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Ed Fornieles

Test Studies
In the 20th century, the film industry largely monopolized the representation of human feelings, whereas in the 21st century, the video game industry engages our emotions through participation. At least that is what Ed Fornieles is trying to demonstrate with his video installation Test Studies in which three-dimensional simulations of a role-playing game are juxtaposed with the emotional comments of those who experience it.
video

DOUG AITKEN

ダグエイケン
道格·艾特肯
new horizon
Doug Aitken was born in California in 1968. He lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. Widely known for his innovative fine art installations, Doug Aitken is at the forefront of 21st century communication. Utilizing a wide array of media and artistic approaches, his eye leads us into a world where time, space, and memory are fluid concepts.

Stine Deja

Cryptic Ruins
It’s the year 21020 and a mysterious archaeological site has been uncovered in what was central London. A large communal structure seemingly dedicated to unproductive expending of energy from human bodies. Whilst we might easily identify it as a gym, our descendants are concerned with why it exists at all. By framing the 21st century compulsion towards physical fitness as a mysterious practice of the past that requires decoding, Deja’s playful film reveals something of the absurdity of contemporary urban life and questions the rationality of our obsessions.

Charlie Behrens

Algorithmic Architecture
This short film is intended to encourage a creative audience to seek out Kevin Slavin’s talk Those Algorithms Which Govern Our Lives. It employs an effect which takes place in Google Earth when its 3D street photography and 2D satellite imagery don’t register correctly. This glitch is applied as a metaphor for the way that our 21st century supercities are physically changing to suit the needs of computer algorithms rather than human employees.

Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits

Swamp Radio
Swamp Radio gets beyond our anthropocenic reality, and maintains connections between the humans and other species. By artistic interventions and transmitting interfaces, the Swamp Radio is turned into a social media megaphone for invisible and inaudible actors of nature. The artists are installing microbial fuel cells, environmental monitoring sensors and transmitting devices to transform the swamps into dynamic power plants and the 21st century multi-voiced broadcast media.

JAUME PLENSA

ジャウメ·プレンサ
Жауме Пленса
Crown Fountain

In his public art, Plensa challenged himself to involve the viewer with his art, which led to his conception of the Crown Fountain. His objective was to create a socially relevant, interactive fountain for the 21st century.] Since water is the focus of a fountain, and since Chicago, and especially Millennium Park, is so greatly affected by the nearby waterfront, Plensa sought to create an eternal water work to complement the local natural inspirations

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.

SARAH MAPLE

Sarah Maple’s artwork is unfailingly bold and brave, not for the coy or faint of heart. These unflinching, occasionally even controversial, investigations into what it is to be a woman and a Muslim in 21st century Britain are made joyful by her own very personal brand of boisterous, tongue-in-cheek humour. more

Nicolas Deshayes

Nicolas Deshayes’ sculptures use materials such as annodised aluminum and vacuum formed plastic to embrace the glossy aesthetics of 21st century design. Despite their emphasis on slick industrial surfaces and physicality, Deshayes’ works maintain a human presence in the form of glutinously rich, bodily allusions, engaging with the materials in ways that distort the ordinary.

LINDER STERLING

לינדר סטרלינג
ЛИНДЕР СТЕРЛИНГОВ

The bodies, objects and surfaces were recognisably 21st century, but details and composition seemed oddly out of time, not least because the imagery was excised from print magazines and not from the internet, but also because the completed works so readily recalled Linder’s first photomontage experiments. Her pairings of different types of consumerist desire, which once declared themselves as critiques of misogynist objetification, are now equally a part of an abiding artistic practice. For example, looking at a particular conjunction of mock-ecstatic porn performers and ornate confectionery, we get the “message” but know too that we can only be in the obsessive, repetitive world of Linderland.

Refik Anadol, Kilroy Realty Corporation and SOM Architects

Virtual Depictions
Parametric data sculptures
The main idea of ‘Virtual Depictions:San Francisco’ is to bring 21st century approach to public art to define new poetics of space through media arts and architecture and to create a unique parametric data sculptures that has an intelligence, memory and culture. Through architectural transformations of media wall located in 350 Mission’ lobby, home of Salesforce, main motivation with this seminal media architecture approach is to frame this experience with a meticulously abstract and cinematic site-specific data-driven narration. As a result, this media wall turns into a spectacular public event making direct and phantasmagorical connections to its surroundings through simultaneous juxtapositions. The project also intends to contribute to contemporary discourse of public art by proposing a hybrid blend of media arts and architecture in 21st century.

