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QUBIT AI: Marc Lee & Shervin Saremi

Speculative Evolution, Prototype 1

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Speculative experiment on a future ecosystem under strict control. The narrative takes place in a simulation, 30 years in the future, where artificial intelligence and synthetic biology collaborate to optimize an environment for cultivated species. An AI-powered simulator helps visitors generate new species to balance the ecosystem. Inspiration comes from the book Under the White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert and artists’ stories about life on a damaged planet.

Bio

Marc Lee is a Swiss artist focused on real-time rendered audiovisual installations, AR, VR and mobile applications, critically exploring creative, cultural, social, ecological, political and speculative themes. His work has been exhibited in important museums and new media art spaces. Shervin Saremi is an Iranian musician and audio engineer specializing in sonic computing, procedural sound design and production. Currently researching immersive audio at UdK Berlin.

Arcangelo Sassolino

The way we were
Not only does Arcangelo Sassolino transform failure into art, but he manages to make the art of failing a profound part of the art of living. He goes even further in the awareness of risk. He is aware that his experiments may not hold up to the forces that he himself puts in place but this possible collateral damage wants to represent an additional value, becoming precisely the existential metaphor of the concepts of risk and failure. His installations explore the behavior and mechanical limits of matter, he forces their characteristics to distort their shape, gravity, pressure, friction, statics, and of each possibility Sassolino contemplates the risks of collapse with its precise timing and programming.

Quadrature

Supraspectives
In the process of creating Supraspectives, the artist duo Quadrature has gathered the data of 590 (recent & former) spy satellites, whose trajectory the installation follows. A third of them can be considered space trash, as they are obsolete or damaged, but still, they continue overflying us. The installation calculates the paths of all those satellites in real time and speculatively reconstructs the view they are capturing, offering artistically intervened images of what the satellites could be observing. Mainly satellites passing near the exhibition venue are selected, combined with other specially interesting or suggestive satellite images. Additionally, a specifically built motorized antenna on the roof connects live with the satellites overflying Tabakalera, transforming their real radio signals into sound. Everytime the installation connects with a satellite, the screen shows the data relative to it, such as country of origin or year of launch.