Art Events Data Table

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.

The Ideas of a tree is a product of its specific time and place much like the natural growth of a tree. It reacts and develops according to its surrounding and constantly records various environmental impacts in its growth process. Each single tree tells its own story of development.

My body of work presents the essence of nature from various microscopic structures, illustrating the substance of the world. A digital microscope was used to capture these complex forms of various plants and objects revealing the natural state of an organic system and visual movements that could not be seen with the naked eye. The Inner Essence is an experimental video that depicts the essence of nature through various microscopic structures, ultimately illustrating the totality of nature’s beauty beyond the surface. This exploration highlights the juxtaposition between the outsider’s perspective upon nature and the essence of nature itself through the lens of a microscope. I was fascinated by the manipulation of optic focuses and the ability to travel through what appears to be the underlying true worlds. This experimentation allows me to observe in contemplation and speculation of nature’s mysteriousness.

A collaboration between The Institute of Unnecessary Research and The Egyptian Bioart Club. A living artwork/open lab around DIY biology, bioart, the body and digital technologies.

The 25 ‘great achievements’ are, of course, the 25 symposia. The symposium is a non-commercial event, that is not structurally supported by any funding party. The nomadic character of the symposium makes it each time a new adventure, for a new team of dedicated people, to organise it. The clip celebrates these achievements as well as the hundreds of artists and thinkers from all over the world that presented their work at ISEA and without whom the achievements would not have been successful. In relation to the fact that each symposium organisation is free to design their own unique  logo, graphic style and  themes, which reflects the symposium series’ non-centralised character, the typography of the locations of the 25 symposia in the clip is extremely diverse. A marching band goes backwards, from 2019 to 1988; the Saints are marchin’ in at the centre of the festivities: the names of some of the keynote speakers and major artists that presented at the ISEA Symposia flash by. Close watching also reveals flashes of some outstanding ISEA event locations, like Buckminster Fuller’s Biosphere in Montreal. The almost chaotic typography of the ISEA city names is counter balanced by the magical, but sleek design of the “25th ISEA” lettering which reminds of the Dutch design tradition of De Stijl. The soundtrack comes, like some of the lectures, and many of the art works we hear and see at ISEA, from Outer Space. This time literally: the ‘anchor man’ of ISEA1990, Seth Shostak, then working for the University of Groningen and now for the Seti Institute, provided pulsar sounds from outer space, that were processed by Dutch sound artist Alfred Marseille. The sounds from the past (as sounds from outer space are) are re-contextualised by Sweenen & Noorda in this moment in time.

Thanks to Wim van der Plas (production) and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Korea for funding the USB-cards on which the film was distributed to the ISEA2019 participants 

Sensory fluid imagery of the megacities New York, Mexico City, São Paulo, Paris, Berlin, London, Shanghai, and Tokyo explores telematic space and the future development of global cities as the material embodiment of information density.

The Key To Time is a highly experimental and imaginative, immersive, cinematic art experience designed for 360 cinemas, domes, virtual reality headsets and other immersive formats. It offers a surreal and operatic, dream-like experience, and it bridges early cinema and virtual reality. Filmed at the CeTA Studios in Wroclaw, Poland, and created using 3-D 360 degree cinema technologies, the experience plunges viewers into a dreamlike adventure inside mechanisms of time and cinema itself.

The dreamlike story follows Tanek, a scientist who is trapped in the future due to a time-travel accident. His only hope is to travel through dreams. As with works like Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room and David Blair’s Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, this experimental art work turns upon its narrative threads. In addressing time, technology and environmental catastrophe, it also echoes themes of classics of early cinema like Arrival of a Train (at Ciotat) and Metropolis. The Key To Time occupies a space between media arts, sound and cinema. It is the result of an unique collaboration between media artist/filmmaker Roderick Coover and composer Krzysztof Wolek. Song and dialog elements layer over cinematic sequences filmed silently both in green screen studio settings and natural settings.

Using ultra-modern musical influences that echo the revolutionary animation techniques of the time, OZMA unveils to the public an unprecedented version of Harry O. Hoyt’s 1925 masterpiece, the most faithful to the original ever reissued. An hour and twenty minutes of live electro-jazz played to the first major dinosaur movie, The Lost World is loaded with adventures and mysteries, impossible love affairs, special effects and dinosaur battles that OZMA refreshes with improvisation, synths and electronic landscapes. With a guest appearance by Madala Kunene.

The film follows a mailman’s bag during its daily routine. The bag becomes the protagonist. The recording engages the real-life moment to moment activity of mail delivery and charts the interactions between humans (postman and citizen) and objects (mail and mailbox).

This piece highlights the social commentary on the political life of Robert Mugabe – an international icon (of sorts) – from Hero to Villain. This is showcased in the various different portraits that embody the many faces he carried in the different parts of his political life (himself, the people around him (such as his family, his allies) & the socio-economic effects of his political decisions). The portraits will be animated, made up of a collage of still images and videos, his journey is so rich in great visuals. This will be further complimented by short sound bites of his speeches and instrumental music that defined the different eras so to speak, such as the political jingles. I have divided his political life into 4 main sections: from the 1960s-80s he was the man of the people, the ultimate hero; in the 90s he was the true darling son of the West, who was slowly starting to rebel; from 2000 to 2016 he was the villain that people didn’t see coming and he became the man who completely sucked the life out of the “Breadbasket of Africa”; & 2017, where he was the ultimate villain and dictator who everyone gravely disliked.

