark corners of lit cities we find ourselves searching the spaces between the rigidity of the organized systems and the city grids. We
look for the respite from the connected, surveilled and illuminated spaces in an attempt to find and celebrate darkness and silence. Part of this search is to
experience these found spaces, attempt to capture them in image and sound, acknowledge their juxtaposition to their surrounding activity, map them onto
the city grid and publish these findings.
This performative workshop and performance installation is in line with a trajectory of the artist’s 10 years of light interventions and community
engagement projects questioning the meaning of darkness and silence in the context of South Africa, across Africa and Europe. The play of darkness and light is one that is not only easily accessible to participants and audiences, but can be read as highly critical of social conditions and behavior, the power of politics and propaganda, and evidence of control and surveillance.

Searching for Substance is an indoor video installation that examines the ideas of consumerism, manicured spaces, and manufactured environments.

Secrets of the Dark manifests both audio and visual noise in harmony with each other. Participants can manipulate visual effects on a projected live video stream by using the custom dual joystick interface in this artwork. The system rewards large hand gestures with increased prismatic video distortion. At the same time, these tangible inputs also drive an FM synthesizer that compliments the visual noise with scrumbly audio. From a distance, the projections and sounds draw people in, often enticed by seeing abstract representations of themselves. At this range, many people can engage with the work simultaneously, while at a more intimate scale, one person can play the interface for the gathered audience. By combing these elements the installation allows people to transform the world around them into one of colorful kaleidoscopic light through expressive movement.
The interface is born of a hacked GameTrak controller embedded in a purple- heart wooden box. Exotic woods were used to mirror colors found at the extreme end of the digital video filters. The interface leverages craftsmanship, traditional methods, and warm materials not often found in digital projects. This materiality both invites people in and juxtaposes the high tech with tangible forms.
The projections stem from a live video feed of the surrounding area. In its neutral state, they are grayscale with a flame effect. Upon manipulation of the interface, the visuals spring to life. The left joystick controls video rotation along the XY plane and zoom on the Z-axis. The right joystick controls horizontal and vertical pixelation on the XY plane and downsampling on the Z-axis. The Z-axes automatically retract, which provides a nice haptic resistance to the user’s input gestures. Combined with FM synthesis, these elements provide the user with a multimodal embodied experience.

#See You at Home is an interactive and immersive installation about changing the role of the private space in a time of crisis. It is part of an ongoing participatory project that reflects on our everyday domestic life between private and public spheres, and thus on our relationship with living spaces in general. The project consists of a collection of hundreds of three-dimensional documents taken between 2020 and 2021 in over 40 different countries during the most intense periods of self-isolation and home confinement.

Following an open call, the collected videos were converted to 3D objects using the technique of photogrammetry. These imperfect objects (pointcloud images with gaps and unfinished endings) are the core content of the work’s archive, along with personal statements about the time of quarantine and the changing meaning of private spaces in the form of audio pieces and text.

#See You at Home (SYAH) is a physical installation that includes 3D-printed objects, plotter prints on the wall, and interactive objects with QR codes leading to 360 degree virtual spaces that visitors can view through the ‘magic window’ feature of their phone. Additionally, the work expands on, and includes within, a previous work: the VR installation The Smallest of Worlds. With it, #See You at Home offers a journey within a journey that explores the private spaces as its possible forms develop and change, in a back and forth between the real and the virtual that is both conceptual and experiential.

Seismik is a dazzling, tension charged performance that taps into seismic waves, frictional  resistance and the Earth’s tremor related phenomena in real time. True to Kolgen’s temporal/ spatial conceptual preoccupations and radiographic approach, he again renders the invisible  visible: he has developed sophisticated software that picks up on the Earth’s magnetic fields and seismic activity from São Paolo to Kyoto, in turn generating abstracted sound and dramatic visual motifs. Exploring the ambiguity of realism in post human landscapes, Kolgen creates three-dimensional simulations through the instability of dynamical systems and converts them into large scale cinematic visuals. A dramatic display of terrestrial activity, Seismik plays on notions of physical, cerebral and emotional tension, in this case using vibrational data and vertical through-lines to explore seismic strains and fractures of varying  intensities, planting the audience squarely on terra (not so) firma.

Self-Organized Landscapes are print collages composed of thousands of closeup photos that are taken using robotic or hand-held cameras that pan and tilt to examine a visual context.

It would not be too much to say that an artist’s self-referential perspective, which is the origin of all artistic perception, is concentrated in the self portrait.

Each person’s life an d death is limited by time. Within these limits, in the momentary artistic consciousness, the artist’s whole way of thought is captured in a microcosm of a lifetime’s achievement, compressed and self-represented as a self-portrait.

This artwork is a visualization of the correlations of the data collected with 5 arduinos and 8 different sensors on a boat trip held by professors, university students and artists.

How would you feel if your shadow wandered off to talk to someone else’s?! This interactive Kinect project prompts participants and viewers to reflect on the complex and often hidden relationships between people, networks and communities on the internet. The on-screen shadows of participants/passers by in Darwin and Sydney are integrated into a composite virtual scene,  broadcast on large public screens in the two cities. Abstracted by anonymity and physical separation, the shadows engage in intimate and playful, yet literally distant encounters; thus strangers engage in virtual relationships across vast distances, provoking contemplation of the impact of anonymity and intimacy in our ever expanding, highly networked world.

Shadow Showdown is a multiplayer, whole-body installation that encourages interaction between people, creativity, and physical activity.

Shadows of aikia is a movement-based interactive audiovisual performance.

How does an Artificial Emotional (AE) kiss feel? Can AI/AE support an intimate kiss?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes human empathic interaction. AI systems applied to Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) for mining and interpreting biofeedback data of social behavior, focus on automatization, categorization, patterns, and prediction. Design for sharing intimate, empathic relations, however, demands a new Artificially Emotional (AE) design approach. In interdisciplinary collaboration (art, design, technology, science, society), art-science duo Lancel/Maat fundamentally rethink AI/AE concepts and ethical design of mirroring empathy (Freedberg & Gallese 2007) in future neural networks. In live experiments and dialogue with public participants, biofeedback-data are interpreted in new ways, building on artistic and scientific insights, visual data-patterns, data-sonification, shared participants interaction – leading to video-works, prints, publications (Lancel et al. 2019).
The poetic ritual and performance-installation Kissing Data proposes an AE/ BCI mediated multi-sensory syntheses of intimate touch, essential to empathy, well-being, and social resilience. People are invited as Kissers or Spectators to experience a shared kiss. While kissing, Kissers’ brainwaves are measured with Multi-BCI E.E.G. headsets. Real-time, their streaming E.E.G.-data-visualizations encircle them in a floor projection. Simultaneously, the Spectators’ brainwaves are measured (their neurons mirroring the activity of intimate kissing movements, resonating in their imagination). Both Kissers’ and Spectators’ data co-create an immersive visual, reflexive data scape, translated to an algorithm for a soundscape: a Kissing Data Symphony. Printed data-visualizations are exhibited as Portraits of a Kiss.
Participants can share kissing or caressing each others’ faces. The artists thank Mondriaan Fund; Delft University of Technology; STEIM Amsterdam/ Tijs Ham (sound); Waag Society Amsterdam ‘Hack the Brain’ Horizon2020 European Union Programme; RIXC-Riga; TASML artists-residency Tsinghua University Beijing; TU Twente; Universities of Amsterdam, Vienna; TNO/NWO Netherlands Scientific Research; Baltan Laboratories, Fourtress, Holst Center and Phillips Eindhoven; Eagle Science Amsterdam; EMAP-EMARE Creative-Europe Programme.

The artist has been taking monochrome pictures with his unique technique since the 1960’s. He also displayed the pictures of “Misawa’s dog” in addition to those monochrome pictures. Furthermore, a movie, MORIYAMA Daido, which is a documentary on the artist’s activities was shown at the site.

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

2021
Inkjet print on Hahnemuhle Rag Baryta paper, 33 x 50 cm.
Courtesy of l’Adagp

[This text is a translation from Chinese by Google Translate, edited by Michelle Lin]

The Legend of Lin Shuiyuan series traces the young memory of the artist more than 30 years ago. By interviewing older families and villagers, trying to solve an exaggerated legend that is the story of oral history.

