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Heavy Duty Love

Lucy Mcrae
HEAVY DUTY LOVE
A cautionary narrative in an uncomfortable, complex debate on the scientific acceleration directing our evolutionary path —from gene-edited babies to CRISPR to AI — Heavy Duty Love is a mental health prop existent as a tactile mechanical structure, asking, “As we head toward a life designed from scratch, will we seek new types of intimacy?”. Realised as a speculative domestic device compensating for a lack of human touch in early life, Heavy Duty Love sandwiches the body between layers of soft, dampening materials normally used in contemporary camping or construction.

Irina Dzhus

DZHUS SS21
Now that sustainable consumption is a more relevant topic than ever, DZHUS has created a collection inspired by the variety of packaging, to draw attention to the importance of recycling. The SS21 designs interpret the visual and structural peculiarities of boxes, packets and wraps of all kinds. Multi-purpose use of clothing has always been crucial to DZHUS, as a revolutionary method to minimise customers’ shopping and diversify their wardrobe at the same time. All pieces from the spring/summer line are transformers, and most garments can be modified into bags in a swift and playful manner.

Jon McCormack

Colourfield
Colourfield is an evolutionary ecosystem of colour. Colour agents try to exist in a simple universe by producing colours that are suited to their environment. This environment is determined by the other agents and the colours they produce. Entering into complex feedback cycles, Colourfield presents an evolving palette of shifting colours. Different configurations emerge based on the strategies the ecosystem discovers for co-existance and co-dependency. Harmonious configurations often remain stable for a short while, before eventually being replaced by new relations, better able to survive in the ever shifting environment.

Frederik de Wilde

Ai Beetles
THIS NEXT NATURE POST-CAMOUFLAGE AI BEETLE IS INVISIBLE FOR THE ELECTRONIC EYE. THE PATTERNS ARE GENERATED WITH NEURAL NETWORKS AND EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS TO FOOL AND MISLEAD ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ENABLED SYSTEMS. MY AIM IS TO DEVELOP A CONTEMPORARY RAZZLE DAZZLE STYLE CAPABLE OF MESSING UP LABELLING AND METADATA SYSTEMS. IT LOOKS LIKE A BEETLE FOR US BUT IS SEEN AS E.G. A HONEYCOMB FOR AN AI.
video

Driessens & Verstappen

Breed
Breed (1995-2007) is a computer program that uses artificial evolution to grow very detailed sculptures. The purpose of each growth is to generate by cell division from a single cell a detailed form that can be materialised. On the basis of selection and mutation a code is gradually developed that best fulfils this “fitness” criterion and thus yields a workable form. The designs were initially made in plywood. Currently the objects can be made in nylon and in stainless steel by using 3D printing techniques. This automates the whole process from design to execution: the industrial production of unique artefacts.
Computers are powerful machines to harness artificial evolution to create visual images. To achieve this we need to design genetic algorithms and evolutionary programs. Evolutionary programs allow artefacts to be “bred”, rather than designing them by hand. Through a process of mutation and selection, each new generation is increasingly well adapted to the desired “fitness” criteria. Breed is an example of such software that uses Artificial Evolution to generate detailed sculptures. The algorithm that we designed is based on two different processes: cell-division and genetic evolution.

Thomas Hirschhorn

توماس هيرشهورن
托马斯·赫塞豪恩
תומס הירשהורן
トーマス·ヒルシュホルン
abschlag

Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Abschlag” installation, which occupies the first room on the main floor, offers a lesson in how not to engage with the Russian milieu: the Swiss artist constructed part of a typical Petersburg apartment block out of cardboard inside the full-height space, ripped off its façade, and deposited the refuse at its base, revealing shabby interiors lined with original avant-garde masterpieces (on loan from the nearby Russian Museum) by the likes of Malevich and El Lissitky. The references allude to a politically radical Russian past; the construction debris acts as a metaphor for history. Though Hirschhorn suggests a recovery of the revolutionary communist spirit of the 1920s, he falls prey to a historically revisionist fetish: citing the Russian avant-garde as a generative point for vanguard culture in the West, and offering it as a source for renewed progressivism in Russia. Hirschhorn seems woefully unaware of the Putin government’s branding campaign, one that aims to sell the Russian avant-guard as a nationalist movement in line with the regime’s own values (perhaps he didn’t watch the Sochi opening ceremony). Hirschhorn ultimately proves Zhilayev right — with its political pretenses, “Abschlag” aspires to make a grand gesture against conservatism, but fails because its critique has already been co-opted..
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SIMON CHRISTOPH KRENN

Parasitic endeavours
Simon Christoph Krenn’s 3D animation, Parasitic Endeavours, initially started out as the creative wanting to explore distorted perspectives on human evolution. “I think my main inspiration came from nature and its creative forces themselves. I used to study zoology at university and was especially fascinated by evolutionary biology and the development of animal morphologies. I realized the video’s strange and somehow creepy potential and decided to push the animation even more into this direction.”

Haru Ji and Graham Wakefield

Infranet
Infranet is a generative artwork realized through a population of artificial lifeforms with evolutionary neural networks, thriving upon open geospatial data of the infrastructure of the city as their sustenance and canvas. Born curious, these agents form spatial networks through which associations spread in complex contagions. In this city as organism, the data grounds an unbounded, decentralized, open-ended, and unsupervised system. Non-human beings flourish in this environment by learning, discovering, communicating, self-governing, and evolving. The invitation is to witness, through immersive visualization and sonficiation of this complex adaptive system, how a new morphologic landscape emerges as a possible but speculative city.

