The Sea

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

The Sea is an extraction of a complex natural phenomenon, resulting in an artificial emulation that develops a life form of its own. Just like the sea with its endless waves, this artificial system follows the impact of an immersive state, leading to a unique vision of an artificial generator. Despite appearing chaotic, it is capable of generating associations ranging from the movement of waves to science fiction scenarios.

Bio

Paul Gründorfer develops process-related systems and explores variable or unstable conditions in the occurrence of sound when exposed to amplification, feedback, and multiple signal streams. His works focus on processes that evolve in a social space. Leo Peschta is an artist and researcher. During his studies, he worked in various fields of media arts, including sound, installations and software, developing over the years a special interest in robotics and machinery.

Credits

Austrian Embassy

Espejismos
Glenda Leon’s work includes various techniques such as drawings, video art, installations, sculpture and photography. Glenda León encourages the viewer to approach the object from a poetical perspective. This way, she reveals the metaphoric part of everyday life objects and is interested in revealing antagonisms like silence or sound, visibility or invisibility; public or private; and ephemeral or eternal.

life life

МИЕОНГБЕОМ КИМ
김명범
tree boat

“I try to examine how my surroundings are perceived and remembered. To do this, I listen to a whisper from the objects within my surroundings. I attempt to have an intimate, private dialogue with the world, trying to concretely present the way things approach me, by using other mediums. To ask what an objects means to me is like asking what being I am. I have consistently experienced my surrounding objects from the perspective of life, growth, and decline, which lends vitality to my work.”

The Last Supper Alive
File Festival
A six minute video installation that brings to life the famous late 16th century work by Leonardo Da Vinci. The slight movements of the figures enhance the choral nature of the Last Supper, with a very measured and meticulous direction that overcomes the fixity of the painting adorning the wall of the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, bringing it back to life and providing it with a new spatial context.

Napoleon

Kevin Brownlow’ restoration

Gance embarked on his greatest project, a six-part life of Napoléon. Only the first part was completed, tracing Bonaparte’s early life, through the Revolution, and up to the invasion of Italy, but even this occupied a vast canvas with meticulously recreated historical scenes and scores of characters. The film was full of experimental techniques, combining rapid cutting, hand-held cameras, superimposition of images, and, in wide-screen sequences, shot using a system he called Polyvision needing triple cameras (and projectors), achieved a spectacular panoramic effect, including a finale in which the outer two film panels were tinted blue and red, creating a widescreen image of a French flag. The original version of the film ran for around 6 hours. A shortened version received a triumphant première at the Paris Opéra in April 1927 before a distinguished audience that included the future General de Gaulle. The length was reduced still further for French and European distribution, and it became even shorter when it was shown in America. Napoleon is a silent film directed by Abel Gance, dramatising the youth and early career of Napoleon Bonaparte. Its most complete screening, said to be nine hours long, took place in Paris in 1927 – but this version was subsequently lost. British film-maker Kevin Brownlow saw a version as a schoolboy and subsequently restored the film to close to its original length from various prints. His restoration was first shown in London in 1980 with a score by Carl Davis.

Give my Creation… Life!
Give my creation… Life! Is a project which links Art, Science and Technology. It is based on the generation of energy through the heart beating, with the aim of granting autonomy to a machine. During the research of this subversive goal, multiple issues have been addressed, such as the extension of a removed organ´s life, its artificial feeding of nutrients and its use as a source of natural energy, among others.

On stage, the ample white strapless dress of a still model serves as a screen for all kinds of projections that echo those of a big screen in the background. “Mixing 3D video with certified fairy tale stories and tailoring tradition” is the idea of the atypical Mountain Ash. Intel technology brings to life on the fabric all kinds of patterns simulating embroidery or painting on silk: stripes of neon lights, butterflies flapping their wings, “mapping” of crystal tassels or the northern lights …

EON
“I considered the first life forms on Earth and how we came to be as a way to refer to the Natural Sciences. I looked at fossil records of the first multi cellular organisms of the Ediacaran Period, 555 million years ago for inspiration. I was struck by the theory of symbiosis in evolution; our DNA ancestors are the resultant fusion of single cellular organisms and bacteria. The millions of bacteria in our bodies are our foremothers. EON is a speculative fiction, a depiction of early life forms underwater. The Universe was formed 13.7 billion years ago. The Earth is 4.543 billion years old. Cyanobacteria or blue-green algae were the first microbes to create oxygen on Earth via photosynthesis 3.5 billion years ago. First humans 200,000-300,000 years ago.” Jennifer Steinkamp

a little death

Despite the broader reference to the traditional pictorial genre of “still life”, disseminated from the Dutch and Spanish painters of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, ‘Still life’ from 2001 and ‘A little death’ from 2002 refer especially to the painting of transient elements of the French Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) to discuss the distortion and inexorability of time, the finitude of life or, above all, the interdependence between life and death. The title makes a direct reference to the expression with which the French philosopher Georges Bataille defined the orgasm: ‘une petite mort‘.