The story of history. The artist was raised by his grandparents when he was young. Very young and unable to speak from a low perspective, to watch the villagers fear Fear and admiration of Feng Shui master. And because I can’t speak or take notes, I can only use from the perspective of the children watching, try to use cartoon-like colorful colors to visually and Feel to reproduce the heroic deeds of my grandfather. And this kind of common people’s transmission Said that it was involved in the role of General Su Aguai of Yunlin County in the reign of Emperor Guangxu of the Qing Dynasty, The story of a generation of bandits in Lin Yupu (Zhushan), Nantou. exist outside of 硘磘庄

After the 36 officers in Fanzi were wiped out, the villagers took the entire army of General Su Tuan is buried in the tomb of Zhongyi. Later, Lin Shuiyuan, who was a farmer, passed by the general Tomb, whenever cows are moved past, the cows are always afraid to pass the general’s tomb and be late He didn’t want to go home for a long time, so Mr. Lin Shuiyuan faced the general’s tomb. Promise, if it goes smoothly in the future so that the cows are no longer afraid, they will enshrine the tomb of the generals Of the dead. But when things went well, Lin Shuiyuan forgot. Therefore, the woodcarver master in the village of Zhushan and Liaobao entrusted Lin Shuiyuan with the deity of the general’s tomb. Sheng, has carved the gods and sent them to the home for a fee, and the two understand each other after the origin, I was surprised, and promised and carried the technical care of Feng Shui master

The responsibility of the villagers has caused a series of local anecdotes in the future.

An article in the National Geographic titled, Water, The Age of Scarcity Begins, inspired Ammar Al Attar to do a project about water. Moved by the fact that our most basic necessity is a scarce and precious resource, the artist chose the UAE in which to explore the contradictory notion that water is often given away for free; remaining easily accessible and freely available to many.

A CCTV camera is filming a beach and we hear its voice, as if it were alive and thinking out loud. But the perfection of her intelligence has led it to doubt and burnout, and to not know what to do anymore: What is this? What should she look at? What is a suspicious behaviour? But above all, what is the point of all this? It compares itself to the click workers who feed artificial intelligences, questioning the meaning of its work with an anthropomorphism that raises its political stakes.

Sightseeing (Penser voir) was initially created by Thierry Fournier in 2018 at the invitation of Pierre Beloüin and the Acoustic Cameras project, which invites artists and composers to annex the real time streams of webcams located in different places around the world.

“With Sightseeing / Penser voir by Thierry Fournier, we quickly understand that we are not confronted with a real AI, but with an artifice, yet we fully adhere to the fiction of this awareness of an entity. Far from breaking our suspension of disbelief, the sound loop that reveals the deception, accentuates on the contrary our empathetic relationship to the AI that “goes off the rails”. It is literally in a loop on its machine condition, and thus on its condition of being (or rather of not being) in the world. While the landscape changes, it doesn’t come out of it, it can’t cope with it. Thus the sound loop is diegetized, appearing as a consequence of this state of burnout described by the artist.

Paradoxically, it is because it is highly efficient that this AI starts to doubt and to malfunction. The machine’s dysfunction thus becomes a metaphor for the dysfunction of a whole world that should be questioned. For how can one continue in such a world? “Fuck. I can’t make it,” the AI repeats tirelessly, while echoing the invisible click workers, the majority of whom are underpaid, who have contributed to shaping it by feeding it. By worrying about its usefulness, it also challenges the injunction to perform, characteristic of our society, which seems to consider man only in terms of becoming a machine. Thus, the fictional narrative deployed by Sightseeing around these issues of knowledge and doubt, performance and failure, meaning and non-sense, appears to be not only philosophical but also eminently political.”

Claire Châtelet, lecturer and researcher, University of Montpellier 3 (France), Les fictions de la machine sensible : l’œil, le faillible et la pensée [The fictions of the sensitive machine: the eye, the fallible and the thought], May 2021

Signal to Noise archives pixels extracted from images found on the hosting service imgur. com. Images of memes, ads, porn, landscapes, and cats all live together on imgur’s servers. Navigation to any image requires appending a random five, six, or seven character file path to the address imgur.com/. Signal to Noise navigates the site’s servers to find a random collection of images as quickly as possible. Pixels at specified locations are copied from their parent images and archived, contextualizing the site’s visual data not by web address, thematic content, or popularity but by time and space. An accompanying booklet of saturation-sorted pixel archives offers an alternative arrangement of the site’s content.

Signature Strokes consists of ultra-short performative interventions in which a remotely controlled drone paints ephemeral graffiti in public space. The title is a play on signature strikes – the drone killings based on suspicious behavioural patterns thought to constitute proof of terrorist activity. But when the drone engages with graffitti, the marks it creates can be understood as a kind of signature. During ISEA2015, the drone will appear as an expressive agent that will unexpectedly intervene and leave visual commentaries.

The artwork grounded on the region’s heritage, reacts inversely to the norms of interactive pieces. It begins as abstract shapes, only when one remains still does the image become tangible.

The wall installation examines the legacy of mining in Johannesburg and how this industry has had a geographical, social and economic influence on Johannesburg. The works engage with how historical ghosts of Johannesburg’s past still influence urban living today. It also deals with the anxieties of Joburg living, where one’s sense of equanimity is constantly being tested. Physical computing components such as servo and DC motors are attached to found objects and fictious characters of the artwork. These characters and objects move backwards and forwards, spin endlessly and shudder on the ledges they stand.

Exhibition Symbiosis, artport x ISEA. Forum des Images, May 16 – 21

Red blades spiral out in a circle over a black sky, with a yellow glow and more geometric shapes behind. In the center interlocking gold rings rotate over intricate and increasingly smaller details.

In SITE1, a fly-through of a three-dimensional space takes viewers on a journey into an intricate, machinic object resembling a spinning wheel, which gradually evolves into a cave-like environment.

The object is an abstracted star chart and computerized cosmology based on L.O.C.K., a previous work Harvey created as part of the artist duo Tale of Tales. The planetary constellations evoked by the spinning wheel—Mars, Mercury, and Earth itself—function as a chart that draws viewers into a cave. Embedded in it are elements of the characters depicted in Auriea Harvey’s sculpture Ox, which exists in physical form and as a virtual model. Among these characters are Fauna, based on a scan of Harvey’s head, and Minoriea, a futuristic goddess that is half woman, half bull and has been the artist’s avatar in virtual worlds since 2017. The virtual world of SITE1 represents an archaeological dig into the “origin site” of Harvey’s characters—an excavation of the universe that the artist is building from mythologies and personal stories. Just as Ox blends boundaries between virtual and tangible forms, SITE1 merges a virtual object and an environment. Viewers can navigate the work by scrolling, or hit the “enter” / “return” key for a continuous scroll.

Procedural animation of human figure moving on sloped surfaces. PhD work of 1984 at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts & Design, Ohio State University, USA.

The man formed pinhole camera which modeled the artist self.

This video is based on original Dubai helicopter footage. Inspired by my interest in Islamic art, I used a custom geometric pattern-creating software to merge East and West.

Slipstream is a multichannel sound composition to be experienced in a unique embodied manner; underwater via submerged speakers. Sound materials collected from Durban and surrounds form a site-specific composition that considers the importance of water for a community living in a humid sub-tropical climate. Presented in public pools around Durban, Slipstream will bring art into the everyday ritual in playful and participatory ways.

The Slow Violence series depicts maps of Australia’s 2019/2020 Black Summer bushfires in the Blue Mountains, the South Coast of NSW, Namadgi National Park, and Eastern Victoria, embroidered into emergency thermal blankets.

These pieces compile satellite imagery gathered from emergency service applications, the Google Earth Engine Burnt Area Map, and state and national open-source datasets of fire damage to vegetation. The resulting shapes combine scientific and personal resources and aesthetics to interpret extreme weather events through a materialisation of data. Designed to retain body heat and as a potential signaling device, the thermal blanket conveys fire as both restorative and catastrophic and the slow technique of stitching encompasses a repetitive and meditative practice that simultaneously destroys and repairs this grounding substrate.

The term ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011) refers to invisible implications of climate change that are temporally and spatially removed from sites of immediate destruction. In these works, the accumulated time and labour of individual actions dissolve to envelop the viewer in vibrant pattern as satellite imagery converges with a human scale. Through a tactile exploration of temporality and scale, they interweave personal experience and planetary forces to express a crisis both urgently present and crucially delayed.

This piece proposes a space to rethink some of the long-lasting effects, and formulates a visual exercise on the geological transformation and destruction of living ecosystems. We want to create a visual that reflects on the great acceleration of these changes (Anthropocene) and their repercussions on climate and biodiversity. A visual and living fresco that encapsulates the unstoppable disaster before our eyes, that devours and consumes nature in an exercise of terrible beauty and where we contemplate, in a very sensory and almost tactile way, the effects and changes produced on the earth’s surface.

Using techniques to photograph frequencies outside our visible light spectrum (ultraviolet and infrared) and time lapse explores ways of seeing complexities, forces, and natural phenomena that are not obvious to the human eye. We want to work on the technique to take an exploratory, deep and conscious look and make visible the invisible forces of nature (erosion, thawing, floods …), observing it through a different perspective.

Smallworld, a suite of interactive computer graphics programs was developed as part of a ten-year project initiated in 1984 to explore the potential of interactive works of art.