RYOICHI KUROKAWA

黒川良一
rheo
This world-renowned Japanese artist’s impressive audiovisual compositions bring visual and sonic material together using a completely revolutionary perspective. His language, a new international benchmark in the world of digital art, field recordings and computer-generated structures coexist in harmony, and open the gateway to an imaginary world where complexity and simplicity alternate and combine in a strange symbiosis.

LARS VON TRIER

لارس فون ترير
拉斯·冯·特里尔
라스 폰 트리에
לארס פון טרייר
ラース·フォン·トリアー
Ларс фон Триер
melancholia
Truth be told, the best thing about Melancholia is its title. In an era where pop therapy abounds, true melancholy and its affinity to beauty needs to be rehabilitated—and of course differentiated from the more banal categories of “mental illness” and “depression.” In a pivotal phase of German Romanticism exemplified by Novalis’ poetry, the quintessentially melancholy category of “longing” is linked with a quest for the “unattainable.” Yet there’s also a tangibly utopian element to Novalis’ melancholy, personified by his dictum, “All representation rests on making present that which is not present.” Or as Max Blechman puts it in his essay “The Revolutionary Dream of Early German Romanticism, the Romantics pantheistic faith points to how art and religion are fundamentally one and the same activity. For is not art the desire to see the real in the ideal, to enliven the ideal behind the real, to transform unconscious idealism into conscious idealism—and is this not done through faith in the ideal?”

xenobots

Xenobots – the First “Living Robots”
Researchers used the Deep Green supercomputer cluster and an evolutionary algorithm to design new life-forms that could achieve an assigned task. Then they built them by combining together different biological tissues from Xenopus laevis embryos, hence the name Xenobots.
Credit:A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms
Sam Kriegman, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, and Josh Bongard
PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1910837117

MARIA BLAISSE

Spheres
Dutch designer Maria Blaisse is one of those legends. She began in the early 80s’ by creating spherical foam forms that moulded and folded in ways that were revolutionary at the time and she worked primarily in dance wear where she is still breaking new ground today. Blaisse then went on to collaborate with Issey Miyake for whom she made mitre-like rubber hats.

Maud de Le Pladec

DEMOCRACY
Compagnie LEDA

“I’ve wanted to work on the drum quartet “Dark Full Ride” by Julia Wolfe for a long time. There is something quite revolutionary in the energy of this piece. Julia Wolfe uses the instrumentation of processions, meetings and political demonstrations. I work on democracy, not democracy reduced its political framework definition […] but ‘insurgent’ democracy that strives for the dissolution of certainty and the claim to equality as civil resistance. Work is nourished by ideas like the test of determination or the idea of a problematizing community, which I call the ‘all-one.’ Also, how does an individual decision open the possibility to collective action? What do we strive for, or against? Who do we give our consent to? Must we disobey democracy? How do we build a controversialist community? Does resistance to power define the democratic experience? What is a savage democracy? … ” Maud Le Pladec

Olle Cornéer and Martin Lübcke

Public Epidemic Nº 1 (Bacterial Orchestra)
Олле и Любке
FILE FESTIVAL

“Bacterial Orchestra” (2006), a self-organizing evolutionary musical organism where each cell lives on an Apple iPhone (it can be ported to any mobile phone, but the iPhone was chosen because it’s popular and the centralized App Store makes it easy for the epidemic to spread). That way, hundreds of people can gather with their mobiles and together create a musical organism. It will evolve organically in the same way as “Bacterial Orchestra”, but it will also be much more infectious. The installation and the ideas behind it can be traced from different areas such as chaos theory, self-organizing systems and neural networks. The goal? A world wide sound pandemic, of course.

ROBERT WUN

last breathe

Robert Wun is a luxury fashion label, aimed to create ingenious garments with sophistication visions, to inspire independent individuals with originality beliefs. The chaos between Nature and artificial forms the centre of the design ethos, through resourcing in the novelty nature and the revolutionary artificial world, Robert Wun believe in such contradiction, promising ideas will be generated through the process of perplexity. Dictating the new ‘futuristic’ through innovative manufacturing yet with uncompromising attention to traditional values. Creating the harmony by combining enlightening ideas with sophistication craftsmanship, brining in a new dimension to luxury garments and also to the young London fashion industry.

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.

DOUG FOSTER

MOONLAND
The gravitational pull of the Moon creates tides in the Earth’s oceans and distorts the Earth’s crust. It was instrumental in the evolutionary journey of life from the sea to the land. The reproductive cycles of many flora and fauna still follow the rhythms of the Moon.

JON MCCORMACK

Джон Маккормак
Eden – an evolutionary sonic ecosystem

Eden is an interactive, self-generating, artificial ecosystem. A cellular world is populated by collections of evolving virtual creatures. These creatures move about their environment, making and listening to sounds, foraging for food, encountering predators and possibly mating with each other. Over time, creatures evolve to fit their landscape. Eden has four seasons per year and each year lasts 600 Eden days. One Eden year passes by in about fifteen minutes of real time. A simple physics dictates only three basic types of matter in the Eden world: rocks, biomass and sonic creatures.

NIKOLA TESLA

نيكولا تيسلا
尼古拉•特斯拉
ניקולה טסלה
ニコラ·テスラ
니콜라 테슬라
Никола Тесла

Tesla is often described as an important scientist and inventor of modernity, a man who “shed light on the face of the Earth”.] He is best known for his many revolutionary contributions in the field of electromagnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. . Tesla’s patents and his theoretical work form the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electrical power systems, including polyphasic energy distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped in the introduction of the Second Industrial Revolution.