The Forgettable Art Machine

FILE 2024 | Installations

International Electronic Language Festival

The Forgettable Art Machine is an artificial intelligence-driven video installation. When facing the panel, the public has their image captured, starting a cycle of analysis, creation and destruction. From this data, a composite emerges, slowly transforming the visitors’ image into a generative visualization. Once the cycle is complete, the composition is deleted, waiting for a new audience to be captured.

Bio

Matthias Oostrik works at the intersection of digital art, installation art, cinema and architecture. His works establish unpredictable relationships between people and their surroundings. Using digital technology, his installations allow visitors to reshape their environment and their relationships with each other. Oostrik collaborates with renowned professionals and, above all, with his audience, who often become an integral part of his work.

Credits

Co-production: Zester
IA Music: Than van Nispen

Breathing
File Festival
Breathing is a work of art based on a hybrid creature made of a living organism and an artificial system. The creature responds to its environment through movement, light and the noise of its mechanical parts. Breathing is the best way to interact with the creature.
This work is the result of an investigation of plants as sensitive agents for the creation of art. The intention was to explore new forms of artistic experience through the dialogue of natural and artificial processes. Breathing is a pre-requisite for life, and is the path that links the observer to the creature.Breathing is a small step towards new art forms in which subtle processes of organic and non-organic life may reveal invisible patterns that interconnect us.Breathing is a work of art driven by biological impulse. Its beauty is neither found isolated on the plant nor in the robotic system itself. It emerges at the very moment in which the observer approaches the creature and their energies are exchanged through the whole system. It is in that moment of joy and fascination, in which we find ourselves in a very strange dialogue, that a life metaphor is created.Breathing is the celebration of that moment.

FILE SAO PAULO 2017
BLACK HOLE HORIZON
The nucleus of the installation is the invention of an apparatus resembling a ship horn. With the sounding of each tone, a huge soap bubble emerges from the horn. It grows while the tone sounds, peels off the horn, lingers through the exhibition space and finally bursts at an erratic position within the room.

Chess Auto-Creative (Self-Replicating)
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‘Chess Auto-Creative (CHEAC)’, takes the form of a cube where each face corresponds to an 8 x 8 chessboard. The six chessboards can also be arranged in a line to make them easier to see. There are 16 white pieces and 16 black pieces on each of the chessboards, made up of elements such as: kings, queens, bishops, knights, castles and pawns, each of which moves according to the rules of the game. However, instead of the pieces being arranged as normal, they are first set out in patterns where each element is repeated […]Each time a piece is moved to a new position, symmetrically or asymmetrically, a new variation of proto-chess is produced – in other words, a new game emerges. All games generated in this way are, in principle, variations of proto-chess – including the official chess game itself. This means that ‘Chess Auto-Creative’ is not a variant of the official chess game, but its origin.

FILE SAO PAULO 2019

POPPY
FILE FESTIVAL SÃO PAULO
As a giant poppy flower, this piece of tarpaulin unfolds itself above the viewer to show an elegant dance of waves and curls while within this dance a violent battle emerges between gravity, friction and centrifugal forces.

Hype Cycle
Machine Learning
Set in a spacious, well-worn dance studio, a dancer teaches a series of robots how to move. As the robots’ abilities develop from shaky mimicry to composed mastery, a physical dialogue emerges between man and machine – mimicking, balancing, challenging, competing, outmanoeuvring.

Body Paint
File Festival

The interaction is simple, movement creates paint. Hidden in the simplicity are layers of subtle details. Different aspects of the motion: size, speed, acceleration, curvature, all have an effect on the outcome: strokes, splashes, drips, spirals; and is left up to the users to play and discover. The installation is designed to work with any number of people and is scalable to cover small or large areas. While the installation is suitable for a single user, when multiple users are present a new dynamic emerges. A user-to-user interaction is born when the audience starts playing with each other via the installation, throwing virtual paint on each other, trying to complete or destroy each other’s paintings.

Initiation
Initiation is an open-end ceremony initiating the audience to the cult of infinity. The gigantic human-machine-interface is driven by the officiants controlling ancestral tools. As time seems to suspend itself, the crowd emerges into an ever hypnotizing state of oscillation. In this place the swing of the pendulum acts as the ever stimulating vector to guide the audience onto higher grounds.