The first Smallworld programs were developed whilst Artist in Residence at the Computing Laboratory of the University of Kent at Canterbury, sponsored by The Arts Council and South East Arts. Smallworld was developed further as part of PhD studies at Loughborough University of Technology Computer-Human Interface Research Centre (LUTCHI)

The Smarter Home American Arts Incubator Workshop reimagines smart homes of the future. We all know the feeling of home, of belonging. But some people may not feel this sense of welcome belonging in all public spaces. What if smart architecture could create inclusive spaces for open conversation? In this one month workshop, we explore how art and technology can be used to address the issue of social inclusion. As a group, we make use of machine learning techniques and custom software to create an interactive installation as a prototype of a Smarter Home, trying to bring technology into personal space on our own terms. All together it offers a vision of a smarter home driven by human lived reality, rather than technological utopia.

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

2020, Robotic cable

How can the content of a signal make the cable that carries it move, as in the case of a video broadcasting device? How would what this video represents then influence, dynamically, the movement of the cable which moves, tortures, struggles, slowly or by jumping, like a snake caught in a trap?

A flat screen is hung facing a wall. It projects a halo of light and the cable feeding it with images is clearly visible: it comes out of the angle of this same wall, to twist and move according to the image thus diffused, that of a continuous news channel.

If the communication industries, as well as the thinkers of this field, still tend to separate the questions relative to the content from those concerning the devices that give access to it, here, it is definitely not the case.

Robotic realization: first version developed by Léo Quénéhervé with the advice of Kanty Rabenorosoa and the collaboration of Olivier Bienz and Didier Bouchon. The improvements of the current version were done by François Marionnet, Patrick Rougeot, Pierre Roux, Matthias Revol and Jérôme Saint-Clair. This project was based on a first robotic experiment developed by Yoann Dumas, Thomas Gaulier, David Kristanek and Léo Quénéhervé under the direction of Kanty Rabenorosoa.
Stage designer assistant: Corentin Loubet

Project developed in the framework of the Reflective Interaction Research Group of Ensadlab, laboratory of the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (EnsAD–Université Paris Sciences et Lettres) in partnership with the École nationale supérieure de mécanique et des microtechniques (ENSMM), S.MART Franche-Comté, AS2M department / Joint Service of Mechanics / FEMTO-ST Institute with the support of the Chaire Arts & Sciences of the École polytechnique, the EnsAD – PSL and the Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso.
Thanks to Euroflex company, Pforzheim, Germany

Soft Waters is a story of water and time.

A water goddess bathes at her temple on a lake in the mouth of an ancient volcano. 30,000 years ago, as the volcano went dormant, she came down with the rainwater. She exists here forever between droplets of time.

As the volcano contemplates extinction, a majestic shipwreck fondly recollects past conversations with cormorants, childish non-human animals ask questions about their ancestry, and an ancient forest speaks across eras about the benefits of a slow existence. Led by a precocious priestess, a mesmerised group of humans form a cult and dance in the honour of the goddess. Several millennia later, their descendants are still dancing, intoxicated, in the afterparty of an eco-rave, unknowingly competing to become the next priestess of the lake.

The water goddess watches patiently over all of them. Up high, on the tallest crest of the volcano, satellites search distant planets for alien gods and bodies of water.

Soft Waters is an experimental video game presented as a triptych with each screen synchronised to a different moment in time. Using a game controller, the viewer plays the role of the shapeshifting water goddess to explore the mythology of the lake.

The piece is influenced by the Hydrofeminism of Astrida Neimanis which reminds us that we are all bodies of water on a watery planet. She writes, “As watery, we experience ourselves less as isolated entities and more as oceanic eddies: I am a singular dynamic whirl dissolving in a complex, fluid circulation.” Soft Waters is an exploration of non-linear time and place through the circulation of watery bodies. Here, water is a time machine that connects all moments in one fluid continuum.

Solar Pink Pong is a sun-powered street video game, in which a moving sunlight reflection becomes the target and the street’s surface the screen.

‘Sonic Interface‘ is his latest creation, in which a human being experiments with his own sense of hearing, its function having been amplified by technology, which in turn plays the role of an interface between the body and the environment. Equipped with a portable hearing device made of a computer and headphones, the subject is invited to enter and explore the urban jungle. Walking freely through public spaces such as shopping malls, train stations, and underground concourse in which he encounters random sound effects and levels, the subject perceives the sonic environment around him (including his own noises) in a modified sensory ambience.

Three different types of software feed the headphones in sequence: the mosaic of sounds, the amplified delay effects and sounds, which repeat themselves and overlap on each other like a millefuille. The sonic ambience and the space in which the sounds were formed in the past are being remixed in the present. The subject, perceiving a shift between sight and sound finds himself in a new universe and, liberated from unified perception.

According to Jacques Lacan, the defenseless ear is the “only orifice which the field of consciousness cannot shut off”. As an organ closely related to the brain, it not only perceives the ambient sounds but also influences the spatio-temporal perceptions which control our sense of equilibrium. It is obvious that the interposition of technology with such a vital organ will permit an expansion of senses, but might also trigger a sense of destabilisation and confusion. As Friedrich Kittler has noticed: “In our times, when it is technically possible to explode the ear, the story of the ear more and more becomes a story of madness”. Yukiko Shikata, exh. cat. Montreal 1999

Sonic Organism is a generative audio composition: a living algorithm that exists in realtime entirely as a synthesized generative digital soundscape. It has a pulse, interconnected cellularstructure, and decision-making nerve-centre. The result is a set of unique musical compositions, with common threads running through, and repetitions within themes. The music-composing algorithm was installed in the aquarium, running on a laptop with a set of speakers, around a cylindrical fish tank as the visual focal point. The idea was to add a completely artificial being to the aquarium, to be observed as sound instead of, or complimenting, the visual creatures. Being generative, the piece consists of an artificial-intelligence algorithm calculating and playing synthesized sound, and is never truly repeated. Once the algorithm runs, the network functions as a synapse system, where adjacent cells are triggered over time and musical combinations and shapes emerge based on a balance of previous decisions and the synaptic layout.

Sono-lumínica-mano-morse: pulsating study for narrating hands is a sound installation that invites the public to interact and reflect with the world of non-hearing. I, Hugo Solís García, am going to exhibit this piece and present a short revision about the development process – since the idea conception until the making of- with the purpose of sharing my experience and reflections about the sense and machinic sensibility from the area of artistic production. Also, I want to expose my considerations about the relationship between the public and this type of creative works.

The project consists of calligraphic handwriting containing the spectral sound information of spoken words, which can be made audible by techniques of sonification. During a live performance, I draw calligraphic handwriting which is trans-formed into sound by means of a special scan-ner (camera and computer-software). I work at the interface between sound and fine art, exploring processes of transformation. In earlier works I focused on a special kind of sound visualization, on spectrographs (also called voiceprints): A spectrograph is a 2-dimensional time-frequency analysis of a sound. I am not only fascinated by the aesthetics of these images but also by their function as a medium — like a code, they contain a certain message as well as the in-formation about the original sound. With certain technology it is possible to convert them into sound again and recover their acoustic contents. In my work Sound Drawings (2010), I began to create hand-drawn spec-trograms: I reversed the process of sound-visualization and painted spectrographs of a human voice on the wall, which afterwards were made audible through an inverse Fast Fourier transformation.
My interest lies in the fact that the combination of manual drawing and digital technology is able to create an artificial voice and the perception of speech. Apart from the poetic performative aspect of drawing voices, human speech and its perception are part of the focus of my interest. My drawings are in fact only layers of frequencies that imitate a human voice. It is not much more than noise and a cluster of sine waves, and it is artificial. But at a certain point in time, we can start to recognize words, maybe a sentence; we start to hear human speech. Due to the constructive behavior of the brain, we search for meaningful messages within the noise that we hear.

SoundLabyrinth explores the relationship between sound and the body, and the sense of meaning or ‘sacredness’ that emerges from that relationship. The work uses ambisonic sound and immersive video projection, set within a 6m diameter geodesic dome. Visitors will be able to explore a number of different sound worlds located within the space of the dome, comprised of material contributed by Indian and Australian poets Nazid Kimmie (Australia/South Africa), Jameela Nishat (India) and Alice Melike Ülgezer (Australia/Turkey), as well as field recordings and sound designs by Mark Pedersen.
Utilising the immersive audio/visual infrastructure of SoundLabyrinth, Action A/V consists of three art objects, MOTION, SPEECH and VISION, which are designed to engage the perceiver both physically and mentally, and to represent that engagement through simultaneously showing the results of their physical and their mental interactions with it. The three objects overtly rely on the interaction and interpretation of the perceiver in order to become artworks. The work surrounds the perceiver, responding to subtle and intuitive interactions which entrance and fascinate.
SoundLabrinth & Action A/V are being shown as part of the workshop Gesture, sound and place: an immersive exploration of body-mapped sonic territories in two audio/visual works: SoundLabyrinth & Action A/V.