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

A computer generated figure with a brain outside of their head, long white lines for hair, and a distorted rig cage like interior of the body visible, over a black background.
Rachel Rossin’s The Maw Of is a transmedia story — a narrative unfolding across multiple platforms and formats — that reflects on the ways in which our bodies and minds are increasingly merging with and altered by technology. Central to the animation is a ghostly female figure, rendered in the style of Japanese manga, who wanders through a landscape of layered interfaces, symbols, and codes associated with technological and organic systems. Elements of content from whitney.org are combined with a graph of the nervous system and Web console exposing data operations, and parental guidance alerts give way to infrared imagery used for target acquisition in military operations. Viewers can use the on-screen QR code to launch the augmented reality (AR) component of the work and experience an additional layer of the narrative on their mobile devices. Synched with the browser-based animation, the AR layer features additional textual commentary and transports the central anime figure out of the browser window onto the viewer’s mobile device.

In The Maw Of, Rachel Rossin takes current research into brain-computer interfaces as a starting point to explore the historical development of the relationship between bodies and machines. The artist highlights how technology has evolved from its function as an extension of the body, enhancing its abilities, to more profound and invasive levels. Devices from smartphones to virtual reality headsets already mediate our personal and social lives, and research labs increasingly test the merging of hardware and living organisms. Rossin makes these developments palpable by weaving together visuals that capture an array of technological platforms in an experience mediated by screens, blurring the boundaries between digital and physical.

Viewers can use the QR code appearing in the browser to launch the augmented reality component of the work on their mobile device.

Fire rise! Freedom! Seated before the hearth the fireside audience is in rapt attention. In the furnace/puppet theater dance the burning flame of passion. The heavenly chords sing and separate from the director. Inflamed by the new found freedom sink amidst
the lapping tongues. Offered the
choice you will gladly resubmit to slavery. This is too intense. There are those who in captive chains sink under the weight, then there are those perverts who, fettered, raise their heads high in joy. Am I sorry for the perversions of my past? …I’m sorry, please take me
back! —Mike Kelly, Plato’s Cave,
Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile,
(Venice, CA: New City Editions, 1986,
p.44.)
The prehistoric cave was not only a shelter for human beings, it was a lirninal sphere, a sacred place of transformation and for influencing the external world by means of images drawn on the wall. The cave or archetypal metaphor of being under or inside the earth evokes the enclosure of the womb and a sphere much like the underworld of antiquity, a realm not only of shades of the dead, but of unrealized possibilities, antasies and dreams. For Plato, the cave was the counter- realm of reason. His Parable of the Cave is many things at once: a hierarchy of values—in Mike Kelly’s rendition: “You are just an imperfect shadow of a single perfect idea befouled by matter, dirtied and made  inconsistent by the clumsiness of matter—brutish matter.”—a description of an apparatus of mystification, a metapsychology, and a prescription.
The cave became the theoretical model for fiction in theater and later in film. What relevance does the cave metaphor have to various apparatuses in the electronic arts? What sorts of values and experiences are invoked in recent invocations of the cave as apparatus and metaphor? The object of this round-table is to use the cave not to arrive a unified conclusions, but as a way of following the unfolding of deep metaphor across cultures and
apparatuses, and across different media and values related to concrete social and cultural experiences. Is the cave an appropriate metaphor for the transformation of information societies into electronic culture?
Margaret Morse will introduce the
parable, the metaphor and the apparatus and discuss some of its ramifications for recent work in the electronic arts, including Beryl Korot and Steve Reich’s The Cave as Biblical story and socio-political metaphor, as well as the
CAVE apparatus for projecting images, to which Jeffrey Shaw’s EVE apparatus was a response. After Jeffrey Shaw’s description of EVE, Frances Dyson will introduce ‘the cave of the imagination’ metaphor in sound art and her critique of the model of interiorization implicit in it. Finally, Alexandru Antik, a Romanian artist living in Cluj
Napoca will introduce several recent pieces, including “The Prison of Fantasy,” a powerful evocation of dystopic enclosure installed at the “Ex Oriente ….  (missing page 127 on catalogue)

The Misty Way installation enacts three main elements involved in fog collection: moisture (small, condensed water droplets), wind and a harvesting substrate. In this piece, fog filmed with a high magnification camera turns each water droplet into a visible circle oscillating to its own rhythm, metamorphosizing it into a light drop collected by a textile net made from parallel threads. One hundred and twenty kilometer of thread walked, stretched and placed one by one in the interstices of threaded rods, create an inclined surface covering the entire ceiling of the room. The light drops move along and through the screen nets of flexible parallel fibers scatter on the floor covered in dark carpet. A fog of light, shadows and sound – a reconstruction of stitched noises recorded by Dutch/Swiss composer Daniel Schorno during lab experiments – splashes the visitor. A dis/orienting experience performs an intimate encounter with water – a stranger within us that passes through every cell in our bodies and invites us to enact an ethical response-ability to bring forward justice in what it means to live responsibly ‘together/apart’ with all sentience (human, non-human and inhuman) on this planet and in the cosmos, with water.