Brume
In the collaborative work Brume fog emerges from and self-organizes on the surface on a sculptural element, congealing with light into an elusive stratum. The installation utilizes a series of ultrasonic transducers that generate thick clouds of dense, yet extremely lightweight water vapor. Fog is produced in an inner chamber contained within an enclosure that is outfitted with a porous surface. A small radial blower inside the apparatus gently pumps air into the inner chamber lifting the fog through the membrane, whereby it “settles” on the surface. Viewed from a distance, the fog appears as a visualized mass of air circumscribing the perimeter of the enclosure.

オラファー·エリアソン
اولافور الياسون
奥拉维尔·埃利亚松
אולאפור אליאסון
ОЛАФУР ЭЛИАССОН
The unspeakable openness of things
The title of the exhibition, The unspeakable openness of things, is a phrase that philosopher Timothy Morton uses when describing art and it resonates strongly with the artist. Eliasson describes how “Art exists both in and beyond the realm of language. Before the form of an artwork emerges, there’s a not-quite-graspable feeling that flows into the artistic process – and that remains in the finished work as something that cannot be fully expressed. At the same time, the artwork is fundamentally open to visitors. It is ready to listen to them, and able to host their questions and experiences.”

Infranet
Infranet is a generative artwork realized through a population of artificial lifeforms with evolutionary neural networks, thriving upon open geospatial data of the infrastructure of the city as their sustenance and canvas. Born curious, these agents form spatial networks through which associations spread in complex contagions. In this city as organism, the data grounds an unbounded, decentralized, open-ended, and unsupervised system. Non-human beings flourish in this environment by learning, discovering, communicating, self-governing, and evolving. The invitation is to witness, through immersive visualization and sonficiation of this complex adaptive system, how a new morphologic landscape emerges as a possible but speculative city.

Криста ван дер Ниет

The work of Krista van der Niet emerges from a dreamlike state of mind, whereby her imagination brings the things around her to life. She seems to glide along the lightness of things and grasps the beauty of the pure object. During the making process objects gain a metaphysical layer of meaning. She is the guiding factor for the viewpoint of her audience, in order to convey her perception. At this moment the sculptor becomes a photographer and you stand still together with her.

Chess Auto-Creative (Self-Replicating )
‘Chess Auto-Creative (CHEAC)’, takes the form of a cube where each face corresponds to an 8 x 8 chessboard. The six chessboards can also be arranged in a line to make them easier to see. There are 16 white pieces and 16 black pieces on each of the chessboards, made up of elements such as: kings, queens, bishops, knights, castles and pawns, each of which moves according to the rules of the game. However, instead of the pieces being arranged as normal, they are first set out in patterns where each element is repeated […]Each time a piece is moved to a new position, symmetrically or asymmetrically, a new variation of proto-chess is produced – in other words, a new game emerges. All games generated in this way are, in principle, variations of proto-chess – including the official chess game itself. This means that ‘Chess Auto-Creative’ is not a variant of the official chess game, but its origin.

FILE SAO PAULO 2019

infinity
filefestival
“Paths are made by walking.” In order to determine whether the above phrase was actually true, Yamashita and Kobayashi kept running in a park for five days. In the fast-forward movie compiled from digital photographs taken one per second, a path with the shape of infinity gradually emerges as they move in high-speed.

Дэвид Линч
ديفيد لينش
大卫·林奇
デビッドリンチ
데이비드 린치
Дэвид Линч
Eraserhead
The Man in the Planet (Jack Fisk) pulls levers in his home in space, while the head of Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) floats in the sky. A giant spermatozoon-like creature emerges from Spencer’s mouth, floating into the void. The Man in the Planet appears to control the creature with his levers, eventually making it fall into a pool of water.
cinema

КРИСТА ВАН ДЕР НИЕТ
The work of Krista van der Niet (1978) emerges from a dreamlike state of mind, whereby her imagination brings the things around her to life. She seems to glide along the lightness of things and grasps the beauty of the pure object. During the making process objects gain a metaphysical layer of meaning. She is the guiding factor for the viewpoint of her audience, in order to convey her perception.

