highlike

Engineered Arts

AMECA
“Multiply the power of artificial Intelligence with an artificial body. Ameca is the physical presence that brings your code to life. The most advanced lifelike humanoid you can use to develop and show off your greatest machine learning interactions. This robot is the digital interface to the real world.” Engineered Arts
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“A U.K. robotics firm called Engineered Arts just debuted the first videos of its new humanoid robot, which is able to make hyper-realistic facial expressions. It’s a pretty stunning achievement in the world of robotics; it just also happens to be absolutely terrifying.
Named Ameca, the robot’s face features eyes, cheeks, a mouth, and forehead that contort and change shape to show off emotions ranging from awe to surprise to happiness. One of the new videos of Ameca shows it waking up and seemingly coming to grips with its own existence for the first time ever.” Neel V.Patel

Daft Punk

Electroma
DAFT PUNK’S ELECTROMA IS THE EAGERLY ANTICIPATED DIRECTORIAL FEATURE FILM DEBUT FROM GUY-MANUEL DE HOMEM-CHRISTO AND THOMAS BANGALTER, BETTER KNOWN TOGETHER AS DAFT PUNK. A PSYCHEDELIC VISUAL AND MUSICAL ODYSSEY, ELECTROMA FOLLOWS THE JOURNEY OF TWO ROBOTS ON THEIR QUEST TO BECOME HUMAN. FEATURING A STUNNING SOUNDTRACK WITH MUSIC FROM TODD RUNDGREN, BRIAN ENO, CURTIS MAYFAIR, SEBASTIEN TELLIER AND CHOPIN, ELECTROMA PLAYS OUT BEAUTIFULLY ‘LIKE MUSIC FOR THE EYES’.

Flora&faunavision

Magenta Moon Garden
Designed to spark conversation around sustainability, tech and media skills in a playful and intuitive way, this interactive, walkthrough video installation comprises three distinct visual environments (Sunrise Garden, Moon Garden, Magenta Moon) enriched with intuitive, interactive real-time elements. The stunning environment and experience is flanked by online contents and events that tackle topics from hate speech to climate change, flanked by a wide spectrum of online contents, talks and on-site workshops.

Lech Majewski

The Roe’s Room
opera movie

In this “absolutely singular autobiographical film opera” (Time Out London), multi-talented composer, writer, director and artist Lech Majewski presents a stunning, intimate, and ultimately magical work of unbridled creativity. A ravishing ode to the imagination, THE ROE’S ROOM is a place where the energy of youth and the eternal power of the natural world triumph over the banalities and deprivations of the commonplace.Within their apartment, a father, mother and son bear the dulling yoke of an ordinary urban life. His mind and heart borne aloft by the cycle of the seasons and the images and music within him, the son transforms his cloistered existence into a richly poetic emotional utopia. As autumn arrives, cracking flakes of plaster become falling leaves. With spring, a cold hard floor comes alive with meadow grass and love beckons in the form of a beautiful young girl’s outstretched hand.

Refik Anadol

WDCH Dreams
The Los Angeles Philharmonic collaborated with media artist Refik Anadol to celebrate our history and explore our future. Using machine learning algorithms, Anadol and his team has developed a unique machine intelligence approach to the LA Phil digital archives – 45 terabytes of data. The results are stunning visualizations for WDCH Dreams, a project that was both a week-long public art installation projected onto the building’s exterior skin (Sept 28 – Oct 6, 2018) and a season-long immersive exhibition inside the building, in the Ira Gershwin Gallery.

Rhizomatiks Research ELEVENPLAY Kyle McDonald

discrete figures 2019

Human performers meet computer-generated bodies, calculated visualisations of movement meet flitting drones! Artificial intelligence and self-learning machines make this previously unseen palette of movement designs appear, designs that far transcend the boundaries of human articulateness, allowing for a deep glimpse into the abstract world of data processing. The Rhizomatiks Research team, led by Japanese artist, programmer, interaction designer and DJ Daito Manabe, gathers collective power with a number of experts, among them the five ELEVENPLAY dancers of choreographer MIKIKO as well as from coding artist Kyle McDonald. The result is a breathtaking, implemented beautifully, in short: visually stunning.