This is a seven-minute split screen video which is related to ‘Emerging Economies/ Emerging Identities’

The New Media Residency is an 11-month residency programme run in collaboration by Tashkeel and ISEA International. Running from Summer 2014 to April 2015 as part of Tashkeel’s Guest Artist Programme, the New Media Residency features sound artists, Chris Weaver and Fari Bradley.

The initiative is aimed at providing artists with time to develop their practice in an environment that encourages the exchange of ideas through practice and experimentation. Their residency will include an exhibition at Tashkeel in January 2015 as well as performances at the 20th International Symposium for Electronic Art (ISEA2014).

For Bradley and Weaver, who are experimental musicians, “sound is a means of creating an intersection between art and music; it is an art form that consistently leaves much to the imagination of the listener.” They have worked together in a number of projects since 2006, which they create as a means to re-imagine sound in space using electronics, acoustic phenomena and domestic or re-purposed materials. In a recent collaboration, the pair worked on the pop-up radio concept ‘Falgoosh’ at Art Dubai.

Korinsky creates a sound performance installed across the vertical surface which is site-specific and generates new physical and emotional acoustic illusions. ‘The Noisy Space’ (2014), a site specific installation, deals with sounds that are usually not recognized by the human ear, that is why many people even can’t remember them later. The specific sounds of air conditioning systems belong to that acoustic group. Combined to a composition, overlapped and reinforced they create an abstract acoustic atmosphere, whose origin does not appear to the audience immediately. On the floor the visitor sees islands made of rescue blankets creating the path through the installation. The silver side of the foil facing the human body supplies warmth and that way it builds a strong contrast to the air conditioning sounds. The abstract form reminds of rocks or chunks of ice and in combination they form a landscape inside the room. They blur inside and outside creating a new physically experience through sound and visual intervention.

The project involves building a virtual tunnel between Wuhan and Hong Kong. The interactive installation will serve not only as a vehicle for communication between the viewers of the two locations, but also render a temporal environment connecting the spaces through the use of light as material. A video feedback loop between the two exhibition areas, and in reverse, causes a tunneling effect where infinitely multiplied images of both cells are strung together to simulate a tunnel connecting Hong Kong and Wuhan. The effects of the light installation on the viewers are in effect multiplied into this augmented reality. Given the latency that is imperative in the livestream, the instances created by the viewers of both cells are stretched out into a receding architectural passage of an incresasingly distant past. The artwork not only discourses at great lengths on the relationship between human and technology, but also our interpersonal relationships with one another, through different spatial realities, media and methods.

“Mankind is a parasite of the earth”

“We need the earth to live on but at the same time we also destroy her. If we can’t change our behaviour and our desire to consume, can we learn to see the beauty of our actions?”

On the one hand, these garments made from crystals show repetition and symmetry. These characteristics reflect mankind’s control over its surroundings. On the other hand, we recognize more abstract lines and structures, reflecting nature and its ways of being. The model is practically covered and overgrown by mankind’s excesses while still, in some small measure, under control of human influence.

This digital guerilla art projection project that was named “The Public Space As Shared Museum” after the Bremen subproject. It was implemented by a team with Popesz Csaba Láng, Elwira Wojtunik-Láng (Elektro Moon Vision), Lorenz Potthast (Xenorama), members of the M2C Institute Martin Koplin and Stephan Siegert together with the local Durban artists of the “Amasosha Art Movement”. It consisted out of a series of activities at different venues in Durban, the Denis Hurley Center, the BAT Center, the Durban Art Gallery and the City Hall.

The project reflects the design of facades in Durban with their often missing link to African art. It created an example how contemporary African art can change the face of the urban environment fundamentally by artistic participation in urban re-design and development. Therefore art works by local Amasosha artists refecting the identity, the history and the problems black citizens have to face in modern South Africa were identifed, digitalized, and animated. The results were projected on a façade directly opposite the Denis Hurley Centre as part of the offcial ISEA2018 program. The animated art works were again shown at the fnal event of the ISEA2018 at the city hall in form of a projection on the pavement and the central square in front of the building. The events ensured the local artists a great attention showing importance of integration of the new local African art in an international conference like the ISEA2018.