REIN VOLLENGA

Ephemeral and ethereal

Ephemeral and ethereal, the work of artist Rein Vollenga is particularly notable in his ‘wearable sculpture’. Vollenga’s unique and visceral work is darkly seductive, and his creations have been embraced by many of fashions forward thinkers as they continue to venture into darker, more fetishistic territory that celebrates a deeper, animalistic sexuality and revels in individuality and fragmented identity. Vollenga is a native of Berlin, reflected in the Teutonic avant garde nature that pervades his work, as is a dangerous, slightly sinister and hedonistic sense that harks back to pre-war Berlin’s days of decadence and ‘voluptuous panic’; his creations conjure all the allure of the decadence of a futuristic Ball Masque. Renowned for his wearable art, which takes form in sculptural headwear and accessories, the artist is now gaining the attention and patronage of the fashion industries elite; a more severe and gothic, 21st Century Dali if you will. Chasseur sat down with Rein himself to discuss his work; its origins and nature, and what drives the man behind the masks.

 

JAMES LAW CYBERTECTURE INTERNATIONAL

Cybertecture Egg
Cybertecture is the revolutionary concept that provides a symbiotic relationship between the urban fabric and technology. Pioneered in 2001, Cybertecture forges both the hardware of the built environment and software systems and technologies from the micro to macro scales of development.The genesis of Cybertecture is in response to man’s progress into the 21st century, where working and living environments need to adapt and evolve to cope with the demands of modern working life. It plays an integral part in this evolution by providing awareness and connectivity via seamless integration of technology into the fabric of space.Cybertecture designs, from technology, products and interiors to systems, buildings and masterplans, allow flexibility and accessibility to inform, adapt, react, communicate, manipulate and control environments, whilst being sustainable and environmentally considered in application and context.Cybertecture embraces the future through continuous innovation and evolution of design and technology. It provides a myriad of solutions, all of which are diverse in individual application but holistic to the overall user environment, and always being integrated with innovation being pursued.

KLAUS OBERMAIER, CHRIS HARING

Vivisector

o what extent does the quality of movement of the virtual world influence real sequences of human movement? Will the real world of the 21st century assume via nanotechnology attributes of the virtual world? Are there still significant differences between a body that is made of synthetic material and warmed artificially and the deep glow of trillions of living cells? VIVISECTOR is an examination of the different speeds of people/nature and technology/information society and of their acceleration; an experiment to overcome the space-time continuum in the real world. It breaks the linearity of movement and in doing so shows the absurdity of momentum. Based on the video-technological concept of the moving body-projection that made D.A.V.E. an international hit, VIVISECTOR now goes one step further: the exclusive concentration on video light and video projection produces a new stage aesthetic in which light, body, video and acoustic space form an unprecedented unity.

MVRDV

Big & Green: Toward Sustainable Architecture in the 21st Century

Tundra

Nomad
Inspired by the concept of digital nomads of 21st-century and based on various pieces and algorithms from TUNDRA’s previous highly acclaimed audio-visual installations premiered across the globe from USA to China, NOMAD brings the polar atmosphere of different TUNDRA site-specific installations into a randomly changing sequence of visual themes and patterns triggered by live-performed sound.

Iwai Toshio and Nishibori Ty

Tenori-On
Media artist Toshio Iwai and and Yu Nishibori of the Music and Human Interface Group, Yamaha Center for Advanced Sound Technology, have collaborated to design a new digital musical instrument for the 21st+century, TENORI-ON. A 16×16 matrix of LED switches allows everyone to play music intuitively, creating a “visible music” interface. It consists of a hand-held screen with a grid of LED switches, any of which can be activated in a number of ways to create an evolving musical soundscape. The LED switches are held within a magnesium frame, which has two built-in speakers located on the top of frame, as well as a dial and buttons that control the type of sound and beats per minute produced.

Tobias Stretch

Craco

Tobias Stretch channels the beauty and melancholia of Hauschka’s single “Craco” in his uncanny video filmed in Philadelphia’s answer to Brooklyn’s High Line, Reading Viaduct Park. With music videos for Radiohead, Crystal Fighters and Christopher Bono to his name, the Philly-based animator is known for his distinct aesthetic and method, pairing landscape photography with life-size stop-motion puppets. “I thought right from the beginning when I saw Tobias’s work that it has a mixture of analog and handmade elements and a surreal atmosphere. In my music you have similar elements,” says Hauschka himself, aka the German pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann, who headline’s London’s Union Chapel tonight as part of his European tour. Although best known as a 21st-Century protagonist of the prepared piano practice championed by John Cage, Bertelmann “left all the preparations at home” in order to work with a pure sound on this track. Named after the Italian ghost town, “Craco” is taken from his entropy-laced album Abandoned City and played to Stretch’s own fascination with urban decay. “The music was there beforehand, but I had a bowl of music and a bowl of names and I tried to pair them up. I think the music sounded not only like an abandoned place but also like a nostalgic place and that’s why I thought it was a great match.”