DOUG FOSTER

the psychotron installation
Now one of Doug’s stunning installations is available in edition format. The Psychotron Framed – a video piece based on the 12-petal lotus flower symbolising eastern spirituality’s heart chakra – has been harnessed into a purpose-built viewer that can hang on a wall or stand freely on a flat surface. The piece is currently only available by collection from The Outsiders London gallery. Order now and Doug will assemble the materials in two weeks.“For centuries, circular figures containing symmetrical patterns have been used as a tool for meditation,” says Doug of his original Psychotron on display at Bedlam. “The mandala, the yantra and visualisations of the various chakras, all conform to radial design principles that have been refined throughout the ages. Now those principles have been ruthlessly plundered for the creation of The Psychotron.

RYOICHI KUROKAWA

黒川良一
octfalls
Octfalls consists of eight hanging HD screens displaying images of a silver waterfall cascading down a cliff, while the sound of the water rushing over rocks plays over a pair of speakers attached to each screen. These screens are distributed throughout the space at varying heights, encouraging our eyes to wander freely through the installation. The stunning images and highly refined sounds immerse our senses and play tricks on our perceptions. The waterfall suddenly vanishes in vain, then reappears, shifting to another screen, a complex combination of loops in a unique sequence of orchestrated play.

ROBERT WILSON

بوب ويلسون
鲍伯·威尔逊
בוב וילסון
ロバート·ウィルソン
밥 윌슨
БОБ УИЛСОН
Peter Pan

All in all, Robert Wilson’s Peter Pan is in itself a great adventure. Although it starts slowly and affectedly, it by and by offers the most stunning images and captivating performances, which are filled with plenty of mystery and possess emotional depth, letting us reflect upon our childhoods – all the varied ones each one of us had and has.

Diana Thater

“Science,Fiction”

Through a combination of the temporal qualities of video and the architectural dimension of its physical installation, Thater’s work explores the artifice of its own production and its capacity to construct perception and shape the way we think about the world through its image. Natural diversity, wildlife, and conservation have been persistent themes in the artist’s work, and she has dedicated herself to an examination of the varied kinds of relationships humans have constructed with animals. While her in-depth studies of ecosystems and animal behavior propose observation as a kind of understanding in itself, her ethical position is implicit in the work, which, while subtly political, provides views of the sublime in all its incarnations—stunning, beautiful, and simultaneously terrifying.

Tod Machover

Death and the Powers

Science fiction and poignant family drama combine in one of the most stunning, cutting-edge operas of the 21st century, with a libretto by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, coming to the stage of the Winspear Opera House in a production directed by Diane Paulus, designed by Alex McDowell (Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report) and conducted by Nicole Paiement (TDO’s The Lighthouse).This visually spectacular robot pageant by MIT Media Lab’s Tod Machover tells the story of a terminally ill billionaire, sung by Robert Orth, who downloads his consciousness into “the System” and proceeds to use all his powers to persuade his loved ones to join him there. Without bodies, without the possibility of touch, sex, suffering, and death — are we still genuinely human?Explore these existential questions and much more in a piece Variety described as “playful, lyrical and…mesmerizing.” Also starring Joélle Harvey as Miranda, Patricia Risley as Evvy, and Hal Cazalet in his Dallas Opera debut as Nicholas.

ERNESTO KLAR

Эрнесто Клар
Convergenze parallele

Convergenze parallele is an audiovisual installation in which airborne dust particles passing through a beam of light are tracked, visualized, and sonified in realtime by a custom software system. The installation reacts to air movements in the exhibition space, allowing the viewer to see and hear the amplified movement of dust particles. “Convergenze parallele” explores the poetic potential of revealing and transforming the imperceptible. The custom software uses a video camera to capture the activity of dust articles passing through the beam of light. It then analyzes the video signal to track the location of individual dust particles, and reveals each particle’s trajectory in the image-processed projection. The physical particles draw traces of their otherwise invisible motion on the digital screen. At random intervals, the software artificially saturates the system by briefly activating the fan-a cloud of dust fills the beam of light and creates dense and stunning patterns of particle trajectories and sound.