The Room Above is an electroacoustic piece developed during an art residency in Genoa in the second pandemic lockdown. The central element of the composition is an organ situated in the church above the residence. The work was conceived in the moment without a written score, and after long walks in the surrounding nature. The church contains an intrinsic architectural sonic spatial identity. The recordings of the organ and its reverberations in the architectural space were then sampled and reworked. The addition of the sonic spaces, those initially recorded, those of the future concert venues, and those present in the mental imagery of the listener during the concert, shall lead to a sonic moiré, a polyphony of spaces. The conceptual idea of the sonic moiré is an auditory perception of several layers of space and comparable to that which emerges visually from Marcel Duchamp’s rotoreliefs. Such perception exists between the work and the spectator, and here between the work and the listener. The sonic moiré changes according to the typologies of each concert venue, and its ultimate goal is to produce an illusion of cinematic experience for the mind of the listener. The artistic research process combines our experience in the sonic arts and our scientific expertise in the cognitive neuroscience of perception to explore the mutual interactions between visual and auditory stimulations for the mental elaboration of illusory or hallucinatory precepts. The objective is to accompany the audience to reach a state of dedicated listening, leading to a focused attention to the experienced sensations and perceptions, in order  to magnify  mental imageries. To leave room for such ‘auralization’, visuals should thus not entirely capture the attention of the audience. We explore ways to merge or alternate the stimuli and specifically address the role of rituals for this goal.

The Sentient Thespian depicts a 21st Century Midsummers Night Dream where a fully “sentient” robot for the fourth industrial revolution passionately seeks to imbue sentience on a human automaton and the industrial robot arm she conducts by casting a love spell on both of them; only to suffer disappointment that his powers can merely simulate, but never imbue, true sentience. As silent films were parables of the evolution of our society from agricultural to industrial, this sort film intimates the new electronic industrial age upon us and its effect on the concept of self-hood from the point of view of a machine that has achieved sentience.

Guided tour, Nelson Mandela Garden, May 17

The Traveling Plant: The Veridical Travel Around the World of A True Imaginary Plant

The Traveling Plant is a collective project created in 2020 by Annick Bureaud, Tatiana Kourochkina, Marta de Menezes, Claudia Schnugg and Robertina Šebjanič, and further developed with the following seed organisations Leonardo/Olats (Paris), Quo Artis (Barcelona and Treviso), Cultivamos Cultura (Lisbon), Sektor Institute (Ljubljana) and the initial support of the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation.

The Veridical Travel Around The World of A True Imaginary Plant traces the voyage of a plant —real, artificial or fictitious— around the world, telling its own story, the stories of other plants and living creatures (other than human and humans) it encounters, of whom and what it meets.

It is the umbrella title for a series of new artworks and events taking place in different times and locations around the world under the direction of the diverse participating organisations and curators

The Peripatetic Tour of the Nelson Mandela Garden in Paris above ISEA
May 17th 2023, 12:00 – 13:15 CET
Free by registration

Location
Paris, France

Zone: Continental
Altitude: Low (Plains)
Eco-system: Gardens / Building

Venue
Nelson Mandela Garden
Les Halles
All. Jules Supervielle
75001 Paris

Climate: Temperate
Humidity: Moderate
Light: Gardens / Building
Soil: Concrete & pavement – Woodchips – Unknown
Vibrations: Noisy (many)

Organiser
Leonardo/Olats

Nature of the event
A guided tour of the Nelson Mandela Garden leaded by artist Eva-Maria Lopez as part of the artistic programme of ISEA2023 in Paris

Event Space: Outside
Humans around: Many

Curatorial statement

The Traveling Plant has been selected for ISEA Paris and is thrilled to discover the Nelson Mandela Garden, laying right above the ISEA venue, at the very centre of the City. Under the guidance of artist Eva-Maria Lopez and with the active participation of ISEA attendees and free audience, in the now traditional art and science methodologies of fieldtrips and walkspaces, The Traveling Plant is walked through five Stations to uncover a new understanding of this specific designed urban environment. Eva-Maria Lopez is reading the garden through some selected plants and areas, bringing to the forefront stories —historical, economical, political and botanical— that the plants are embodying. The Tour is part of her project The Gentlemen in my garden.

Curators
The Traveling Plant Team: Annick Bureaud, Tatiana Kourochkina, Marta de Menezes, Claudia Schnugg, Robertina Šebjanič

Participants
Eva-Maria Lopez
Annick Bureaud, Tatiana Kourochkina, Claudia Schnugg, Robertina Šebjanič
ISEA audience members
Passers-by

Commissioned projects
The Gentlemen in my garden, by Eva-Maria Lopez

Name of the plants
Local name: Magnolia
English name: Magnolia
Latin name: Magnolia soulangeana

Local name: Oiseau de paradis, Strelitzia
English name: Bird of paradise, Strelitzia
Latin name: Strelitzia reginae ‘Mandela’s Gold’

The Unreal is a machinima film (videogame recorded in real-time) set in a utopian landscape. The viewer is led in a first-person point of view across the shiny surface of this unexploited mine. Ambient music, accompanied by a soft voice-over, creates a soothing atmosphere and entices the viewer to meditate while also being exposed to the mineral origins of technology and its dynamics of extractivism.

The project, as a non-located, atemporal, ahistorical landscape, addresses the emerging questions of the contradictions of media materiality and its disengagement with the landscape. In a grounded practice-based approach, The Unreal presents an artificial world constructed by video game software, built to play with the appropriation of the visual and narrative codes of techno-colonialism.

