EGO

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

The mirror stage in psychology explains how the Ego forms through objectification, where one’s visual appearance comes into conflict with emotional experience, a concept called ‘alienation‘ by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The interactive installation EGO reenacts and reverses this process by distorting the mirror image based on the user’s movements, highlighting the tension between the real and the symbolic, the Ego and the It, subject and object.

Bio

Klaus Obermaier is an interdisciplinary artist, director and composer who creates innovative works in the performing arts, music and installations using new media. Stefano D’Alessio researches social issues induced by the internet and explores how the web and its derivatives influence human behavior and the body. Martina Menegon creates intricate assemblages of physical and virtual elements, exploring the contemporary self and its hybrid corporeality.

Les trois Grâces

file festival
“Les Trois Grâces” is a presence and corporeality simulation in virtual reality. Exposing the underlying power struggle implied within touch, this piece explores the trespassing  of bodily frontiers and territoriality. As a sculpture, its object is not matter, but our relationship to the other.
It offers a troubling experience of intimate proportions.

Homo Economicus
Homo Economicus explores how men working in the City of London financial district both modify and commodify their own bodies. The work intentionally conflates the corporate and the corporeal, questioning male self-worth and its apparent apotheosis in the hyper-competitive financial services industry. Grounded in audio interviews with real city men, Homo Economicus proposes an alternative economy of the male body: not as an unquestioned instrument of power, but a site of vulnerability and power-play.

Nine Bats

The abstract and colorful patterns of Kølbæk Iversen suck our bodies and envelop us in total installations that deal with the body, corporeality and phenomena such as phantom pain. The works store poetic and existential narratives of what it means to be human.

克劳斯奥伯迈尔
the concept of … (here and now)

In front of a giant screen, two dancers interact with a cohort of cameras… Their movements are captured by infra-red sensors and projected onto the screen, whereby their bodies become the canvas on which new images take shape. The result is a shifting kaleidoscope of strange, living, quasi-mathematical visual worlds which sometimes seem to be emanating or even escaping from the dancers’ bodies. “Who decides which movement to make: the man or the machine?” Blurring the line between the real and the virtual, Klaus Obermaier loves to subsume his performers’ bodies and physicality in a disconcerting digital universe. With his latest creation, the choreographer/artist has taken a bold new step. He has constructed a system of projectors and infra-red sensor-cameras, trained upon the movements of two dancers. The performers thus find themselves thrown headlong into a living, moving graphical universe: their movements are projected onto the screen, but at the same time their bodies are illuminated by more projected images. This is a true artistic performance, pushing well beyond the frontiers of a standard dance recital, or even a contemporary dance show. A corporeal, temporal performance. A choreography which makes subtle use of its raw materials, deftly combining lights, video, perspectives and the real-time power of bodily movement.

Matrix Paris
Matrix Paris is a fully immersive and experiential light installation. The visitors walk into a maze of LED lights distributed over two floors. The colors of the lights slowly change between red and blue. These colors delineate the visible color spectrum as well as the spectrum of our human emotion with red as the most sensual color and blue as the cool, rational counterpoint. The corporeal intensity of the immersive aesthetic experience combined with the underlying technological aspects of a highly sophisticated binary logic blurs the border between the virtual and the real.

CORPORÉALITÉS
Corporealités is a large-scale work exploring the autonomy of ballet through the immersive elements of sculpture and video. At the heart of a piece is Just’s film, displayed across a series of LED-panels strewn about the space, where close up shots of dancers from the American Ballet Theatre show their bodies affixed to electrotherapy patches. As the muscles displayed on the panels contract, notes of Fauré’s Op. 50 seem to play in tandem, providing an ominously invisible link between the film and physical space.

the sound of empty space
The sound of empty space explores relationships between microphones, speakers, and surrounding acoustic environments through controlled, self-generating microphone feedback. Amplifying and aestheticizing the acoustic inactivity between technological “inputs” and “outputs” – stand-ins for their corporeal correlates, the ear and mouth – the notion of a causal sound producing object is challenged, and questions are posed as to the status of the ʻamplifiedʼ. By building flawed technological systems and nullifying their intended potential for communication, the ear is turned towards the empty space between components; to the unique configurations of each amplifying assemblage.

Hosotan

Hijikata conceived of Ankoku Butoh from its origins as an outlaw form of dance-art, and as constituting the negation of all existing forms of Japanese dance. Inspired by the criminality of the French novelist Jean Genet, Hijikata wrote manifestoes of his emergent dance form with such as titles as ‘To Prison’. His dance would be one of corporeal extremity and transmutation, driven by an obsession with death, and imbued with an implicit repudiation of contemporary society and media power. Many of his early works were inspired by figures of European literature such as the Marquis de Sade and the Comte de Lautréamont, as well as by the French Surrealist movement, which had exerted an immense influence on Japanese art and literature, and had led to the creation of an autonomous and influential Japanese variant of Surrealism, whose most prominent figure was the poet Shuzo Takiguchi, who perceived Ankoku Butoh as a distinctively ‘Surrealist’ dance-art form.

Three Machines on Transparency
Three Machines on transparency is a project that is imagined as an “exhibition by appointment” where the artist guides the audience throughout the gallery installation. The machines represent artefacts that “do” philosophy or prototypes that materialize ideas. By demonstrating their functionality the artist synthesizes philosophical concepts into the corporeality of the physical prototypes.

video

Джулия Рэндалл
Blown
Julia Randall is in love with drawing, and uses her seductive technique to craft images that subtly challenge assumptions about corporeality, desire, and the natural world. Intersecting sensibilities activate her work; images are simultaneously erotic and humorous, beautiful and repulsive. Although she clearly operates in the realm of fantasy, Randall uses observation-based drawing and hyperrealistic technique to create images that are surreal and suggestive.

Corps célestes
The parisian photographer Dani Olivier uses the human body as a canvas, creating geometric, kaleidoscopic patterns and projecting them onto skin, the resulting portraits turning their corporeal subjects into trippy, futuristic landscapes.

Desire of Codes

This interactive installation consisting of three parts is set up in YCAM’s Studio A, a space that is normally used for theatre performances.
A large number of devices resembling tentacles with built-in small cameras are placed across a huge wall (Part 1), while six robotic “search arms” equipped with cameras and projectors are suspended from the ceiling (Part 2). Each device senses with insect-like wriggling movements the positions and movements of visitors, and turns toward detected persons in order to observe their actions. In addition, a giant round-shaped screen that looks like an insect’s compound eye is installed in the back of the exhibition space (Part 3). Visual data transmitted from each camera, along with footage recorded by surveillance cameras installed at various places around the world, are stored in a central database, and ultimately projected in complex images mixing elements of past and present, the venue itself and points around the globe, onto the screen. The compound eye visualizes a new reality in which fragmentary aspects of space and time are recombined, while the visitor’s position as a subject of expression and surveillance at once indicates the new appearances of human corporeality and desire.

light drift
Höweler + Yoon Architecture / MY Studio is a multidisciplinary practice, operating in the space between architecture, art, and landscape. They believe in an embodied experience of architecture, seeing media as material and its effects as palpable elements of architectural speculation. While their work lies at the intersection of the conceptual and the corporeal, they are committed to both the practice-of and prospects-for architecture. Engaged in projects of all scales, they are interested in the material realities and material effects of their work. From concept to construct they are determined to realize the built idea and to test projects through the dynamic interaction between the construct and the larger public.