highlike

Kenny Wong

Squint
file festival
I was inspired by how the sunlight bounces around in our artificial forest.
“Squint” is a kinetic light installation consisting of 49 mirrors that reflect lights in a bright space. The mirrors track and reflect lights on audiences’ face with composed patterns of movements. It extends the generated perception by focusing on how lights pass across our visual senses physically, and combines with our perception of images through flickering. “Squint”, which extracts various daily experiences to an abstraction brings the audience to expand their interpretation of lights and perceived imagination into a non-linear experience.
“Squint” simulates light source and intentionally shines lights on audience’s faces. Bright light is projected in the gallery, a clean bright space.
Everyday people are dynamically moving around in the city. Sunlight reflects and flickers even when it is indirect and hidden behind the artifacts. While we are traveling, we are experiencing motion. We are also experiencing the shift of light intensity, visual patterns and textures. The varieties of light forms inspire the artist to explore the potential of light textures, select and sort out the combined complexity in urban space. The artist turns them into a minimal form of light experience, while maximizing its diversity of perception.

geoffrey mann

Cross-fire cutlery detail
The focus of the Past, Present & Future Craft practice commission was to examine the intangible characteristic of the spoken word and investigate the unseen affect of sound upon its inhabited environment.The project centralizes around the context of a domestic argument. In this case the event samples an audio excerpt from the 1999 Sam Mendes Film ‘American Beauty’. The slow building dialogue between the three central characters family dinner climaxes with a sound clash of emotions. The cross-fire of the argument traverses the dinning table but where previously the inanimate everyday objects such as plates, cutlery, teapot etc were unable to express their character, the intensity of the conversation deforms their once static existence into objects of unseen familiarity.The presented sound artifacts each encapsulate a momentary emotion of the argument.

JACQUES LESEC & CHRIS MARTIN

INDUSTRIAL CREEPER

On the site we envision a antagonistic dialogue between the seemingly biologic units and its abiotic architectural foundation. The units find a home intertwined amongst the predictable regularity of the steel configuration remeniscent of a deteriorating and outdated technological era whose remnants can be found scattered across downtown Los Angeles. These old industrial artifacts, derived from sheer function, act as an all too familiar platform by which the occupant interacts with this new synthetic ecological system. Throughout the site, we see the units stretched and twisted in an extraodinary demonstration of elasticity. In this way, the building lingers in a constant state of mediation between the past and the future; succombing to the complex configuration of the aggressive industrial creeper.

Di Mainstone & Joanna Berzowska

Skorpions
LUTTERGILL
Skorpions are a set of kinetic electronic garments that move and change on the body in slow, organic motions.They breathe and pulse, controlled by their own internal programming. They are not “interactive” artifacts insofar as their programming does not respond to simplistic sensor data. They have intentionality; they are programmed to live, to exist, to subsist. They are living behavioral kinetic sculptures that exploit characteristics such as control, anticipation and unpredictability. They have their own personalities, their own fears and desires.

Arnaldo Morales

Electro-cución
“I am fascinated with the physicality of low-tech manual devices and mechanical systems. I am aroused by their shapes, sounds, and gestures, which are beautiful descriptions of their own functions. Industrial materials—stainless steel, aluminum, titanium, plastics, and rubbers—seduce me. Artifacts of disappearing industry, I find strange and beautiful shapes in their debris that allude to sexual operations, violent actions, mysterious purposes. Their potential triggers my thought process.”

Ayodamola Okunseinde

TechnoShamanism
I reclaim spaces for underrepresented communities with the use of technology, ritual and the speculative. Whether it be a citizen “sousveillance” suit to monitor police activity, a Techno-Shamanistic religion that virtually renders ritual, or archeological artifacts from future African cultures, I find it imperative to work collaboratively with other artists and local communities.
Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde (ayo) is a Nigerian-American artist, designer, and time-traveler living and working in New York. He studied Visual Arts and Philosophy at Rutgers the State University of New Jersey where he earned his B.A.

LEYLA CARDENAS

Periplo (detail)
Based in Bogotá and represented there by Casas Riegner, Leyla Cardenas engages with the remnants and artifacts of destruction, the seen and unseen, the visible and invisible. Working with found object and images from archives, often her process mirrors that of an archeologist since she procures fragments such as walls, ceilings and floors to produce her work.

Antoine Catala

安托万·卡塔拉
Antibody

French born, New York-based artist Antoine Catala first began experimenting with digital artifacts in 2003, through a technique that intentionally causes compression errors in digital video, which often plague satellite television, streaming internet videos and other digital environments.

Ting-Jung Chen

Side Walk
By performing non-material and material elements in poetic arrangements within temporal related spaces, Ting-Jung Chen discusses the tension between the subjectivity and the objects. By studying Today’s phenomena and reproducing “human’s relationship with cultural and industrial artifacts” in the works, she demonstrates in her aesthetic practice a critical approach to “transformed identity” and its makeshift dwelling.more

Sonja Baumel

crocheted membrane

‘Crocheted Membrane’ experiments with creating a momentary fiction through fashion artifacts. Starting with the physical needs of one individual human body in an outdoor temperature of 10 degrees Celsius, seven hand-crocheted body forms were produced. The clothing’s texture got thinner or opened up completely on areas of the body that needed less warmth and were thicker where warmth was lacking. In this way, a fundamental change in the aesthetic and function of clothes was displayed. Fixed forms, such as trousers, were recreated into new, unique body forms. Instead of one uniform surface, the textures became alive and inimitable. “Her concept of clothing does not derive in the same way as most fashion design, from shape or historically patterned form with embedded social hierarchy and material richness, but is instead determined by the needs and sensations of the human body – performing in the same way that bacteria populations individually respond.” (Villeré 2014) The resulting fictional artifacts illustrate how we could use knowledge about our unique bacteria population to create a novel layer.