What is the South? How to build an identity when the mere act of searching is already a political act as the subject ceases to be an object of exotic study in order to define itself? This itinerant laboratory of epistemological decolonization uses scientific tools and methods for an artistic purpose. It is based on the idea that some disciplines regarded as neutral are tinged with a Western halo of tautological and epistemological construction. Technology understood not only as a device, but as a process, is perceived as a bridge to ancestral knowledge that evades the autocracy of Western aesthetics and narrative as it connects past and future.

This screening showcased the results of the corresponding workshop.

You encounter a feast of intense morphing light in a chamber structure. You feel ecstatic as you move inside the chamber through an aperture and experience bathing in transcending colour.

Radio controlled clocks, custom electronics 

With Space Time, Jeron presents a work that deals with digital synesthesia and space-time infrastructure. By making the time deviation audible, time can be experienced. Space Tme refers to several related phenomena where a clock does not run at the exact right speed compared to another clock. That is, aftersome time the clock “drifts apart” or gradually desynchronizes from the other clock. Everyday clocks such as wristwatches have finite precision. Eventually they require correction to remain accurate. The rate of drift depends onthe clock’s quality, sometimes the stability of the power source, the ambient temperature, and other subtle environmental variables. Thus the same clock can have different drift rates at different occasions. Atomic clocks are very precise and have nearly no clock drift. Even the Earth’s rotation rate has more drift and variation in drift than an atomicclock. The principle behind the atomic clock has enabled scientists to define time in terms of a fundamental physical constant, the rate at which a type of particle oscillates. Measuring these events discretely (withoutskipping an event) is what gives an atomic clock nearly zero drift.

SpaceTime Helix is an audiovisual performance with an optoacoustic instrument by Michela Pelusio, forming a large helicoid up to the ceiling. The helix surface is bright and transparent, with waves running over it, disappearing into the future, more and more distant in space-time. The translucent standing wave climbs and arcs towards the ceiling as minimal sounds harmonize with its flux. Quantum physics meets audiovisual experimentation in this performance, exploring helical symmetries and infinity, frequencies and geometry, sonic visions and perceptions. The hardware and software of the helix were developed and custom-designed by Michela, allowing for precise control and interaction with light, sound, and touch.

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

Spaghetti (stand-alone system)
In Spaghetti, the viewer is confronted with a machine that compresses a strand of spaghetti with precision until it inevitably breaks. By watching this process, the viewer feels as though their own psychological and bodily tension is being transferred to the machine, experiencing the sensation of the body being subjected to pressure. Through this machine performance, the artist explores themes of technology, the body, and humanity’s relationship with machines in an increasingly automated world.

Performance, Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique, May 19

The research-creation project “ Rhythm(s) of spaces” was born from a meeting between Vivianna Chiotini and Rémi Sagot-Duvauroux within the framework of the SACRe doctoral program and the desire to create a synergy between live performance and virtual reality. Our research comes together on two essential notions: The fragmentation of the space of representation and its influence on the setting in motion of the body.

Three isolated bodies inhabit a rhythmed scenic space. The hybrid scenography consists of a physical triptych staircase, as its virtual version is gradually being revealed and radically transformed. Step by step, from loneliness to co-presence, the performers embody the expansion of their environments and the staircase symbolizes a movement towards a form of symbiosis. Their gestures and voices are augmented by a musician whilst their gazes become cinematographic images projected on a screen, allowing the spectators to perceive poetic relations between the real and the virtual.

Performance: Logann Antuofermo, Anneta Chrysidou, Lucie Gallo
Sound creation: Romain Blanc-Tailleur

Concert/Sound Event, La Station – Gare des Mines, May 21

SoundWays Paris x Toronto – audio AR on mobile phone

Outdoor presentation on SoundWays (geolocalized listening platform) of five immersive sound works by the duos Nova Materia (FR-CL), OttoannA, Parhelic Shell (FR), Laura Barrett X Slowpitchsound (CA) and Stefana Fratila (CA). Program proposed with the support of Toronto Transit Corporation, the City of Toronto, the French Institute and the City of Paris as part of an artistic exchange project conceived on the occasion of A More Beautiful Journey: a commission of 30 immersive sound creations for the city of Toronto.

Cooperation by:

1. Station – Gare des Mines
2. CNM
3. Région Île-de-France
4. Dark Euphoria
5. L’Institut Convergences Migrations (ICM)
6. La Plateforme MAS (Musique – Audio – Sons)
7. Radio france
8. Institut français
9. Ville de Paris
10. Canada Council for the Arts
11. Toronto Arts Council
12. City of Toronto
13. The Daniels Corporation

Concert/Sound Event, La Station – Gare des Mines, May 21

SoundWays Paris x Toronto – audio AR on mobile phone

Outdoor presentation on SoundWays (geolocalized listening platform) of five immersive sound works by the duos Nova Materia (FR-CL), OttoannA, Parhelic Shell (FR), Laura Barrett X Slowpitchsound (CA) and Stefana Fratila (CA). Program proposed with the support of Toronto Transit Corporation, the City of Toronto, the French Institute and the City of Paris as part of an artistic exchange project conceived on the occasion of A More Beautiful Journey: a commission of 30 immersive sound creations for the city of Toronto.

Cooperation by:

1. Station – Gare des Mines
2. CNM
3. Région Île-de-France
4. Dark Euphoria
5. L’Institut Convergences Migrations (ICM)
6. La Plateforme MAS (Musique – Audio – Sons)
7. Radio france
8. Institut français
9. Ville de Paris
10. Canada Council for the Arts
11. Toronto Arts Council
12. City of Toronto
13. The Daniels Corporation

Concert/Sound Event, La Station – Gare des Mines, May 21

SoundWays Paris x Toronto – audio AR on mobile phone

Outdoor presentation on SoundWays (geolocalized listening platform) of five immersive sound works by the duos Nova Materia (FR-CL), OttoannA, Parhelic Shell (FR), Laura Barrett X Slowpitchsound (CA) and Stefana Fratila (CA). Program proposed with the support of Toronto Transit Corporation, the City of Toronto, the French Institute and the City of Paris as part of an artistic exchange project conceived on the occasion of A More Beautiful Journey: a commission of 30 immersive sound creations for the city of Toronto.

Cooperation by:

1. Station – Gare des Mines
2. CNM
3. Région Île-de-France
4. Dark Euphoria
5. L’Institut Convergences Migrations (ICM)
6. La Plateforme MAS (Musique – Audio – Sons)
7. Radio france
8. Institut français
9. Ville de Paris
10. Canada Council for the Arts
11. Toronto Arts Council
12. City of Toronto
13. The Daniels Corporation

Concert/Sound Event, La Station – Gare des Mines, May 21

SoundWays Paris x Toronto – audio AR on mobile phone

Outdoor presentation on SoundWays (geolocalized listening platform) of five immersive sound works by the duos Nova Materia (FR-CL), OttoannA, Parhelic Shell (FR), Laura Barrett X Slowpitchsound (CA) and Stefana Fratila (CA). Program proposed with the support of Toronto Transit Corporation, the City of Toronto, the French Institute and the City of Paris as part of an artistic exchange project conceived on the occasion of A More Beautiful Journey: a commission of 30 immersive sound creations for the city of Toronto.

Cooperation by:

1. Station – Gare des Mines
2. CNM
3. Région Île-de-France
4. Dark Euphoria
5. L’Institut Convergences Migrations (ICM)
6. La Plateforme MAS (Musique – Audio – Sons)
7. Radio france
8. Institut français
9. Ville de Paris
10. Canada Council for the Arts
11. Toronto Arts Council
12. City of Toronto
13. The Daniels Corporation

The works of the 15 students were exhibited, They were enrolled in Dr. Peter BENZ’s seminar at the Media school of Bauhaus University.

Original works of art: Gathering of Auspicious Signs, Vase of Flowers

This interactive augmented reality installation re-creates Castiglione’s painted flowers as spectral 3D objects. On the screen of a hand held tablet, the flowers in vases appear like holograms standing on top of two designated plinths. On each plinth there is a circular printed image – a detail of the flowers – that is used by the tablet as a positional reference so the visitor can walk around the plinth and view the virtual vase of flowers from any angle. The exhibition visitor may also purchase these flower prints, and then, after downloading the ‘Castiglione’s Virtual Flowers’ app onto their mobile device, they can place and view this augmented reality artwork anywhere they wish.

