Elements
Elements is an experimental art film by Maxim Zhestkov about nature, physics, art and love. More than 2 billion elements / particles governed by tensions and forces of nature were used to tell stories and show emotions through the motion of collective behavior.
The film is a trial to explore the idea that everything around us and inside us is made from simple elements / blocks which can be arranged in complex relationships and become compound structures. We could project this idea into emotions, behaviours, thought processes, relationships, life, planets and the 23.

Somaphony

<somaphony> is composed of autogenous electronic objects that respond to stimuli and biofeedback wearable controllers. As it is connected with heart pulse, muscle tense, and movement of performers, real-time audiovisual visual composition is possible. The artist explores interdependence between digital equipment and performers that express behavior and cybernetic(artificial brain) relationship through this project.

We only come out at night
FILE FESTIVAL 2007
We Only Come Out at Night is an urban graffiti project involving interactive public projections. A site is selected at dawn and a sticker is stuck or a stencil image is sprayed at the location. When the sun sets, jellies are projected over the heads of pedestrians on the street. As the pedestrian walks underneath the projection, the monsters grab the shadows of the people and eat them. The sticker is then removed and the project visits another place at dawn. A website is created to track the history of the monster appearance in order to promote and create a mythology. There are seven monsters in total, each monster’s design and behavior is unique. Gula, the monster that always eat, Avaritia, the monster that stuffs you into his pants, Invidia, the monster that takes your image and pretends to be you, and so on. Each monster is unique but always sad.

Scale
‘scale’ is an interspecies art project: an audience-interactive installation that involves nocturnal electric fish from the Amazon River Basin. Twelve different species of these fish comprise a choir whose sonified electrical fields provide the source tones for an immersive audiovisual environment. The fish are housed in individual tanks configured in a custom-built sculptural arc of aluminum frames placed around a central podium. The electrical field from each fish is translated into sound, and is thus heard — unprocessed or with digital effects added, with immediate control over volume via a touchscreen panel — through a 12-channel surround sound system, and with LED arrays under each tank for visual feedback. All software is custom-designed. Audience members interact as deejays with the system. Amongst the goals of the project is our desire to foster wider public awareness of these remarkable creatures, their importance to the field of neurological research, and the fragility of their native ecosystem.The project leaders comprise visual/conceptual artist Marlena Novak, composer/sound designer Jay Alan Yim, and neural engineer Malcolm MacIver. MacIver’s research focuses on sensory processing and locomotion in electric fish and translating this research into bio-inspired technologies for sensing and underwater propulsion through advanced fish robots. Novak and Yim, collaborating as ‘localStyle’, make intermedia works that explore perceptual themes, addressing both physical and psychological thresholds in the context of behavior, society/politics, and aesthetics.

Specimen Box

The OCR began work on Specimen Box in 2014 at the request of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. Microsoft’s Cybercrime Center monitors communications coming from hundreds of millions of PCs around the world that have become infected by botnet malware. Employing data sonification together with advanced visualization techniques, Specimen Box provides a configurable multi-sensory presentation of botnet signal activity in real time. It also features a multitouch gesture-based interface for navigating, exploring, selecting, and examining the billions of signals that have previously been collected. Users can access the collected signals based on their activity levels, the geographic locations of their sources, or their daily activity patterns over time, using clustering to group sources with similar behavior.

n-Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound after Iannis Xenakis
N_Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound After Iannis Xenakis is a spectacular light and sound performance-installation combining cutting edge lighting, lasers, sound, sensing and machine learning software inspired by composer Iannis Xenakis’s radical 1960s- 1970s works named Polytopes (from the Greek ‘poly’, many and ‘topos’, space). As large scale, immersive architectural environments that made the indeterminate and chaotic patterns and behaviour of natural phenomena experiential through the temporal dynamics of light and the spatial dynamics of sound, the Polytopes still to this day are relatively unknown but were far ahead of their time. N_Polytope is based on the attempt to both re-imagine Xenakis’ work with probabilistic/stochastic systems with new techniques as well as to explore how these techniques can exemplify our own historical moment of extreme instability.