File Festival

Daito Manabe

真鍋 大 度
Perfume

Perfume is Japan’s top techno-pop girl trio – Nocchi, Kashiyuka and Aa-Chan – whose music and synchronised dance sessions have won them a global online fan base. This year they have had their first sellout European tour. Their distinctive sound is the work of Japanese electronic music guru Yasatuka Nakata who has been their music producer since 2003. Their stunning performance at the Lions International Festival of Creativity at Cannes recently was the result of their collaboration with leading Japanese techno-artist Daito Manabe. Manabe is one of a new generation of programmers whose genre-crossing work has placed him at the cutting edge of techno-art-music-performance. His art embraces dynamic sensory programming, projection mapping and body capture; lasers, robots and sonar.

Asif Khan

UK Pavilion at the Astana Expo 2017
At the heart of the UK pavilion is a stunning 60 metre panorama depicting a living, universal landscape generated entirely by computer. It captures the relationship between the Sun, the Earth and its climate in incredible detail through virtual day and night. At a stunning 40,000 pixels wide it is the largest project of its kind ever undertaken.

DAMIEN JALET

OMPHALOS
In ancient Greek Omphalos means navel as in navel or center of the world. Jalet’s creation examines the question of origins. The choreographer reflects on the human predicament and life in the cosmos, a recurrent theme in his work. For his first Latin American creation, Jalets brings together an ensemble of 20 dancers who perform to the music of Marihiko Hara et Ryūichi Sakamoto. This stunning performance makes light of gravity and instability, unfolding at the very edge of empty space. Exceptional event: the only performances in France as part of a world tour.

PHILIP GLASS

فيليب الزجاج
菲利普·格拉斯
פיליפ גלאס
フィリップ·グラス
필립 글래스
Филип Гласс
Dracula (Bela Lugosi)

Dracula is one of Philip Glass’ many projects that involves adding music to classic films, the most effective of which is probably Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête, which essentially turned Cocteau’s masterpiece into a stunning film opera. His music for Dracula exists in four versions: the original, for string quartet, recorded by the Kronos Quartet; an arrangement by the composer for string quartet and piano; and arrangements for the Philip Glass Ensemble and for solo piano, both made by Michael Riesman, who plays the solo version.

Wim Wenders

לזכות ונדרס
ヴェンダースに勝つ
벤더스 승리
ВЫИГРАТЬ ВЕНДЕРС
Wings of Desire
cinema

Wings of Desire is one of cinema’s loveliest city symphonies. Bruno Ganz is Damiel, an angel perched atop buildings high over Berlin who can hear the thoughts—fears, hopes, dreams—of all the people living below. But when he falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist, he is willing to give up his immortality and come back to earth to be with her. Made not long before the fall of the Berlin wall, this stunning tapestry of sounds and images, shot in black and white and color by the legendary Henri Alekan, is movie poetry. And it forever made the name Wim Wenders synonymous with film art.

CLAIRE MORGAN

КЛЕР МОРГАН
كلير مورجان
克莱尔·摩根
クレア·モーガン
클레어 모건
If you go down to the woods today
British artist Claire Morgan creates stunning installations out of organic materials including animal taxidermy, seeds, and insects. Morgan often uses taxidermied birds in her works, suspending the birds among intricate arrangements of thistle seeds, bees, or other small objects.

john houshmand

arch
John Houshmand creates exquisite art pieces that combine wood, glass, acrylic, and steel into stunning furnishings. He works and selectively harvests trees from, as well as mills and kiln dries wood at his 900-acre, upstate New York farm. He believes that trees are becoming lost in our world of mass furniture production. Much like our philosophy at RWF, John strives to show what wood really looks like.

RYAN JOHNSON

Райана Джонсона
pedestrian

Ryan Johnson’s pieces made from found and repurposed materials are very much rooted in traditional figurative sculpture, but he has abstracted the forms, making his work have a weird gestural quality. The drawing and writing he does on the casting tape he uses plays on the idea that it’s usually wrapped around broken limbs, but it also allows him to use it to create another thread of communication within his work. His ‘Pedestrian’ series of figures made out of wood and paint is also really stunning – they look like people zapping between dimensions.

oliver herring

Gloria
Oliver Herring’s stunning sculptural portrait Gloria (2004) was a hit at the recent international art fair Art Basel Miami Beach. Created from thousands of fragmented digital chromogenic prints, this lifelike and expressive construction exists at the intersection of photography and sculpture and between realism and abstraction.