My current artistic work takes place under the umbrella of Spectral Landscapes where I investigate radioactivity and the landscape. Since spring 2020 I conduct intense fieldwork in Finland. I am exploring sites with heightened natural radioactivity, originating from the decay of natural uranium and thorium mineralisations with some of those places being potential future sites of mining. There I collect data via custom-made sensors and software which allow me to portray the gamma radiation fields as bodies that protrude from the radioactive base-rock as intricate but intrinsic features of the landscape. Invisible but present, the constitution of these bodies is part of the innate processes of our planet in deep time. They conform with continental drift, the biogenic accumulation of oxygen in our atmosphere, the folding of mountain ranges, and their weathering and they follow the carvings of geophysical forms which produce the features of the landscapes we observe around us. I refer to these bodies as spectral because their presence is ghostly and can only be detected via extra-sensorial means, but then they are also spectral because they are fields of light, of photons, although located in a part of the spectrum not visible to the human eye. At the same time, Finland is building Onkalo, the first permanent deep geological spent nuclear fuel repository. It will be backfilled until 2120 and engineering claims that Onkalo can hold back the nuclear waste for the next one hundred thousand years, traveling into a deep future yet to become. Two stories connected by their materiality cover the full scale of planetary time. What can we learn from deep time for the present and a possible deep future, what about questions of intergenerational justice, is there a politic of scales, and what are possible artistic strategies to address such questions?

Juried artwork. Exhibition ‘AI, Kombucha, and Cyberfeminism’ at École des Arts Décoratifs, May 16 – 21

Spectral Plain is an interactive game-installation, exploring the capacity for AI and randomized technologies to foster forms of co-creation in- and between humans.

In collaboration with Isaac Clarke, Zach Furniss, Mārcis Lapiņš, Filip Setmanuk, and Jim Zweerts. Supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL, V2_Lab for the Unstable Media (NL) and Stimuleringsfonds and Cultuur Eindhoven (NL).

Recently, visual studies scholars have turned toward conflict studies and proposed an examination of conflict through vision, itself. This radical approach means asking questions of how we see a conflict, visually — in place of how media might have re-represented what “really happened.” Such scholarship is only the first step in understanding the role, implications, and conditions of newly weaponized cameras in conflict zones. Since 2013, Berdugo has been researching the use of cameras in Israel/Palestine, and has gained unprecedented access to a video archive in the region (note that a distinguishing feature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the freedom to record).

This work traces the emergence of direct camera face-offs between Palestinian cameras and Israeli cameras — a trend Berdugo calls “shooting back at shooting back,” and which she has collected into numerous video pieces. This talk also analyzes how conflicts produce an inequality of visual rights , including rights to see and rights to be seen; rights to look and to surveil; rights to be out of sight; and rights to have one’s image circulated, posted, and trusted.

This is the animated version of the performance art light painting series by Teddy Lo. Spectrum Manners series is an abstract expression and exploration of programmable LED fixtures and body motions of the artist and long exposure photography by the photographer. For ICC Open Sky project, the artist reverse engineered the still photography into a motion graphic sequence for the media façade projection on the building.

While absorbed in conversation you notice a stranger approaching. With a curious instrument affixed to their face the visitor leans in, and listens. The mouth opens, patterns of rhythm and sound emanate from within: voices recognizable as your own.

Spun out of focus, words reveal their ingrained subtleties as the collector of conversation captures the sentence but not the sentiment. Vocal exchanges are recalled and reflected. Voices are transformed by physical formant inflections, while acoustic hallucinations seem to reference what might have been said.

An étude on hearing lips and seeing voices, the performer’s mechanically augmented vocal tract reshapes and filters conversational spectra into new modes of mis-communication. Spiel physically unravels the tenuous synesthetic relationship between what is seen, heard and understood.

SPIRAL OF WORDS is a platform for creative writing in VR, based on an idea realized in 1998. Three authors from three locations (London, UK; The Hague, the Netherlands and Novi Sad, Serbia) sent texts at defined time intervals, starting from words to sentences over paragraphs to short stories, all this took place via e-mail/the internet, creating a common narrative in a defined location that built a spiral of words in a fictional space.

The VR project SPIRAL OF WORDS is a kind of ‘artistic recycling’ as well as an archive of the idea of a realized textual narrative performance.
The narratives in SPIRAL OF WORDS have been partially modified, they symbolize the original idea in different colors. The project is refreshed, enriched, and different in relation to the original performance, it is actually a reinterpretation of a creative collaborative idea, in a way that VR media allows. And that is the direct interaction of the users, where they freely communicate with the given words, choosing them, moving them, and creating their own meta-text, in any form they desire. Certain words in the spiral, when selected, activate short audio and visual effects that are symbolic to them. All selected words of the newly created narrative can be changed, rearranged, or rejected. SPIRAL OF WORDS is currently an unrepeatable experience, in which user’s meta-text only lasts for the duration of the session.

Ulf Langheinrich was commissioned to create a special project for the opening of ISEA2016 at the Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre Theatre of the School of Creative Media.

Audiovisual live-improvisation, duration circa 45 minutes
remoulding reforming matter,
changing extension, consistency, viscosity, transparency, temperature symphonic noise, pulsating fluid textures
fields of oscillations in interference, in phase, in sync, in one vibration, from surface to deep space,
a resonant matrix,
a deep glow
your body
you have lost everything and it will be silent around you.

“In the works of Ulf Langheinrich, contexts, social settings, gestures and meanings are of no interest. The external features have been removed from the apparatuses with which images and sounds are produced. These works are media, but without a concrete mission—nothing is visualized, nothing set to music. Interest is focused on the materiality of the media, on its physics” _Marc Ries

one/two … red/black … lost/locked … Looped sequences of similar short texts appear briefly on two screens mounted on monochrome boards (one red, one black) and are accompanied by two repeated sounds, with the asynchronous nature of playback causing slight rhythmic shifts. The work is a simple language play of lists; a meditation on the contemporary social fixation on acquisitive selfishness and ‘security’; a reminder of the inevitability of loss; and a poetic allusion to the romanticism of ‘lostness’; while the monochromes evince associative economic and political meanings built up around the colours red and black. Disassembled digital photoframe displays attached to the screens expose the technological complexity underpinning consumer culture, whilst also combining with the screens to present oddly anthropomorphic ‘torso and head’ figures.

Based at KZNSA Gallery this project by the New York City based artist Carl Skelton and member of M2C Institute Stephan Siegert related to the PS2 Subproject “Express Yourself/city.”. States of Public Mind / Wireless Birds proposed additions to the public language of road signs, in preparation for a time when the ubiquity of digital signage in “Smart” cities will make it possible not only to provide dynamic signage, but to do so based on the direct participation of local stakeholders in real time, about a much broader range of concepts relevant to safety and quality of life. ISEA2018 organizers, artists, visitors, neighbors, and everyone else could get into exchange with the artists and propose alert/ warning/ information/ command sign ideas to complement and extend not only the iconography, but also terms of engagement of the public realm at a hyper-local level. Participants could send a fnished graphic, a photo of a sketch, a description of an idea, or a single word. After one week over 20 new road signs were produced all picking up local particularities and nuisances in a humoristic way.

Rabotnik TV is a weekly video/art magazine on Amsterdam’s cable network. After SISEA they broadcasted this programme, consisting of video of Stelarc’s main SISEA performance, documention of his earlier work and an interview with Stelarc.

Floor cameras Fokke van der Veer & John Duncan. Interview by John Duncan.

sTem is the sensitive encounter between the precariousness of survival and the sustainability of the machine. The device traces an unlikely landscape, it roams around the area and heads for the encounter with the tree chimera. It questions the machine and its capacity for poetic correspondence. In a crossing that tends towards the absolute, passengers will never touch the ground; they slip through the landscape sensitive to the sound of the intertwining of the murmurs of the wind, the polyphonic sequences of choirs and the dark scraping of strings – all this the result of algorithmic calculations (Turing machine).

The works Still Life (Tornadoes) and Still Life (Swell) (2021) are a reformulation of the Neo-Barroc Still Life genre in several videos, allegorizing both the questions related to human existence and its relationship with Nature. Their pictorial tonality is very sophisticated, offering a fascinating hyper-reality approach that presents the viewer with specific details such as the movement of a piece of cloth or the spilling of liquid from a glass due to an inexplicable turbulence. Drama and beauty are intertwined in these works that explain this artist’s maturity.

An exploration of graphs and boundaries in paintings and video. The work questions how colours and forms are used to signify wealth.

Straights is part of the Fracture Zone exhibition. Fracture Zone conjures artists from Brazil and South Africa to dialogue as duos over shares subjects. Post-colonial displacements, enlaced hidden histories, decolonial imaginaries, the friction between human and natural processes through abusive resource exploitation, representations of symbolic cultural expressions, urban dynamics of exclusion, political and social reflections are some of the themes present at the exhibition.

Streaming Pool is an interactive installation of clusters of wheel-thrown plates and bowls which contain speakers from which sounds of social interaction, nature, and art making come together to fill the space and to remind us of our everyday existence, the materiality of culture and ways in which we connect.