Digital Beijing
The Digital Beijing building begins to explore what will occur in the digital epoch. The building served as the control and data centre for the 2008 Olympics. The concept for Digital Beijing was developed through reconsideration and reflection on the role of contemporary architecture in the information era. Resembling that omnipresent symbol, the bar code, the building emerges from a serene water surface. The façade itself is detailed to resemble an integrated circuit board.

Spectres
Lang explores the power of the figurative sculpture in this as in many other projects, its use as a tool for propaganda or political power. Her work with ancient statues draws attention to the object itself, which emerges from their original use and purposes as a thing in itself, through the passage of time.more…

Putting The Pieces Back Together Again

The kinetic installation “Putting the Pieces Back Together Again” is a complex system with self-organizing and emergent behaviour, at the same time it is an artistic inquiry and meditation on contemporary scientific methodology. The installation investigates non-hierarchical communication and collective behaviour by implementing such a system physically through many electro-mechanical actors.
The Installation consists of 1250 stepper motors arranged in a two dimensional grid of two by two meters. Each motor is equipped with a pointer made from white acrylic glass. The radii of the pointers are chosen to intersect with the pointers of its neighbours. All motors are excited with the same alternating current that let them move initially in a random direction. Each actor is at the same time sensing its environment. In the event of a collision the pointers reverse their turning direction. This is achieved through a custom motor control circuit. Through the interplay of many entities a complex behaviour emerges on the surface of the installation. By manipulating the signals during runtime the system will form spontaneous pattern on its surface. It seems like they are negotiating it’s position with nearby actors. By this the system is showing behaviour of self-organization. The installation drifts through various activation levels during its run time by this it constantly evolves new formations and constellations (crystallization).

СЕРИС ВИН ЭВАНС
ケリス·ウィン·エヴァンス
Form in Space…By Light

‘Cerith’s installation sits beautifully within the space, unfolding as you walk through,’ explains Clarrie Wallis, Tate’s Senior Curator of Contemporary British Art. The neon experience builds, from a single ‘peep hole’ ring in the South Duveens, through which you can glimpse swirls of radial light and an imposing octagon in the central gallery. The fractured neon fragments look like frantically drawn sparkler-lines on fireworks night.But there’s method and logic within these celestial scribbles. Hidden in the design are references to a host of highbrow sources, from Japanese ‘Noh’ theatre, to Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23. Don’t worry if you missed them. The beauty of rendering precise (verging on obscure) references in such a celebratory neon explosion allows for multiple – if not endless – interpretations.Each way you look at the sprawling 2km of neon tubing, a different shape or symbol emerges. No small thanks to the elegant way in which the structures have been painstakingly suspended. ‘There were over 1000 fixing points, and obviously we couldn’t drill 1000 holes in the Grade II listed building,’ Wallis explains. ‘We had to work with structural engineers very intensely, so as to be completely happy and convinced that we would be able to remove it without damaging the fabric of the building.’Though it seems too soon to be discussing the installation’s removal, Wallis has a point. It’s a visibly fragile, delicate sculpture – whose impermanence makes it more intriguing. As it is a site-specific sculpture, it can’t be recreated elsewhere. What’s more, because the neon tubes are filled with a constantly moving stream of pulsing, vibrating gasses, visitors will never see the same sculpture twice.

1st light

Paul Chan’s work summons the darkness that envelops us despite the greedy illumination of our cities. Evoking our world on the verge of disintegration, it celebrates the light that emerges in too much light.
The fight is no longer the fight between day and night that inaugurates Murnau’s Faust, but that between the light of the spirit and the light of things. In this shadow theater, under the auspices of a telegraph pole shaped like the Golgotha ​​cross, we witness the rise of the objects of our consumerist societies.
Phones, I-Pods, scooters, whole trains rise to the sky, saved, as the shadows of men fall, hurled to the abyss, like the suicide bodies of “September 11” victims falling from burning towers.
The image, gradually modified along the continuum of projection, carries with it the prophecies of the Apocalypse rehashed by American fundamentalist movements, and the obvious disgrace of a society that celebrates its materialist cult.