ELECTRIC SKIN

The Electric Skin explores the possibility of creating a wearable that extends the functionality of the skin to sense electromagnetic fields (mostly within the radio spectrum) and translate that information into touch sensation. The wearable consists of two main functional parts: 1) A matrix of omnidirectional antennas that act as sensors and probes and 2) corresponding electrodes that stimulate the skin of the wearer. Through this artificial “skin” or “exoskeleton”, the wearable changes our experience, perception, and understanding of space and movement, and in doing so, our interactions. The project speculates on the possible co-evolution of man and technology and draws attention to the role of environmental influence on our own bodily development and behavior.

Self-Reflected

Dr. Greg Dunn (artist and neuroscientist) and Dr. Brian Edwards (artist and applied physicist) created Self Reflected to elucidate the nature of human consciousness, bridging the connection between the mysterious three pound macroscopic brain and the microscopic behavior of neurons. Self Reflected offers an unprecedented insight of the brain into itself, revealing through a technique called reflective microetching the enormous scope of beautiful and delicately balanced neural choreographies designed to reflect what is occurring in our own minds as we observe this work of art. Self Reflected was created to remind us that the most marvelous machine in the known universe is at the core of our being and is the root of our shared humanity.

Prehysterical Machine

The Prehysterical Machine has a spherical body and eight arms made of aluminum tubing. It has a sensing system, a motor system and a control system that functions as an autonomous nervous system (entirely reactive). The machine is suspended from the ceiling and its arms are actuated by pneumatic valves and cylinders. Pyroelectric sensors allow the robot to detect the presence of viewers in the nearby environment. It reacts to the viewers according to the amount of stimuli it receives. The perceived emergent behaviors of this machine engender a multiplicity of interpretations based on single dynamic pattern of events.The aim of this project is to induce empathy of the viewer towards a “character” which is nothing more than an articulated metal structure. The strength of the simulacra is emphasized by perverting the perception of the creature, which is neither animal nor human, carried through the inevitable instinct of anthropomorphism and projection of our internal sensations, a reflex triggered by any phenomenon that challenges our senses.
FILE FESTIVAL

Shame
Shame leaves us helpless in the face of the bad behavior of others. What is more, shame is relational. Maybe we feel shame because of something we have done. But, for us in this moment of seeing ourselves being seen, we realize that it is much more often that we feel shame because of something that someone else has done. We are defenselessly bound to people whose names we will never know only because we have somehow identified ourselves as one of them, at one with them, and the pain of it never ceases.

BACON

He painted the abysses of the human soul: the British artist Francis Bacon. Basic mechanisms of relationships such as desire, domination and exclusion he presented with merciless honesty and painful beauty.
With her piece, Nanine Linning fathoms the emotional cosmos of Bacon`s paintings and detects in their uncompromising depiction an analogy with her own art. With excessive physicality, the choreography explores fundamental patterns of behavior, which blur the line between human and feral bearing by their archaic and merciless nature. From an almost disturbing proximity the spectator witnesses the struggle of the individual for affiliation.At the same time fascinating and disturbing, the piece celebrates its comeback on stage fourteen years after its first release. BACON, which received the »Swan« for the best Dutch choreography, returns with revised choreography and new video- and light design.

BEHAVIOURAL COMPLEXITY

Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) and the experimental design studio Minimaforms examining a behavior-based agenda that engages experimental forms of material and social interaction. Cybernetic and systemic thinking through seminal forms of prototyping and experimentation will situate the work through continued experiments that have manifested since the early 1950s as maverick machines, architectures and computational practices exploring the generative potential of self-regulating phenomena as proto-architectural environments. Through explicit models of interactions, observable patterns and proto-animalistic agency; the research will discuss the capacity of these systems to evolve, adapt and self-structure through computation.

POF 51
Fabrice Hyber sets out to examine the way we communicate and mimic the endless affinities between ideas. What interests Hyber is engaging people with everyday life to invent new modes of behavior. In his mental spa with Faust, he deploys one of his POF’s (Prototypes d ‘Objets en Fonctionnement, created between 1991-2012) to interpret and resolve the complexity of reality by constantly searching for possible, or impossible, hypotheses, a kind of activism to explore endless possibility and infinite variations for art-making.