Hidden in a small side room is the other ‘heart’ of this show – the visceral one: Peta Clancy and Helen Pynor’s Study Towards Aftermath. A video documentation of the perfusion of pig hearts, performed at the Science Gallery in Dublin earlier in 2013, the work cleanly records a technical process, but this documentation is both disturbing and acutely poetic.

From what I see, ‘perfusion’ entails taking the pig hearts, hooking them up to tubes, zapping them into apparent life with a defibrillator (don’t quote me on this), and pumping blood through them (or letting them do the pumping themselves); in this case into a large perspex ‘blood-catching’ apparatus. Against Gail Priest’s minimal soundtrack of gentle harmonic hums, soft and distant, we watch the set-up: the splattering blood as clamps are manipulated; the urinal-like containers into which the hearts bleed copiously; the audience clustered around. The cinematography is stunning: sharp-focused and built on primary colours, mostly red. The two hearts in their dead-but-animated state pump and bleed; at one point, one seems to hiccup blood – it’s gruesome. The cut arteries gape like too-soft mouths; the beating action is undulating, horribly sensuous, and riveting.

Animation shorts ‘Supercollider: Guns’​ and ‘Infection’​. Format – digital with 35mm output.

‘Supercollider:Infection’, is one of three 35mm animation shorts that make up the Supercollider cycle – the others being ‘Guns’ and ‘Boundaries of Mankind’.
Marc Swadel – Director/Sound
Paul Swadel – Director/Editing
A ‘Swad Bros’ Production.

SuperEverything is a cross disciplinary performing arts project by the UK’s leading audiovisual artists, The Light Surgeons, which sets out to explore the relationship between identity, ritual and place.

“Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with technological mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and complexity.”*

The fractured drift of the perpetual loop and harsh regression of the gif animation with its belligerent stutter both in their own way present new modalities, ruptures in our understanding of time, new paradigms, variant ontologies, recursive action, indefinite progression, endless reiteration. High frequency trading algorithms, twitter feeds, data flow, meme generators, click streams; modernity hums with relentless aetheric data coursing through the veins of our cities.

* Cuboniks, Laboria, “Xenofeminism: A politics for alienation”

Drops of oil seem to hover unsupported in mid-air. At other times, the drops are in the process of a reverse slow motion splash onto the pedestal.

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

Video installation

Oli Sorenson presents Chaîne logistique, a sequence of animations composed of simple geometric shapes in extremely vivid colors. Created in a hybrid style, this video recalls the square layout of Instagram, the pixelated landscapes of Minecraft as much as the works of american painter Peter Halley. Sorenson’s images thus feature a multitude of scenes, both abstract and figurative, to illustrate the ubiquity of networks that exert controls over our social relationships. Among these fiber optic matrices that feed the global digital economy, the artist tries to interweave other networks of roads, shipping lanes, pipelines, electrical cables and sewers, as well as the atmosphere saturated with WiFi and Bluetooth signals, in addition to carbon polluants and pesticides. These conduits and many others contribute to an acceleration of consumption flows at the heart of contemporary societies, particularly through the rapid obsolescence of technological devices, and other sectors of human activity which are accumulating on ever-increasing areas of land and sea, to the point of causing urgent ecological repercussions.

Digital Art technology has allowed for the creation of a myriad of different types of art. There are very few limitations when it comes to creating digital art. As an artist, S’boniso Shelembe seeks to explore the possibilities presented by this technology. This work is a short series of digital sculptures exhibited as augmented reality objects. These sculptures are made to look like amalgamations of organic objects, creating forms which bring to mind the idea that the artwork could have, at some point, been alive. At their core, they are created to be curiosities. Abstract pieces that seek to make their audience question what the sculpture actually is, and what went into their creation, they explore the interplay between the intangible (the digital) and the tangibly real (physical space).

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

Interactive installation
TV monitor, camera, aluminium, acrylic, electronics, computer
Dimensions : 210 cm x 120 cm x 20 cm

​Veillance is an interactive installation that performs a full-size scan of individuals on a large screen. In doing so, it makes an inventory of all the people it has interacted with in a vast mosaic.

Developed by Steve Mann, the concept of veillance is the state of mutual scrutiny that arises between citizens and institutions constantly snooping on each other. In Veillance, while we contemplate the scanned images of other individuals, the installation captures our portrait – and adds it to its archive. However, given the nature of the scanning process, we can evade capture via our gestures – altering our appearance over time – thereby hijacking the scanography process.

“Swarm Raid” acts as an interspecies meditation on social life. In this music and dance film, two of the most social creatures on earth—ants and humans—converge in a surreal trip to the grocery store inspired by the highly coordinated food gathering missions of the army ant species Eciton burchellii. The central character in the film experiences a kind of fever dream borne of social anxiety in which she witnesses crowds of humans becoming ant-like workers bringing offerings of food to their “ant queen,” performed by a virtuosic soprano. The ant queen invokes the refined choreography of the army ants as she sings “Pheromones, show the way! Coordinate the corps, of our Eciton ballet.” Meanwhile, humans dance in and around shopping carts and circle islands of produce in Busby Berkeley-inspired formations. Ultimately, distortions in the speed of the film reveal a manic, ant-like quality to the humans’ search for food. In all, the film draws connections between the ways that humans and ants communicate and find food, and, more importantly, reflects on collective behavior and social hierarchy in ants and humans.

“Swarm Raid” was inspired by the Carl and Marian Rettenmeyer Army Ant Guest Collection housed at the University of Connecticut, a world-class natural history collection of more than 2 million specimens. The music for “Swarm Raid” is scored for soprano and custom digital instruments and combines traditional through-composed music with musical textures developed using a generative approach to music composition modeled on biological processes. The film is directed by Anna Lindemann and Ryan Glista. Music by Lindemann; lyrics by Emma Komlos-Hrobsky; performance by soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, Lindemann, and fifty swarming members of the community.

Swarm Vision is an installation consisting of multiple autonomously behaving cameras simulating human vision that continuously map the space in which they are situated on large screens.

Nuits Sonores

Swarm is an immersive, Biotechno, audiovisual performance envisioned by Colombian artist Juan Cortes and his group “Atractor” It takes an unconventional look at the complex structures of language between some insects that communicate through sound waves such fireflies, crickets and bees. The artist will transform the audio field recordings of these species recorded live in the Colombian mountains and through Arduino metamorphosing them into visually mesmerizing, immersive laser projections. The performance is enhanced by live electronic music developed by the artist and his team of engineers. This performance has been artistically directed by Asher Remy-Toledo director of HyphenHub.

The notion of emergence result from the interaction of many component according to simple rules, it passes through the inert material , human and animal life. This concept also applies to the viewer’s perception . Specifically, the piece is presented in the form of a global environment composed with complex shape and organic forms constantly changing. Aesthetically, the work explores the relationship between clouds of particles and sound grains.

Swim was the last collaboration Kombo Chapfika created with Sarah Murphy, Erin Murphy, and Gemma Temlett before the Murphy family left Zimbabwe for greener pastures. This was created as a goodbye of sorts. The project emerged out of an urge to create something to express that heightened moment before imminent loss, the allure and risk of an unknown future.

SYN is an interactive installation activated by Internet data exchange. This acrylic artificial nervous system uses video mapping technology and social networking to function as a postmodern social brain. With a simple tweet, a participant initiates an audiovisual performance by activating the sculpture with a mobile device, simulating the activity of a central nervous system.
SYN is a synchronization request packet on the Internet.
SYN means “together” in ancient greek.
SYN is the synapsis.
Through the synapses a neuron exchanges informations with other neurons within a neural network managed by the brain.
SYN installation represents an artificial neural system with a constant exchange of electrical inpulses. The constant exchange of electrical impulses is realised using QuartzComposer to set a precise videomapping activated by topic related tweets on Twitter and audience web-interaction. Using a mobile device (smartphone, tablet or laptop), anybody can send a spark, a creative contribution from the festival location or all over the city. Each spark will activate the installation and can be visualized on the dedicated app. Moreover, the videomapping can be realized as well within an audiovisual live performance. Video: ARlab | SYN [2011]
Credits:
Art Direction/IxD: Mariano Leotta
Set Design: Marta Nardi
Sound: Kaeba (Plaster) myspace.com/kaebasound
Visuals: Aikia alessandraleone.com & Born Holmer
Production: artereazione.org + Consonant

Syndemic Sublime is an ongoing series of data-driven computer-generated animations created using COVID-19 data libraries and molecular visualization software. The animations intertwine molecular models of SARS-CoV-2 with both human and non-human protein structures such as antibodies and cell receptors. The generative movement is created using data from COVID deaths to disrupt the 20 amino acid residues along the protein structures. The resulting disruptions create mesmerizing tableaus that are sometimes spastic and sometimes sublime. Each animation has a unique starting and ending form as it slowly morphs from its biological folded form or “conformation” to its technologically distorted form. The generative quality of the process allows for unpredictable and unique transformations within each animation as the software creates unexpected visuals. The unraveling and collision of the proteins results in both jarring glitches and in soothing movements. The animations in the series combine models of proteins from the coronavirus with proteins from llamas, alpacas, cats, dogs, pangolins, bats and humans evoking our increasing interspecies entanglements in the contemporary biotechnological landscape. From zoonotic diseases to transgenic vaccine development to the use of animals as living factories to produce biological products, our understanding of what it means to be “human” in the “natural world” is becoming increasingly complex. The slow, quiet animations create liminal spaces for reflection, mourning, and wonder at the unseen molecular forces of the biological world affecting our daily lives in profound ways.