The Unreal is a virtual promised land surrounded by an infinite coastline and a transcendental pink sunset. We can draw lines to settler colonialism in what looks like an expedition into the sublime. In this sense, The Unreal has been created as a hyperbolic representation of the techno-romantic discourses that permeate everything related to technological development and solutionism.

The dematerialization and deterritorialization of the digital have been defined by natural metaphors (the cloud, space and the sea) and are part of the rhetoric of digital emancipation and the cultural hegemony of Silicon Valley. Under the illusory slogans of freedom, innovation, progress and infinity, we have willfully forgotten and rejected the physical, material and residual condition of technology.

The Value of Art (Cat) is from a series of interactive paintings dealing with value creation in the art world and the attention economy. Responding to the idea that attention is the new currency in our media based society, the artists buy paintings at auction houses and equip them with sensors that measure the time that viewers spend in front of the work. The value of the artwork is constantly updated in 1 Euro increments, making the process of value creation transparent.

The Vultures is a hand drawn animation of birds flying and gliding, observing their next target. I use paper and video in order to create a body of works and installations to comment on society. With drawing, collage, photo, animation, video and installation, I tell stories in series searching to transcend mediums and dimensions. With a dark humor, I comment History, environment and current events mixing a naïve aesthetic with troubling subjects.

The Wall of Gazes consists of one screen in which visitors can see how portrait images are revealed by the eye movements of many persons simultaneously. Gazes were captured by an eye tracker device. Around 100 participants were seated in front of a portrait image and the device recorded their gazes for 15 seconds. The screen is connected to a computer and a special software displays the eye tracks stored in a database. Portraits are ever-changing composition, according the gazes captured and displayed by the software.

The Wall of Gazes aims to engage people with those parts of the face that are really seen and those parts that remain “unseen” while attention is focused elsewhere on the portrait.

Hacnum Exhibition. various locations, May 16 – 21

Immersive Theater and Virtual Reality. for 50 to 100 people including 20 with VR headset.
Approximate duration: 1h15.

The White Out is a performance for an actor and an immersive audiovisual device, on the edge of theater and virtual reality, adapted from a short story by Alain Damasio. An investigation against a backdrop of injections of memories, coupled with an ode to past, present and future resistance.

Through the adaptation of a thriller by Alain Damasio, spectators will be led to conduct an investigation through different media in order to become the jurors of a rather special futuristic trial. This immersive show is divided into three parts for around fifty spectators, 20 of whom will be immersed in VR headphones. Active participation is requested from the public in a memory reconstruction exercise in a forensic setting. Thirty lucid witnesses equipped with audio headsets will follow the experience from the outside guided by a coryphean actor, who will embody the guinea pig of an investigation by injections of memories.

Other spectators immersed in the VR headset will form a chorus, guided in a process of memory manipulation in order to have access, just like the actor on stage, to the memories of the various suspects. The story takes place in winter, in the mountains. The Vercors territory, snow and water are important aesthetic elements.

Summary: A memory storage factory explodes, thousands of samples contained in snowflakes spill out into the wild. To reconstruct the circumstances of the accident (or attack?), a volunteer is injected with samples of memories stored in water molecules. On stage, an actor will find himself crossed by the memories, sometimes incomplete or even contradictory, of various witnesses considered as potentially suspicious.

after “The Chamois of the Alps Leaps” by Alain Damasio

Direction and sound: Frédéric Deslias
Performer: Pierre Mignard
3D: Benjamin Bardou
Music: Perig Villerbu
Artistic Collaborator: Mathilde Gentil
Lighting: Quentin Pallier
Dramaturgy: Cathy Blisson
Voiceover: Jérôme Thibault, Jana Klein, Eric Schlaefin, Angie Pict, Marion Suzanne .
Photos: Alban Van Wassenhove

[ECO]nomy. This is a rejection of the one-directional sovereignty of globalized humanity over nature, with adverse environmental conditions as the byproduct of profit-driven decisions. The [ECO]Nomic Revolution shifts the logic of economic decisions from individualized choice to reflect the logic of nature on a microbiological level. The installation documents the artists’ scientific and socioeconomic experimentation as they reflect on how values are assigned. The artists encode economic indicators and area demographics into the microbiological terrain overlaid on a map of Durban. As the microorganism, Physarum polycephalum, charts the territory with its own growth algorithm, Cesar & Lois reference the growth dynamics of this nature-based culture to ponder a city’s dynamics. Cesar & Lois respond to the algorithmic growth of the organism with a log of observations, interspersed with community members’ reflections on societal dynamics and growth. By referencing nature’s networking and the organism’s system of sharing resources, alternative logic models for growth may emerge. By reorienting the logic of a city to the smallest entities within nature, the project hierarchizes the biological culture’s logic over human design.

Minoru Sato has been thinking about ‘heat’ a lot recently, from his perspective its lack of palpability rendering it ‘ghostly’.  Sato muses on the very narrow temperature range within which we and our technologies exist, contrasting these with the extremes of the core of the planet, the surface of our Sun or even the core of an incinerator.  Whilst these are unimaginable they are not exceptional in the grand scheme of things. In this work Sato creates a microscopic world of heat energy, transforming and transducing heat into a sonic experience, inviting us to reconsider our relationships to natural phenomena.