Esther Stocker

ЭСТЕР СТОКЕР
에스더 스토커
以斯帖施特克尔
Unlimited Space

Italian installation artist Esther Stocker creates stunning geometric environments that can often be explored by the viewer. The construction of each piece appears to follow some type of strange equation, resulting in unusual linear patterns and planes that completely transform the physical pace.

STUDIO ANDREEA MANDRESCU

MATERIALITY
With the introduction of “Materiality,” a stunning continuation of her previous works, but with new vision and just as much revelation, Andreea manages to create another incredible tactile and visual experience. Inspired by jewelry and precious stones, the collection takes a flexible, fluid, and much more playful approach to adornment.

THOMAS MCINTOSH WITH MIKKO HYNNINEN AND EMMANUEL MADAN

ondulation

We enter a room and are plunged into semi-darkness. The room is dominated by an immense basin of water, ripples radiating across its surface in concentric rings. Intuitively we know that the sounds around us are closely related to the ripples, a fact reinforced by the water’s reflected movements on the surrounding walls through a sophisticated play of light. As we get closer, it becomes clear that the sounds are emanating from speakers concealed under the basin, the source of the ripples on the water’s surface. The water acts as a medium in the sense that it acts as middle ground: stimulated by the sound and swept by the beams of light, it produces richly evocative reflections. A latent photographic metaphor is at play in the installation: the water seems to take on the properties of a sensitive plate, with the sound imprinted upon it and revealed by the movement and stunning reflections projected on the walls.

BOUNCE STREETDANCE COMPANY

Insane in the brain

‘Insane in the Brain’ is a reworked producion of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as a feast of stunning street dance. Injecting a healthy dose of contemporary styles fused with breathtaking hip hop moves. ‘Insane in the Brain’ features a pulsating soundtrack with cuts from Missy Elliot, Dizzee Rascal, Gotan Project, David Holmes and Cypress Hill. Inventive set design and choreography are mixed with film and multimedia sequences to produce a fast-paced show that is funny, moving and packed with high-octane dance.

Richard Nicoll

Fiber Optic Dress
At the intersection of fashion and digital innovation comes wearable tech. Giving analog clothing and accessories a futuristic upgrade, it promises to completely redefine their form and function. One of the most stunning examples of the tech-chic trend is a headline-making dress dubbed the “jellyfish.” Created by designer Richard Nicoll, it appeared to float down the runway at London Fashion Week exuding the same phosphorescent glow of the eerily gorgeous sea creatures that inspired it. (Except his dress used strings of fiber optics—no stinging tentacles here!)

ilanio and iimuahii

ILANIO REUBIN AND ELENA SLIVNYAK
SUPREME BEINGS FASHION SHOW

The Supreme Beings Fashion Show will reveal the avant-garde concepts of two local fashion designers, Ilanio Reubin of Ilanio and Elena Slivnyak of IIMUAHII, at the spacious SOMArts Cultural Center on Thursday, March 1st. The two runway shows will showcase 8 imaginative looks from each designer, as well as two short improvisational performances by Butoh (contemporary Japanese) dancers which we find very fitting for the two creatives.Though different in aesthetic, both designers hail from similar backgrounds and aim for analogous goals. Ilanio (San Francisco Art Institute) and Elena (Academy of Art) both found the retail and fashion corporate worlds too constrictive and mass-produced, and thus ventured into their own imaginative ones.
Ilanio works to create “visually stunning fashion concepts that explicitly disregard wearability, saleability, and practicality; that embrace advanced definitions of sexuality and gender; and that defy the commercially-mandated boundary between the fashion and art worlds.” For Elena of IIMUAHIII, her avant-garde aesthetic is manifested in an intricately-crafted sportswear line.Although we’re dreaming of being in Paris (but really, when are we not?), we’re excited to watch Ilanio and IIMUAHII strut and represent San Francisco’s undeniable talent in their nontraditional fashion show and hope to see you all there as well!

