Shell of

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Marc Vilanova – Cascade – Spain

Waterfalls are a continuous source of infrasonic frequency found in nature. Although inaudible to humans, they play a crucial role in ecosystems, especially for migratory birds who use them as a compass. However, many waterfalls have lost their frequencies due to climate change. The work creates an immersive experience in which the audience interacts with the visualization of sound waves, experiencing the vibration of sound through illuminated strings.

Bio

Marc Vilanova is a sound and visual artist who works at the intersection of art, science and nature. Vilanova’s artistic production has always been led by a spirit of innovation fueled by an interest in new media. His practice combines sound/light installations, performance, and sculpture.

Credits

This work was partially carried out within the scope of the EMAP program at gnration, with the support of the Creative Europe Culture Programme, the Avatar Center in Quebec City and the Ramon Llull Institute.

Photo:
Eloise Coomber

balenciaga collaboration
A 25 minute video loop with previously unreleased tracks by DJ Hell, made in collaboration with Balenciaga.

Here is a dramatic tension in his work between the real and the imagined in his use of often-appropriated digital objects to create virtual landscapes, which frequently contain elements – animals, machines, fragments of videogames – that are recognisable from our day to day life. This creates a symbiotic relationship between the digital and the real. In a very real way digital space has now become an intangible reality. The worlds built by Robak have a distinctly cinematic sensibility that hyperbolises the shine and dramatic effects of 3D rendered animation. The aesthetic of his work is supremely important, drawing the viewer into a truly alluring, indulgent and strangely gratifying environment. There is a further challenge to the void between high-art and the worlds of 3D animation and gaming, in the intersection between depiction and simulation. This can be partially attributed to the vernacular of advertising Robak is so proficient at utilising.

Moving atmospheres
Moving Atmospheres, the tenth Garage Atrium Commission curated by Iaroslav Volovod, is a partially mirrored sphere suspended in the air, propelling us towards an Aerocene epoch. We call towards this new era with Aerocene. For more than a decade we have been imagining a world free from the carbon, extractivism, capitalism and patriarchy that fuels some forms of life, a new way of being with the atmosphere and emissions-free travel, free from solar panels, lithium, helium, hydrogen and fossil fuels. This new era stands in stark contrast to the lingering eco-traumas of the Anthropocene, the current geological age in which some human capitalistic activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

Until the Lions
In this partial adaptation of poet Karthika Naïr’s book Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, an original reworking of the epic Mahabharata, Khan uses kathak and contemporary dance to tell the tale of Amba, a princess abducted on her wedding day and stripped of her honour, who invokes the gods to seek revenge. In an epic theatrical piece, Khan explores the notion and the physical expression of gender, bringing together some of the stellar artistic team behind his solo DESH: writer Karthika Naïr, visual artist Tim Yip, lighting designer Michael Hulls and dramaturg Ruth Little.

This installation, for a restaurant in San Francisco, responds to three large skylights high overhead in a long, narrow space. The design is an interpretation of “extruding” the skylights down through a partial false ceiling and into the more intimate space below. For this project, we pushed our glass “fabric“ techniques (used in the Capella Hotel and the IHG Lobby installations) one step further, heating the woven glass fabric in a kiln for further shaping. This lets us deform the tubes in the fabric as well as flex the overall matrix to create large continuous glass surfaces that billow like sheets in a breeze.

Library
The library is a potent metaphor for knowledge that evokes images of organization, study, research and discovery. Libraries build relationships and connections and act as catalysts or laboratories for creative thoughts. Chun’s project is inspired in part by Jorge Luis Borges’ celebrated text, ‘The Library of Babel’ that compares the library to the universe with the grand idea that it is a repository for all knowledge and every individual truth. The universe is governed by an order that we can perceive only partially yet it evokes ideas of the infinite and the eternal – like matter it is neither created nor destroyed – it just is.

FILE SAO PAULO 2017
HYPERGRADIENT
“Hypergradient” analyzes the different interpretations of an impartial consistent statement. The installation repeatedly changes between two states: the “statement” state and the “interpretation” state. The statement state displays a sequence of characters of a distinct semiotic system, which can be described as a deputy for all known semiotic systems. These single characters are grouped to strings and then form string orders into an abstract proposition.