Thin Membrane is a video installation that shows how media electronics are embraced similarly across cultures as tools and status symbols in order to enhance feelings of community and belonging.

In this fascinating look at – or rather listen to – time, Shane Fahey collaborates with horologist Evan Carr and recording engineer David Carr and collectively they entertain whether time is “an increment of revolutions or a lagging magnification of vibration”. Fahey comments that “its image as a series of numbers seems to be such a useful aid for setting up activities but the sound of ticking is so delightfully paranoid!” He sees analogue timepieces as early robots, “many faced harmonic character[s] with proto-intelligence”, a “mesh of teeth and tiny fields of electromagnetic current … abject personalities with bare bones drive”. In this work they lay aside “notion[s] of productivity and equation with money”, and explore the pitch perception implications of different microphone characteristics located in close proximity to such timepieces; the shifting phase relationships between two or more timepieces sharing the same ‘sound stage’; and natural and artificial stereophonic images of two movements.
Shane Fahey: Conceptual Artist/Sound Engineer
Evan Carr: Horologist/Radio Broadcaster
David Carr: Musician/Sound Engineer
Honi Ryan: Visual Imagery

1. 2004, Artist book – Archival inkjet on Archival rag paper
2. 2010, DVD – Digital book – Interactive

Timebinder is a book and interactive documenting the psychometric responses of six clairvoyants to fragments collected from a variety of Polish wartime stories including Hitlers Lair, Lambsdorf (the labour camp that her father was interned in) and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The work sits at the intersection between subjectivity and history; how we come to embody, if at all, and understand the nature of events that exceed rational understanding. Programming and interface design by Gary Warner

Hardware: Ridge 3200, Raster Tech frame buffer
Software: P.D.I.

Computer animation category winner.

Computer animation category winner.

n.a.

Exhibition. Le Tétris, Le Havre,  June 14 – 24

Davide Porta is an ISEA2023 selected artist

Tobia explores and imagines alternatives to human-machine interactions. It is part of the experimental project “Towards a new Liminality”. It questions the dialogues between humans and digital entities, explores the modes of cohabitation between organic and non-organic matter. It questions different forms of intelligence, artificial or not, and the ways of feeling things beyond hearing, touch or smell.

Like a slightly strange plant, Tobia is a robot that reacts to external stimuli. Through eyes scattered on his skin, he perceives light and detects human presence. An invitation to dialogue with a most surprising being.

We live on a planet in flux–with warming waters and land, chaotic weather, and unknown futures. Our adaptability and ingenuity are crucial to our survival, and our planet’s. In response to this condition, we are exploring new tools for understanding, engaging, and responding to our current and future environment. Bringing together artists, designers, scientists, and activists, this crowd-sourced piece focuses on ‘tools’, as a call for action, access, and collective engagement. New tools are needed to build more adaptable, resilient communities, as well as to imagine new ways of living on a fragile planet.

Tools for a Warming Planet is focused on the idea of tools–tools of collection, translation, engagement, connection, and care–which directly speaks to a time of climatic flux. Through display of physical and digital objects, as well as narratives on the use of these tools from the participating artists, the installation is a living archived of methods for working and living together. The project will develop over the course of the exhibit, allowing attendees and the larger global community to contribute tools to grow the collection.

The term ‘tool’ is used to focus on action: from hand craft, to care and repair, to data mapping, to digital filters, to community engagement. New tools posited across the works represent new possibilities of working and open up a conversation about our role as cultural and social activators. Tools for a Warming Planet brings together global voices into a visual dialog across languages and cultures that all must adapt to a changing climate on planet Earth. These global perspectives will allow for both localized perspectives and universal experiences, advancing a collective conversation with endless possibilities.

The dynamic image projection Topography of Movement features two oversized hands in motion. They seem to be feeling out their environment, gliding or swiping over the surface upon which they rest. The two cropped projections cover the walls and parts of the floor and ceiling in the exhibition space. A projection mirror further enhances the dynamic depending on how the movement patterns of the hand and the mirror coincide.

The projection of a left and right hand suggests an (absent) body. Even though a subjective observer position is made impossible by the high magnification of the image content, the events are spatialised through the authenticity of the movements and the corresponding sounds, which were made in the process of recording, leading to a sensory experience of space.

Lately, I, Katherine Melançon, have been focusing on having nature control what humans create. In this installation, the pH data of the soil around the location of the artwork modulates an animation created with the leaves, plants and flowers planted in that same soil at an earlier stage of their life. The evolutive state of nature controls the life of the artwork created by a human and nature controls its own representation. My practice is interested in process, nontraditional tools and materials and the use of camera-less photography to reveal aspects of the natural. Through cycles of transformation between the virtual and the physical, I create “new seeds” that I plant in different materials to discover what emerges. The starting point is often natural specimens from a specific location scanogramed. Recently, I have encompassed interests for spiritual utopias and experimental projects. The concept of “flatness” interests me for its capacity to reboot societies under no, or different, hierarchies, including non-human people.