AND THEN, ONE THOUSAND YEARS OF PEACE
And Then, One Thousand Years of Peace is a huge, ambitious monolith of a work. First created by Angelin Preljocaj for the Bolshoi Ballet in 2010, it takes inspiration from the vision of apocalypse conjured by St John in the biblical Book of Revelation.There are no horses galloping across the stage or horned beasts. But Preljocaj sets himself a barely less daunting task: choreographing the essential meaning of apocalypse, as a cataclysm so profound it lays bare the very essence and history of human nature.Preljocaj launches his work with a shattering opening sequence. Ten women drive through hard, slicing, geometric formations; lights flash, electro-percussive music reverberates; and the air becomes as thick and swarming as a tropical thunderstorm as the movement accelerates towards its convulsive climax.Out of this intensity emerges a Garden of Eden tranquillity, where men lope and flutter in delicately animalistic moves, and two women in white tunics play like lazy cherubs.

The Artificial Nature Project
In The Artificial Nature Project a new encounter between human and non- human performers emerges from the following questions:What does it mean to make a choreography for materials where human movement is no longer in the center of attention?How can one address the force of things, materials, objects and matters as something that acts upon humans?What is the relationship between the animate and the inanimate world?
The outcome is a performance that literally throws things around. Materials fly through the air giving rise to a landscape that constantly transforms itself. Throughout the performance the view is persistently changing: a calm contemplative site may turn into an energetic chaos of stuff being projected into space. Or, a flood wave becomes a storm of confetti whirling through the air, rushing over the stage. The theater stage gets covered with and traversed by various objects and raw materials, creating a disastrous mess of small, thick, light, big, heavy, thin, breakable and resistant things.

曹斐
ツァオ·フェイ
Чао Фей
Haze and Fog

Cao Fei’s ‘Haze and Fog’ is a new type of zombie movie set in modern China made by one of the most important Chinese artists working today. Working with film, photography, installation and performance Cao Fei probes her personal and cultural relationship to metropolitan China.Rather than positioning activity as good vs evil, Cao Fei’s major new video commission explores how the collective consciousness of people living in the time of what the artist calls “magical metropolises” emerges from seemingly tedious, mundane, day-to-day life. This magic reality is created through a struggle at the tipping point between the visible and the invisible.

CARBONIFEROUS table

Carboniferous is a table that cuts through space, definite and strong.Its many layers of black surface together create a shape, a crystallization of a quick movement, crushing, leading the eye towards the future.The honeycomb cardboard, covered with fiber glass and resin is finished off with layers of carbon fiber.The carbon fiber composes and traces the design, the movement into its unique strength.
In Carboniferous you get the feeling that the top surface does not necessarily represent the ideal landing platform.On another perspective the landing surface generates the powerful and matherical base.
Carboniferous is flowing and exploding, like an aggressive wind with a clear direction.As the earth below, coal is extracted into a new form, the result of sediment build-up of plants,
and also the secrecy and conspiracy of the Carbonari, from underground and from the depth of their hiding places,which emerges a few decades later into the tricolore (the three colours of the Italian flag).
Coal, a dense network of plant remains, and Italy, a mix of cultures and different latitudes.Italian amalgam of different origins, Italy particle edges, Italy multiform, Italy tangle of angles,Italy blunt, concave and convex, Italy Alpine wedge, Italy coal.Sediment of a combustion that melted and transfigured particles.

Do You Remember When?

The hole and exposed earth of Do You Remember When? becomes a spiritual, cultural and physical portal – a point of transformation between worlds – from which emerges an Indigenous worldview engaging a discourse on sustainability. The block of concrete on the pedestal – the foundation of the institution constructed on top of tribal lands – functions as a trophy celebrating Indigenous intervention in opposition to a Western scientific worldview. The closed-circuit audio broadcast of a Pee Posh social dance song performed by the collective provides the psychosocial soundtrack of the transformation process. The work shifts the sustainability from a focus dominated by Western science to a balanced approach inclusive of Indigenous knowledge systems.