Chromadynamica
Pantone’s work deals with dynamism, transformation, digital revolution, and themes related to the present times. Felipe Pantone evokes a spirit in his work that feels like a collision between an analog past and a digitized future, where human beings and machines will inevitably glitch alongside one another in a prism of neon gradients, geometric shapes, optical patterns, and jagged grids. Based in Spain, Pantone is a byproduct of the technological age when kids unlocked life’s mysteries through the Internet. As a result of this prolonged screen time, he explores how the displacement of the light spectrum impacts color and repetition.

Арне Куинз
Chaos Life
The composition of a Chaos artwork started as a self-portrait; the representation of what’s going on in his head. But soon a shift occurred towards an enduring research on the definition of chaos in society. Often these artworks are filled with a mass of small wooden sticks attached to each other, looking enormously chaotic. “There’s no chaos, only structure” is a tagline in some of his work expressing his inner self and how he describes his thoughts. To him there is no chaos, everything is structured even in the chaos you find structure. There’s no such thing as chaos in Quinze’s world or at least not in the sense of how society defines chaos. Chaos does exist, as a form of structure. Chaos is irretrievably linked with life. In life everything is a matter of rhythm. Something without a rigid structure is part of the organic order in life.

АСТРИД КРОГ
Ikat I
Fascinated by the interplay of textiles and light, Denmark-based artist Astrid Krogh explores the dialogue between natural and artificial illumination when paired with fibers. While studying at the Danish Design School, Krogh explored her interest in textiles, which shines through in the craftsmanship, patterns, and ornamentation of her work. Inspired by cycles of life in nature, many of Krogh’s neon.

Animation
Mahler – Das Lied von der Erde – Der Abschied – O Adeus

Das Lied von der Erde is a large-scale work composed in 1908-1909 by the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler. The work was described as a symphony when published, and it comprises six separate songs for two singers who take turns to sing the songs. Mahler specified the two singers should be a Tenor and an Alto, or else a Tenor and a Baritone. The work was composed following the most painful period in Mahler’s life, and the songs address themes such as those of living, parting and salvation. On the centenary of Mahler’s birth, the composer, conductor and Mahler champion Leonard Bernstein described Das Lied von der Erde as Mahler’s “Greatest symphony”.

Alone Together

The phrase Alone Together describes a nature of personal relationships and relating to one another that I have found to be characteristic of an experience the generation I am a part of encounters, if not others as well. The phrase in context of communication calls upon the experience and realization that your mental state is completely unique and solitary. There is a push to connect with others as well as to find someone to spend your life with, and along with this push comes the expectation of a complete and total togetherness. There is an eventual point of realization and discovery of your own mental state and its perpetual solitude, transcending physical closeness with others. The photographs in the series evoke contemplation of this experience, through imagery of the mundane, capturing a quiet departure into a somewhat bizarre disconsolate self-investigation. The photographs play with the association of Alone Together to intimacy and love, with an alternate interpretation or redefinition according to newfound phenomenon.

SPACIAL SOUNDS

Spatial Sounds (100dB at 100km/h) is an interactive installation that is capable of very intelligent behavior. Not only can the arm spin quickly or slowly, it can also make very well-defined movements in both directions. On the one hand, Spatial Sounds (100dB at 100km/h) lives a life of its own; on the other, it reacts very directly to the people in its space. The sensor can detect how close the visitors are and where they are in relation to the arm. When the installation scans the space, it makes inspecting movements and generates sounds that symbolize this scanning. It produces remarkably short, loud pulses and ‘listens’ to the reverberations from the empty space. The pulses combine different frequency ranges and rhythmical patterns. When visitors enter the room, they are detected immediately. The installation reacts in both a musical and a gestural way. The sounds relate directly to both the position of the arm and the dynamic ‘map’ of the space and the visitors. These sounds are very physical. For example, when the speaker is pointing at someone, it will generate a specific sound. This is also the case at high speeds and with several people in the room. However, the sounds and movements of the arm also tempt visitors to move around. Different locations in the space represent different sounds, as does the distance of the visitors to the rotating arm.

“Baraka is a documentary that starts from an old word with meanings in several languages. It can be translated as a blessing, breath or essence of life, from where the process of world evolution is triggered. The film reveals how much humanity is interconnected, despite the differences in religion, culture and language of the peoples. A true visual poem without narration or caption, only images and sounds carefully captured and articulated through an expressive montage, which makes each take add the next other meaning, whose theme is… After all, what is Baraka about? I believe that each viewer of the film sees a different theme. It can be about the strength of planet Earth. It may be about the multiple diversities that unite us. It can be a lot. Baraka is a visual reproduction of the human connection with the Earth ”