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

2022
Video of the participatory performance on Roblox, 9’30”, FullHD Photo print, variable dimensions
Courtesy of the artist and gallery Odile Ouizeman.

Toxic Garden – Dance Dance Dance is an online participatory performance taking place in Toxic Garden, a Roblox map designed by Kamilia Kard. Spoiled of their custom avatar and randomly converted into one of the 7 poisonous plants inhabiting the environment, participants dance together, automatically synching to the artist's avatar. Inspired by the defenses of poisonous plants, Kard imagined a choreography intended as a warning and a reaction to manipulative attitudes, using AI to capture and process the movements of four professional dancers.

Transit explores the representation of clouds within the context of wireless networks.

The artists explore the creative potential within light as both the creator and transmitter of sound and actively move away from creating visualisations of sound towards an audiovisual experience based on resonance and feedback loops between light, sound and object. Using performances, workshops, and installations they attempt to learn about information, disturbance, noise, glitch, communication, as well as the ephemeral relationships that emerge from both theirs and the audience’s engagement. The artists aim to reveal the complexity of these fleeting experiences that occur in the moment, those glitches that happen somewhere between physical sensors and mental representation, that can’t be recorded, repeated, or simulated.

TRANSMITTER > MULTI-MODAL CROSSOVER > RECEIVER

Consisting of three parts the interactive installation investigates the potential for using digital devices to create a synesthetic communication system. The installation draws on the different experiences of synesthetes and uses this to explore a messy and playful way of communication. Using digital protocols of ASCII, MIDI and frequency conversion letters are encoded into a combination of a light colour and a sound frequency (e.g. “A” is transmitted as yellow light and a 50 Hz sine wave) allowing a simulated synesthete to decode the text that has been transmitted through space. However, to reach closer to a synesthetic communication process the classic Transmitter -> Receiver pattern must be interrupted by a multi-modal crossover that mimics a synesthetes’ unique experience of light and sound. The visitor is able to adjust the multi-modal crossover to gain further understanding of a synesthetes unique experience whilst interfering with a potentially flawless communication flow.

By expanding the communication system across three distinct sections, the installation develops defined territories or zones where information (noise and signal) flows over and through. Although these sections of the system appear as physical material in the space the artists are actively exploring the spaces between the physical parts. It is here where we encounter the resonance within the system; where neighbouring sections meet through the interference of external noise (light and sound) and through which new meaning potentially begins to emerge. The system encourages a nomadic movement of information across a technological plateau that is initially understood as linear, allowing for the spreading, leaking and disruption of information across undefined routes.

What if one could utilize someone’s unique sensing ability? Would this be an effective tool to securely communicate? After all, one could covertly send hidden messages in plain sight that only an intended receiver could decode (steganography). Such a system for transmission could, in the odd event, be learned and understood by someone able to perceive the blurring of these senses and, with practice, the user could claim our proposal as their own efficient, albeit abstract, working communication tool.

Furthermore, the installation is a cybernetic experiment tapping into the unknowable and becoming. The physical installation is also an enquiry into practice in its own right and aims to raise questions about our relationships with technology, our co-evolution, and the blurry lines that our minds try to define as borders between the self, the body and other technological systems.

TranSwarm Entities is a couture piece developed by fashion designer Maartje Dijkstra in collaboration with creative programmer and music producer Newk. This interactive design is created during Fashion Fusion, a fashion/ technology program of T-Mobile in Berlin.

The sculptural, totally black dress, is build up out dozens of small repeated fragments in the shape of bird skulls sculptured together like cells building an organism. The parts , that are all manual 3D printed, meaning using a 3D printer pen to create fabrics. are all connected together by hand with black polyester wires. The technology part is not directly all integrated within the design but is connected and presented in a more surprising way. 4 small drones, that where customized to appear the same as the dress design, fly up out of the design so it looks like parts of the dress are flying away. The drones fly on the beats and melodies of music producer Newk around the model creating a little swarm.

Sometimes inspiration can be found in unexpected places. Choreographer Allison Orr finds beauty and grace in garbage trucks, and in the men and women who pick up our trash. Filmmaker Andrew Garrison follows Orr as she joins city sanitation workers on their daily routs to listen, learn and untimely to convene them to collaborate in a unique dance performance. Hard working, often carrying a second job, their lives are already full with work, family and dreams of their own. But some step forward, and after months of rehearsal, two dozen trash collectors and their trucks perform an extraordinary spectacle. On an abandoned airport runway in Austin, Texas, thousands of people show up to see how a garbage truck can “dance.”

Exhibition. Grand Palais Ephémère, June 23 – 25

The installative corpus Trash Dwellers is comprised of a series of sculptures, sound and interactive real-time animations. The installation uses the language of sci-fi and speculative fiction to portray a new archaic community of Dwellers in an ecosphere of junk. Born of Trash, a real-time, interactive piece, is a search for the divine in the detritus: visitors join the protagonists of a new speculative tale aiming at provoking a positive reimagining, or (re)building, of our collective future. Part of this narration are also all the other elements of the installation: a VR immersive experience and a series of moist, trashy sculptural artefacts from the otherwordly reality.