video

WIM VANDEKEYBUS & ULTIMA VEZ

MENSKE

Even the standing room only tickets have sold out, and the raging mass of disappointed kids looks like they may start a riot: the atmosphere before Ultima Vez’s performance is akin to a rock concert. Choreographer superstar Wim Vandekeybus’s company has toured the world with their trademark vocabulary of acrobatic, extreme, often violent movement, soaked in multimedia and energetic music. Menske (meaning approximately ‘little human’), their latest work, has all the typical flaws and qualities of classic Vandekeybus. On the conservative end of political intervention, Menske is an explosive concoction of brash statements about the state of the world today, a sequence of rapidly revolving scenes of conflicting logic: intimist, blockbuster, desperate, hysterical. The broad impression is not so much of a sociological portrait, but of a very personal anguish being exorcised right in front of us, as if Vandekeybus is constantly switching format in search of eloquence. Visually, it is stunning, filmic: a slum society falling apart through guerrilla warfare, in which girls handily assume the role of living, moving weapons. A woman descends into madness in an oneiric hospital, led by a costumed and masked group sharpening knives in rhythmic unison. A traumatised figure wanders the city ruins dictating a lamenting letter to invisible ‘Pablo.’ Men hoist a woman on a pole her whole body flapping like a flag. “It’s too much!” intrudes a stage hand, “Too much smoke, too much noise, too much everything!” And the scene responsively changes to a quiet soliloquy. At which point, however, does pure mimesis become complicit with the physical and psychological violence it strives to condemn? Unable to find its way out of visual shock, Menske never resolves into anything more than a loud admission of powerlessness.

REYNALD DROUHIN

РЕЙНАЛЬД ДРУХИН
LANDSCAPE MONOLITH

MONOLITH is the title of French multimedia artist Reynald Drouhin’s latest art project which consists of a series of digitally manipulated images of stunning natural landscapes. In the middle of picturesque sunsets and serene Arctic landscapes, Drouhin pastes a mysterious prismatic shape and then flips it, thus creating a mind-boggling visual effect of an otherworldly transparent object hovering in desolate locations. The entire project is an ingenious appropriation of the famous monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s film ”2001: A Space Odyssey” where mysterious dark rectangular objects (dubbed as monoliths) were scattered across the solar system by an unknown alien civilisation which seemed to guide humans along a risky interplanetary journey. Reynald Drouhin’s MONOLITH series captures exactly the double nature of Kubrick’s monoliths: the inverted shapes in the photographs seem to be a window to another dimension, a physical anomaly which distorts the nature around it, and is both menacing and inviting.

ANISH KAPOOR

阿尼什•卡普尔
アニッシュ·カプーア
Аниш Капур
Arcelor Mittal Orbit
Award winning London-based artist Anish Kapoor has been given the commission of a lifetime to design the spectacular new public attraction in the Olympic Park. The stunning artwork, to be entitled ‘The ArcelorMittal Orbit’, will ensure the Park remains an unrivalled visitor destination following the 2012 Games, providing the key Olympic legacy Mayor of London Boris Johnson envisaged for the East End.The breathtaking sculpture – thought to be the tallest in the UK – will consist of a continuous looping lattice of tubular steel. Standing at a gigantic 115m, it will be 22m taller than the Statue of Liberty in New York and offer unparalleled views of the entire 250 acres of the Olympic Park and London’s skyline from a special viewing platform. Visitors will be able to take a trip up the statuesque structure in a huge lift and will have the option of walking down the spiralling staircase.One of the world’s most distinguished contemporary artists, Turner Prize winning Anish Kapoor studied in London, where he is now based. He is well known for his use of rich pigment and imposing, yet popular works, such as the vast, fleshy and trumpet-like Marsyas, which filled the Tate’s Turbine Hall as part of the Unilever Series, the giant reflecting, pod like sculpture Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park and his recent record breaking show at the Royal Academy, the most successful exhibition ever presented by a contemporary artist in London.