“tangibleFlux expresses the ontogenic moment that vividly moves around the cosmos. In its microcosms, the three-dimensional movement of spheroids under magnetic harmony, look like a paranormal phenomenon, like the dance of life itself.” – advertimes journal, Kotaro and Takashi Koguchi, Japan (2018.09.11)

“I felt a mysterious force that makes me forget even the sense of time and space due to the whirlpool of movement of entities that cannot be seen at the beginning nor at the end.” – 100BRANCH Magazine, Shibuya, Japan (2018.10.15)

In search for the hidden mysteries of matter from the borders of table-top astrophysics and natural fiction, three microcosms orchestrate states of sensory access to the phenomenological emergence of order out of chaos. tangibleFlux ? plenumorphic ? chaosmosis is an installation that invites participants to intimately encounter the ontogenesis of vital patterns through the spontaneous formation of temporal textures that emerge from material-energy fields.

Physically investigated through collaboration with forces of complex harmonic motion, patterns-of-interaction between magnetism, gravity, and light spiral out of theories of complexity and into an improvisatory dance of hallucinatory forms. Eventually, the kinetic event unveils messy realness chaosing into balance: things doing… stuff seeking a minimum-energy-state under magnetic flux. Sensually binding, spatially confusing, and temporally unsettling, tangibleFlux pulls everything into immediate vibrational relation with its vertiginous ritual.

Each microcosm engages unique entanglements. Microcosm no.1 “plenumeia” suspends a miniature ball above unstable magnetic fields. The ball shoots, twists, and turns towards a stability which it never sustains, leading to the spontaneous emergence of hypnotic patterns. Chaotic behaviour of the ball is then sonified and haptified in poetic sync, confusing the senses and bringing the body into prominence. No.2 “plenumélliptique périgée”, stirs a large array of spheroids in an intensive magnetic whirlpool. Elliptical textures emerge and morph to survive induced instabilities… energetic upheavals at the edge of chaos surrender to the seemingly static power of an underlying orbicular resonance of atomic topologies. No.3 “plenumophileia” holds a sensual swamp of voids, curves, and sog, where gestures prevail shapes: where pixel is lube, architecture is pollen, and objects are but excited clumps in a puddle of time.

Exhibition. Forum des Images, May 16 – 21
Also ISEA2023 Artist Talk

Sunjeong Hwang is an ISEA2023 selected artist

Premiered and exhibited at ACC (Asia Culture Center), 2021. Also exhibited at New Art City (online) by the Arts Council Korea Art Museum, 2022.
Mycelium is an organism on earth that occupies most of the earth’s geological period, far beyond the geological period called the Anthropocene. Artist named this to ‘metabolic organ,’ and through them, the coexistence explores from a natural and global perspective. Contains the human and mycelial ontological synthesized as an experience, this work includes the organic metabolism of the fungal system and the artist’s perspective on metabolizing the earth.

While researching mycelium fungi, the artist unravels the relationship and network of fungi and the ‘indeterminism’ development of their growth process as a generative medium using new media and neural rendering, Ai and neural networks. And through this organism, the ecology system reveals the view that Eastern time implied.

Tanhamnu Warp Drive Single Channel Video 14’05” 2021 _The Tanhamu Project begins with research on the network system of mushrooms (fungi), ecology metabolism, and symbiotic relationships, and contains thoughts about Earth-human metabolism in the current geological era. Through this project, named ‘Tanhamu’, which is a combination of the ancient Sanskrit words ‘Taṇhā’(desire)’ and ‘舞mu(dance), the artist has been working on symbosis and synthesis with species, connection of differences and Reflecting on the meaning of encountering through transformation. Tanhamu unleashes the posthuman interest in metabolism and organic communication through media works, both as a natural-artificial institution that extends human network system and symbiotic relationships.

Director Creative Visuals / Cinematograph / Writer / Voice: Hwang Sunjeong
Sound design / Genertive AI: Hwang Sunjeong,
MoonGyuchul Neural Randering: Hwang Sunjeong, Sergio Bromberg
human Cast: LeeJeongmin

An interactive object that obstructs the action of viewing as a device to confuse, frustrate and ultimately question the act of gazing vainly.

A framed video work shows a honeybee traversing botanical drawings of native plants from New Mexico, Greece and Dubai (the artist’s current home, native home, and location of conference)

The video shows gestural interaction with a building. A human figure explores the contours and surfaces of the architecture surrounding it. The tentativeness of touch contrasts with the massiveness of the highrise on which these images are being displayed. The figure plays with the boundaries of the architectural space to create and comprehend it as a space for the human body. The work alludes to the rise of touch as primary means of our interaction with media, and to the tentativeness of our grasp of how contemporary media architectures transform our existence.

TentVision was implemented by the Bremen artists Jürgen Amthor, Marion Bösen, Patricia Lambertus. The three artists performed and exhibited art works in public space that were created together with by-passers and artists from Durban as a “re-survey” of urbanity as a social and cultural space with art as a medium of exchange between the spheres and people. Therefore the artists set up a tent at different places in Durban, KZNSA Gallery, BAT Center, City Hall, Durban Art Gallery, UShaka Marine World and DUT University. People could enter the tent and share images of Durban with the artists. In a looping slideshow all shared images piled up forming layers of memories and views. Not only locals shared images with the artists but also conference participants. Result was a collection of personal visual statements on Durban from the inside and outside perspective.

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

This is a test art event for connection to the group pod.

A portal was created in the 404th Wall between 30th October and 8th November 2014 when Alexia Mellor and Anthony Schrag crossed the threshold to explore what lies on the other side. During this period they used Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Six Memos for the Next Millenniumas guidebooks for their explorations. Each day, they navigated this new land with one of Calvino’s memos: lightness, quickness, multiplicity, exactitude, visibility and constancy. Their findings were sent back to the team of Extra Dimensional Explorers (EDE) and invited guests at the NewBridge Project Space in Newcastle who interpreted and responded to a variety of artefacts. Mellor and Schrag connected with the EDE team using livestreams, which have been archived in a top secret vault. As a new recruit to the EDE team, you can access these videos as you prepare for your own mission of crossing the 404th divide. Search the archive below. Don’t worry. There is no need for a chewing-gum stretching machine afterwards.

Symbiosis and Humanity(s) Exhibition, MSH Paris Nord, May 17- 27

The Avatar Alert of Etienne Armand Amato & Claire Sistach, ISEA2023 selected artists, occurs in the mild spring of 2023, in the middle of an Electronic Art Symposium, and among many other announcements of catastrophe, it attempts to confront humanity with its present and past choices concerning the virtual. Will the message find an echo? The diversity of possible futures is announced, with its nuances and its chasms. Which one will be made by humans, with the help of the clairvoyance of their digital partners, the avatars of yesterday, today and tomorrow.

In 2011, in full expansion of immersive worlds, the Avatar Society was founded, bringing hope and identity emancipation. She wants to promote symbiotic collaboration between digital avatars who deserve more fair consideration and humans whose role would be to take care of them and evolve together. In 2023, hitherto discreet, this organization is bringing out its reserve to alert humanity, because today our future is decisively at stake, while colossal ideological and economic forces are taking hold of the metaverse. According to its prospective studies, and thanks to mysterious “very well placed” informants, four more or less worrying or desirable futures are announced, which depend on our current choices. Taking advantage of ISEA2023, this avatar alert sheds light on the year 2056. Will we succeed in cultivating an alliance between humans and avatars or cannibalize each other? What role will AIs play? How to avoid a hopeless fascination?

The altar of a temple built by the Church of Christ Scientist in San Francisco, incessantly buzzes with the sound of data flow. As you enter the building and go up the staircase, the humming becomes hypnotic. The trance leads you to the altar, where you find yourself surrounded by huge windows that stain the entire room with an intense yellow light. The temple houses six towers of digital servers arranged at the two sides of the main altar. The sea of data flowing through these hard drives—and others not visible to the public—comprises the Internet Archive (IA), the largest digital library in the world.

