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Mark Ramos & Ziyang Wu

Networked Ecosystem
In Networked Ecosystem, natural phenomena have been replaced by digital and artificial systems as forces that drive development: Electricity/battery = sustenance, WIFI signals = nutrition, Lidar data = fire/heat. Data Organisms populate this digital ecosystem as native life forms in the form of bots, AI’s, and avatars. Visitors to this networked landscape develop new kinds of digital senses to experience data as environmental changes, and interact with the simulated world and each other in an ever-changing online environment.

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Datapaulette

Topographie digitale
“Topographie Digitale” is an interactive installation created by DataPaulette. This landscape uses electrically functionalized and pleated textiles as sensitive surfaces reacting to touch. This interaction brings to life a “digital clone”, video-projected. This mirrored scene reveals an organic side contrasting with the mineral aspect of the physical scene.

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REVITAL COHEN & TUUR VAN BALEN

The Immortal
A number of life-support machines are connected to each other, circulating liquids and air in attempt to mimic a biological structure.
The Immortal investigates human dependence on electronics, the desire to make machines replicate organisms and our perception of anatomy as reflected by biomedical engineering.
A web of tubes and electric cords are interwoven in closed circuits through a Heart-Lung Machine, Dialysis Machine, an Infant Incubator, a Mechanical Ventilator and an Intraoperative Cell Salvage Machine. The organ replacement machines operate in orchestrated loops, keeping each other alive through circulation of electrical impulses, oxygen and artificial blood.
Salted water acts as blood replacement: throughout the artificial circulatory system minerals are added and filtered out again, the blood gets oxygenated via contact with the oxygen cycle, and an ECG device monitors the system’s heartbeat. As the fluid pumps around the room in a meditative pulse, the sound of mechanical breath and slow humming of motors resonates in the body through a comforting yet disquieting soundscape.Life support machines are extraordinary devices; computers designed to activate our bodies when anatomy fails, hidden away in hospital wards. Although they are designed as the ultimate utilitarian appliances, they are extremely meaningful and carry a complex social, cultural and ethical subtext. While life prolonging technologies are invented as emergency measures to combat or delay death, my interest lies in considering these devices as a human enhancement strategy.This work is a continuation of my investigation of the patient as a cyborg, questioning the relationship between medicine and techno- fantasies about mechanical bodies, hyper abilities and posthumanism.

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NED KAHN

Нед Кан
Tornado
A 10-foot tall vortex is formed by air blowers and an ultrasonic fog machine inside a sculpture installed in the atrium adjacent to the Winter Garden. The vortex continually changed shape in response to the surrounding air currents.These fluctuations gave the vortex an erratic and life-like appearance. Viewers were encouraged to alter the shape of the vortex with their hands. The calm, central core of the vortex is clearly evident.
Kahn’s interactive scientific projects leave little doubt about his command of meteorological processes. Through his immense technical ability, he demonstrates the versatility of turbulent systems, such as the vortices of wind and water. He employs diverse mechanical, pneumatic and electrical technologies to design, build and refine his installations. This is how he constructs dazzlingly complex but comprehensible images of nature that respond to viewers, conform to architectural structures, and reveal environmental conditions.

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Neil Mendoza

The Electric Knife Orchestra
Created by Neil Mendoza, The Electric Knife Orchestra consists of sixteen knives and one meat cleaver (all purchased from the $0.99 store) that have been brought to life to perform the Bee Gees’ 1977 hit Stayin’ Alive. The orchestra consists of six musical machines and all of the sound is created through the operation of these machines.

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PAUL VANOUSE

Latent Figure Protocol

Latent Figure Protocol takes the form of a media installation that uses DNA samples to create emergent representational images. The installation includes a live science experiment, the result of which is videotaped and repeated for the duration of the gallery exhibit. Employing a reactive gel and electrical current, Latent Figure Protocol produces images that relate directly to the DNA samples used. The above images were re-produced live. Each performance lasts approximately one hour, during which time audience members see the image slowly emerge. In the first experiment, a copyright symbol is derived from the DNA of an industrially-produced organism (a plasmid called “pET-11a”), illuminating ethical questions around the changing status of organic life and the ownership of living organisms. Future instances of the LFP will use the DNA of other subjects and create other images.

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Ursula Neugebauer

tour en l’air
With “tour en l’air”, the Berlin artist Ursula Neugebauer returns to an unforgettable childhood experience: Donned with the first long skirt in the fast turn around your own axis, to experience a previously unknown body feeling – and to get to know a new form of stability in the rotation.
Tour en l’air is an impressive installation at the intersection of fashion, art and architecture. Decorative busts slip into several floor-length red taffeta dresses and come to life thanks to computer-controlled electric motors. Although the individual components are of purely mechanical and material origin, the overall composition appears as a poetic expression of the human: namely a magical dance.

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ATSUKO TANAKA

Electric Dress
«‹Electric Dress› is a powerful conflation of the tradition of the Japanese komono with modern industrial technology. Prior to her conception of this work, Tanaka had appeared in a larger than-life paper dress that was peeled away layer by layer, not unlike the peeling away of Murakami’s paintings; she was ultimately disrobed to a leotard fitted with blinking lights. Tanaka began to envision ‹Electric Dress› in 1954, when she outlined in a small notebook a remarkably prophetic connection between electrical wiring and the physiological systems that make up the human body. (…) After fabricating the actual sculpture, she costumed herself in it in the tradition of the Japanese marriage ceremony. Hundreds of light bulbs painted in primary colors lit up along the circulatory and nerve pathways of her body.»
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LARRY FLINT

What A Way To Go!(Movie)
painting machines (Scene)

Paul Newman as “Larry Flint”, an ex-patriot artist living in Paris. Shirley MacLaine as “Louisa”, looking for the simple life._”Larry” develops abstract painting machines consisting of a controllable arm with a paint-brush “hand”._He explains to “Louisa”, “The sonic vibrations that go in there. And that gets transmitted to this photoelectric cell which gives those dynamic impulses to the brushes and the arms. And it’s a fusion of a mechanised world and a human soul.””Larry” uses a siren, horn, alarm bell, bongo, sledge hammer and a pneumatic jack hammer amongst other things as random sound sources for his abstract art.

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JEAN TINGUELY

让汤格利
ז’אן טינגלי
ジャン·ティンゲリー
장 팅겔리
Жан Тингели
homage to new york
JEAN TINGUELY’S “Homage to New York” was billed as the ultimate homemade gadget — a towering contraption composed of found junk, dismembered bicycles, dismantled musical instruments, glass bottles, a meteorological balloon and electric motors in questionable condition. It was slated to come to life and spectacularly self-destruct in a one-night-only performance for some 250 patrons and reporters in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Modern Art on March 17, 1960. And self-destruct it did, but not quite according to plan.Mr. Tinguely’s self-destructive sculpture had failed — and thereby, in a sense, succeeded. Mr. Tinguely, a Swiss artist who died in 1991, was by 1960 well known for such Dada-inflected works; he posed with the wreckage after the performance and took a bow.

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