Treadmill, Dreamtime, Running, in Place is a hybrid work of interactive installation and performance that invites spectators to consider their relationship with the environment. A large-scale multimedia event constructed for both live performance and interactive installation; it is a response to our current global environmental crisis.

Selection of artworks inspired by light, using multiple digital media based on instant and random inspiration.

Tricky Apatheosis 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.

Our childhood often shapes us into adulthood. Trauma, happiness, fear and pain stay with us till we die. This series of shorts is entitled “Childhood Memories”, in collaboration with the Vientianale International Film Festival in Vientiane, Laos. Story, concept art and voice recordings were realized in 2013. The first in the series of childhood stories is Chasing Grasshoppers (2013). The second in the animated series of Lao Childhood stories is Tuk Tuk Ride (2017).

Inkjet prints, ANSI C size: 17x22in (14.2×20.3in), 432x559mm (361x517mm), Epson Velvet Fine Art paper

Turn-over 2 is an installation to prompt spectators to touch the art works directly. The artist wants you taste the colors and feel the paper.

Twitch Of The Death Nerve seeks to explore the idea of the uncanny and the unsettling feeling of seeing elements of the face cut up, recombined and reanimated through simple electrical motors.

Tweets, once the sounds of birds chirping, are now the data of social media texting; the twittering of this physical computing real-time composition machine is inspired by both birdsong and the chaotic twittering chorus of social media.

The enchanting Earth is too-often made inhospitable to those marked as transgender. To survive we xenomogrify ourselves through social and biological technologies, altering our surfaces, our viscera, our molecular balances. None of us have been to space even if we possess somatic knowledges of deep bodily transformations, necessary experiences for extraterrestrial environments.

TX-1 launches bits of the artist’s hormone replacement medications, marking the first-known time that elements of the transgender experience orbit the earth. TX-1 includes a fragment of my spironolactone pill, a slice of my estradiol patch, and a miniature handmade paper sculpture, included to gesture towards the absent-yet-present xenoentities of the cosmos. A symbolic exodus to an orbit high above, the eventual return of TX-1 to Earth is also a sign of resilience, of not being disposed, of coming back to thrive once again.

On the cultural night of ISEA2014, in the garden of Zayed University, Dubai, there were demonstrations of traditional arabic food making, calligraphy, music and dancing. The students of the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises (Zayed University) prepared a special performance for the occasion, with umbrellas and lights.

In the UAE, music is typically performed by men, and visual arts are women’s trade. So, all students of the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises are female.

There are many times in the life when he or she is put under examination of a community’s standards, laws, and customs that he or she might reject completely.

For Unforeseen Spaces, Marie Lelouche continues her exploration of the relationships between the physical and the virtual realities of the space. The exhibition at the gallery is an extension of a research project started during an artist residency at Les Tanneries Contemporary Art Center in Amilly (France), in 2021. During this residency, Marie Lelouche was interested in the birds that inhabit the park of the Art Center, as a means of decentralizing our point of view on this area. Building on this, she created an exhibition that appeals both to hearing and sight, as well as to the movements of visitors and the experience of the space “augmented” by a virtual reality device.

The development of the virtual reality artwork entitled Unforeseen Spaces (2021) benefited from the participation of the DICRéAM, a french program for the support of artistic multimedia and digital creation of the CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée.

A part of the sound elements of the work Unforeseen Spaces rely on the use of the programs/software for bird song recognition BirdNET and BirdNET-Pi as well as the online collaborative bird sound library XENO CANTO, thanks to recordings by Peter Boesman, Jorich van Arneym, Frank-Udo Tielman, Grzegorz Lorek, Jerome Fischer, Larss Edenius, Jorge Leitano, Tristan Guillebot, Jarek Matusiak, Mateusz, Erik Roels, Sylvan Schnabel, Alin Malengreau, Norbert Uhlhaas, Bodo Sonnenburg, Brickegickel, Toon Jansen, Frederik Fluyt, Hans Matheve, Twan Mols, Florian Kubala,Bernard Bousquet, Fabian Deck), all under Creative Commons License.

The animation Unforgotten tells a traumatic historical event that happened to the most vulnerable group of women during a wartime and had been forgotten for a half-century. The animation shines a light on the victims’ voices and their willingness to give testimonies that deliver the historical truth rejected and denied by mainstream history. The women who give the testimonies in the animation spent the last moments of their lives fighting for women’s human rights so that women will never be sexually sacrificed again during wartime.

Unforgotten tells the atrocious wartime sexual violence through fairy-like visuals that are metaphorical and poetic so as not to perpetuate violent imagery and retraumatize the victims. This approach is for changing how we conceive victims of wartime sexual violence, who were commonly considered filthy women by their community and retraumatized in media by repeatedly reproducing sexual sensations. The animation ultimately intends to change the way we conceive our past and historical trauma and, most importantly, pursue our future to embrace the history of marginalized people.