The Little General Pinball Machine
“One of the most memorable pieces in the 1997 Documenta X was Öyvind Fahlström’s The Little General (Pinball Machine), 1967. Resembling a raised indoor swimming pool with some two dozen movable parts spread out across its shimmering Plexiglas surface, the thirty-year-old “variable” sculpture radiated a visual audacity that made much of the current work around it pale by comparison. Ersatz scoring cues brushed up against cutouts of historical and pop-culture figures, who in turn seemed to jostle dismembered cartoon limbs and partial anatomies. The cumulative effect was dizzying, as if news, commercials, and cartoons were being broadcast in one overpowering barrage.”Dan Cameron

The almost ideal game

Gilles Deleuze about the Ideal Game: we are surprised when he postulates as the first rule: “there is no rule”. Soon, all the other games that have some rule are, for him, partial. That is, products of the ideal game.

A game where there are no rules implies a completely free game creatively. The question to be raised is whether there is a grey region between the ideal game and the partial games, so that the rules established in the partial games could be suspended. This way we could unpartialise the games bringing them closer to the ideal game or some kind of almost ideal game.
If we take the rules of any game, it means it stops to work immediately, except in the ideal game. Therefore, the key question is: how to suspend the rule of a game (Dice games) so that it can continue to work?

FILE FESTIVAL SAO PAULO 2016

ケリーリチャードソン
켈리 리처드슨
קלי ריצ’רדסון/
凯利·理查森
mariner 9
Mariner 9 presents a panoramic view of a Martian landscape set hundreds of years into the future, littered with the rusting remains from various missions to the planet. Despite its suggested abandoned state, several of the spacecraft continue to partially function, to do their intended jobs, to ultimately find signs of life, possibly transmitting the data back to no one.
Mariner 9 was created using scenery-generation software employed by the film and gaming industries in combination with technical data from NASA’s missions to Mars to produce a faithful artist’s rendering of Martian terrain, populated by the debris from centuries of exploration through real and imagined spacecraft in the centre of a duststorm. “Cinematic tropes of sci-fi films abound, but any search for a clear narrative is frustrated. Presented with minimal action, we wonder instead about the search for life beyond our own planet and the simultaneous destruction of life on earth.” (Laurel MacMillan, Programmer for TIFF Future Projections)

Moving Mario
file festival
“Moving Mario” definitely doesn’t reproduce Super Mario Bros in another way. By partially grabbing the concept and some of the key elements behind the TV game development, Moving Mario tries to challenge some of the traditional game elements. Throughout the gaming process, players can rethink the relationship between the player and the game. This work consists of basic set-up only: there isn’t any side-scroller or background scrolling. Moving Mario is actually demonstrating the mentioned concept and setting up a platform for players to visualize this concept while participating in it. Let’s move Mario!

drawing with robot arm
“With gene mapping, gender reassignment, prosthetic limbs and neural implants, what a body is and how a body operates becomes problematic. We generate Fractal Flesh and Phantom Flesh, extended operational systems and virtual task environments. Meat and metal mesh into unexpected and alternate anatomical architectures that perform remotely beyond the boundaries of the skin and beyond the local space it inhabits. The monstrous is no longer the alien other. We inhabit an age of Circulating Flesh. Organs are extracted from one body and inserted into other bodies. Limbs that are amputated from a dead body can be reattached and reanimated on a living body. A face from a donor stitched to the skull of the recipient becomes a Third Face. A skin cell from an impotent male can be recoded into a sperm cell. And more interestingly a skin cell from a female body might be recoded into a sperm cell. Turbine hearts circulate blood without pulsing. In the near future you might rest you head on your loved one’s chest. They are warm to the touch, they are breathing, they are certainly alive. But they will have no heartbeat. A cadaver can be preserved forever through plastination whilst simultaneously a comatose body can be sustained indefinitely on a life-support system. Dead bodies need not decompose, near-dead bodies need not die. Most people will no longer die biological deaths. They will die when their life-support systems are switched off. The dead, the near-dead, the not-yet-born and the partially living exist simultaneously. And cryongenically preserved bodies await reanimation at some imagined future. We live in an age of the Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera. Liminal spaces proliferate. Engineering organs, stem-cell growing them or by bio-printing will result in an abundence of organs. An excess of organs. Of organs awaiting bodies. Of Organs Without Bodies.” STELARC