In most genesis stories life originates in water. Just like our origin stories, our digital cosmology is bound up in the language of fluidity. Our world, the Blue Marble, is a vast ocean of data, where each droplet of water is a bit of potential information. As data flows from cloud to cloud, back into electrical currents in vast oceans of data, water is revealed to us as the initial stage of being, each particle containing the possibility of knowing ourselves—of sensing our individual and collective consciousness.

The evaporation of information from the ocean, with its swirling cables, is forming unprecedented clouds. All climate predictions today suggest that the poles are rapidly melting, sea levels are quickly rising, and large dark clouds are forming over our global networks. Some even think that the depth of these dark digital clouds is larger than the depth of our cosmos. We live in the eye of this hurricane, every time we swipe our phone or turn our screens on. The storm of data pushed by the winds of capital and surveillance seems almost unstoppable. If all predictions are correct, what will this storm of data look like when the clouds finally break?

Original footage shot in high speed as a 360-degree panorama of a street sculpture. Sound by david fodel.

The Burst of Pleasure is an electronic installation which builds up the excitement and relief holds the audience’s breath and emotion and serves as a certain art therapy.

The work creates an experience from physical vibration into various sound compositions. The analog properties transformed into a canvas of audio-visual imagination beyond the range of vibration and resonances.

This artwork is an exploration of our reality and augmented reality. The Creature is an example of how we have created another environment, another world through technology. This environment is something we interact with daily, It is the internet of things, the digital space; whether it be Facebook, Instagram or Google; this artificial reality has become both real and alien. We can engage with the internet to connect with people virtually, create social networks, play multiplayer games and make friends, however we interact on a capacity that is disconnected, without a medium to engage with this environment all of these connections are lost. The Creature has been designed to visually portray the fragility and alien like environment we have created, the Creature is from this artificial technologic world as it attempts to interact and ingest aspects of the real world it grows frustrated in finding that it cannot actually grasp reality, it is a futile attempt. Whilst it can see us and try to interact, it can only be seen through the tools we have created, and even when we can see it and react to it, we can't truly interact with it.

Ten thousand years ago, there were 1 million people living on the planet, fifty years ago there were 3 billion of us and, by the end of this century, we are estimated to reach a population of 10 billion people! We have modified almost every part of our planet and, as we continue to grow, our need for vital resources increases exponentially. We human beings are the main force behind every global problem we face.

Marco Barotti’s new work is a kinetic sound sculpture resembling an egg. The cycle of life, reflected in the shape of the sculpture with neither beginning nor end, symbolizes fertility and reproduction – and thus questions the impact of overpopulation. Driven by real-time data generated by the Worldometer, the sculpture constantly changes its shape.

The data produced by the Worldometer counter recording births and deaths is converted into bass frequencies. These frequencies are pitched below what is audibly perceptible by human beings, infrasound. They are too low to be heard but powerful enough to drive the subwoofer to produce movements, air pressure and sound vibrations to interact with the flexible membrane of the structure. This creates unpredictable patterns that continuously reshape the sculpture.

Original work of art: One Hundred Horses by Giuseppe Castiglione

Giuseppe Castiglione painted many horse scenes. His horses are very life-like thanks to the shadows and fine details that brought painterly realism to a new height. To remain faithful to the original painting, the latest most sophisticated animation technology was utilized to render and vividly portray images of horses engaging in playful activities: nudging each other, resting, galloping and fording.

The common thread running through Moscheta’s work is a great fascination for nature, together with his willingness to travel and experience the land- scape. This experience of traveling and living in difficult environments stimulated his interest in depicting the memory of a place in his works, developing a classification procedure like that of an archaeologist questioning the boundaries of territory, geography and physics through art.

The Erection of Phygital Graveyard is an auto-generated real-time animation which speculates the heritage of the phygital environment where the online world and the physical world are intertwined. Updated every hour, the system searches for the most popular keywords online, algorithmically downloads and removes part of the downloaded image which conveys the narrative, leaving only the color information and the rectangular frame. The system automatically arranges the residue of the images creating the digiscape of our collective thoughts of the past and the present.

The space created in The Erection of Phygital Graveyard has no similar world to compare as it prevails for one hour and what seems like an accidental creation is only edited by an algorithm. Created by data which was once edited through removal, the phygital world turns into a cosmic dust.

Instead of it being a mimicry of the physical world, The Erection of Phygital Graveyard reveals the workings of the machines dealing with data and in the process displays how the digital culture is created through the means of re-arranging the visual information. Within this digital ecosystem and culture, where the machine generalizes, classifies and makes decisions, and as we all take part in training a dataset to train the machine, The Erection of Phygital Graveyard speculates the possible heritage and the culture of the digital.

Exhibition. Le Cube Garges, April 27 – May 18

2020
Installation, interactive, moving and sound sculpture

The statuary bodies of the Franco-Iranian artist Yosra Mojtahedi make indistinct the borders separating the human from the non-human, the animated from the inanimous, the mythological from the prospective. The Erosorbenus, this oxymoronic and innovative piece, attracts and repels, fascinates and alerts in an assumed technological baroque. She combines soft robotics, ceramics and programming, in a sculpture that emerges from obscurity. The Erosorbenus is a hybrid, sensual and vegetal body on which robos cling

The Erosarbenus is a body, a tree, a sensual sculpture that calls for touch. Inspired by the richness of plant forms and human anatomy, the artist Yosra Mojtahedi questions through her works the boundary between living and non-living. In order to convey the sensation of life, the artist worked with the DEFROST laboratory at INRIA,specialized in soft robots, soft and flexible robots powered by an air blowing system. Like a flower that opens, the work offers an organic appearance whose realization called on the four elements: earth, fire (ceramic firing), liquid, air. Erosarbenus breathes, it also sings. Drawing on her Persian and Kurdish roots, the artist summons traditional songs to transform the sculpture into a sounding board for these songs forbidden to women in Iran. In the room floats a heady and sensual smell of rose, an emblematic perfume of Persian civilization.

Production: Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains In partnership with Elnria – Defrost (Deformable Robotic Software) ADAGP Digital Art Revelation Prize 2020.

The Flying Umbrella Project is an aerial robotic performance consisting of two artificial flying creatures in the form of umbrella mating in the air. As the canopy of the umbrella severely hinders airflow into the propellers, they exist as tragic, extremely non-efficient man-made lifeforms that struggle with wind and gravity. During the performance, these flying creatures become emotional prosthetic of the viewers, and enable them to access the emotions through absurdity and extension of self.

Taking a cue from the immense collection of artifacts at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, the installation will use recreations of significant objects as “keys’ to access alternate storylines in a viewer-activated audiovisual environment.

This self-generating work – “part robot, part performance and part durational kinetic installation” – populates itself over the exhibition period by way of a prototype 3D printer. A new ‘component’ for a model of a freeway system is ‘printed’ every 30 minutes, and is then placed on the gallery floor by visitors as directed by the artist; by the end of the exhibition the system will cover the gallery floor. By rendering visible the process of making and assembling the sculpture, the performative nature of the installation is embedded within the work. Situated within the traditions of kinetic sculpture and durational installation, this work also has a close relationship to performance in its direction of participants’ physical movement through time and space. The Generative Freeway Project takes the freeway – a central infrastructure and key cultural metaphor of our society – and extends the allegory by using its intersections to draw attention to the chaos, confusion and constant movement of our world.

The Genre Project: Listening Stations for Birds that Play Human Music is an outdoor installation that invites birds to respond to different genres of human music. This project acknowledges that birds in urban settings are routinely bombarded by human noise and circumstantial evidence shows that many avian species pay attention to it. In the Northern Hemisphere cat birds and mockingbirds replicate sounds made by people. In Australia, the lyre bird even learns human tunes and teaches them to successive generations of its young. However, no one has studied what kinds of human music our avian companion species might enjoy.

The Genre Project addresses this lack of human knowledge by creating system designed for birds that plays human song. This project involves the installation of three “listening stations,” that each play a different genre of human music. Each listening station is comprised of an audio hood, a sound system, and a covered tray of wild bird food. While the Genre Project will be available for humans to watch on a live-feed at ISEA 2020, the ultimate goal of this artwork is to allow our avian companion species to select the kinds of music that they prefer in our shared environment.

Begun in residence at K11 Art Village, Wuhan, the body of work The Gynoid’s Guide to Continuous Service surveys the scene in the not-so-distant future when hyper-real fembots are integrated, in service mode, into existing patriarchal fabrics and socio-industrial complexes. It imagines what ‘life’ is like for the gynoid, and presents a manual for ‘her’ professional performance.

The object series Gynoid Survival Kit prototypes jewellery and accessories, worn by the gynoid, that work to ensure both her personal safety and her continuous operation. They could be called ‘analogue hacks’ for robots, or wearables for machines.