LIGHT

“Helen Pashgian is a pioneer and pre-eminent member of the California Light and Space Movement. Her signature forms include columns, discs and spheres in delicate and rich coloration, often with an isolated element suspended, embedded or encased within. Pashgian’s innovative application of industrial epoxies, plastics and resins effect semi-translucent surfaces that simultaneously filter and contain illumination. Activated by light, these sculptures resonate in form and spatiality, both inner and outer.” Dimitris Lempesis

In the robot skies
In the Robot Skies is the world’s first narrative shot entirely through autonomous drones. In collaboration with the Embedded and Artificially intelligent Vision Lab in Belgium the film has evolved in the context of their experiments with specially developed camera drones each programmed with their own cinematic rules and behaviours. The film explores the drone as a cultural object, not just as a new instrument of visual story telling but also as the catalyst for a new collection of urban sub cultures. In the way the New York subway car of the 80’s gave birth to a youth culture of wild style graffiti and hip hop the age of ubiquitous drones as smart city infrastructure will create a new network of surveillance activists and drone hackers. From the eyes of the drones we see two teenagers each held by police order within the digital confines of their own council estate tower block in London. A network of drones survey the council estates, as a roving flock off cctv cameras and our two characters are kept apart by this autonomous aerial infrastructure.

Cloud Arbor
A 20-foot diameter sphere of fog forms inside a forest of stainless steel poles. High-pressure fog nozzles embedded in the 30-foot tall poles convert water into a cloud that appears and vanishes every few minutes. A collaboration with landscape architect Andi Cochran and the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum. Completed in 2012.

The Unseen Collection
Experimental fashion studio The Unseen has produced a range of accessories that alter in response to environmental changes using inks developed from its colour-shifting wearable sculptures. Bowker has previously embedded her specially developed ink into feathered, leather and gemstone-encrusted headdresses. The Unseen also presented a sculptural jacket that changes colour depending on the wearer’s mood.

Subdivided Cube 4
At best, a computational approach enables architecture to be embedded with an extraordinary degree of information. Structure and surface can exhibit a hyper-resolution, with seemingly endless distinct formations. The processes can generate highly specific local conditions, while ensuring an overall coherency and continuity. As such, the resulting architecture does not lend itself to a visual reductionism. Rather, the procedures can devise truly surprising topographies and topologies, offering a thousand unique perspectives. Computational architecture can defy classification, it can evoke curiosity and elicit individual interpretations. The projects presented here forecast an exuberant architecture in which the exceptional supersedes the standard.

Cusp
A familiar childhood location on the Essex marshes is reframed by inserting images randomly generated by a neural network (GAN*) into this tidal landscape. Initially trained on a photographic dataset, the machine proceeds to learn the embedded qualities of different marsh birds, in the process revealing forms that fluctuate between species, with unanticipated variations emerging without reference to human systems of classification. Birds have been actively selected from among the images conceived by the neural network, and then combined into a single animation that migrates from bird to bird, accompanied by a soundscape of artificially generated bird song. The final work records these generated forms as they are projected, using a portable perspex screen, across the mudflats in Landermere Creek.

Liminal Beings
Liminal Beings explores the concept of automaton and the different anthropomorphic forms and functions embedded within its ontology. Automata, since ancient times, have been standing on the verge of two states, developing machinic and human characteristics simultaneously – in reality, and in the collective consciousness. They are trained to execute and learn respective actions and procedures, thus creating an uncanny, awkward state, trapped in limbo between diverse conditions of existence.

Metadata
These videos are networked across multiple screens that have ben sculpturally shaped into a tall arch, asserting its physical presence like boding force. Embedded within one of the video sections is a poem the artist wrote about the ties the police have to slave catchers who then became police officers after abolition. The video also separately speaks to the artist’s own personal loss, affecting the video with an additional elegiac quality of the search for a missing friend.

Wavelet
It uses the changing light to mimic the flowing water. Wavelet is composed of 1,300 light-responsive light bulbs. Each light bulb is designed in an arc shape, which gives the light wave a distinct direction. Each of the teardrop-shaped light bulbs is embedded with custom-made electronics that detect and react to changes in light and colour. When any of the light bulbs detect a change in colour or light, it displays the colour accordingly. When any of of the lights are turned on, the adjacent light bulbs react to the light change and the light waves automatically expand out to the very edge of the installation. From a single source of light, waves spread out like a series of dominoes. The random variable patterns created give a pleasant surprise to the audience.

Avatars
For this installation, So Kanno + yang02 composed all kinds of differently sized objects, including a telephone, a traffic cone, a plaster figure, a car, and a plant. Cameras, microphones, monitors and microcomputers are embedded in everyday objects arranged in the exhibition space, and connected to the Internet. Visitors can experience the work by logging in to / “riding“ each object via a web browser. Those objects exist as substitutes of – yet together with – real human beings (the visitors) in the same real environment that is subject to physical laws, rather than operating in a virtual space. Against the backdrop of the age of IoT, where all kinds of things are connected through networks, and artificial intelligence is about to mature, this work observes the new relationships that emerge when inorganic, non-autonomous objects transform into persons that act and perceive the world according to their own intentions.

A Monumental Offering of Potential Energy
Hill’s installation and performance, A Monumental Offering of Potential Energy (2016), places him atop a plywood platform embedded in the sculpture, which resembles a classic wooden roller coaster. Embodying the abstracted vehicle for which the track is laid, Hill’s physical presence in the work is undeniable and a central part of a 512-hour long performance that runs the course of the exhibition.

no(where) now(here)
Fashion designer Ying Gao has fabricated a pair of dresses that writhe around and light up when someone stares at them.”We use an eye-tracking system so the dresses move when a spectator is staring,” Ying Gao told Dezeen. “[The system] can also turn off the lights, then the dresses illuminate.” The gaze-activated dresses are embedded with eye-tracking technology that responds to an observer’s gaze by activating tiny motors to move parts of the dresses in mesmerising patterns.

Spirit Molecule
Spirit Molecule II, engages local community members as DNA donors to be memorialized in a site-specific commission for the Broad Museum at Michigan State University, created in collaboration with University scientist Dr. Bjoern Hamberger. The work consists of a large mound of moss growing in the gallery, with four embedded cylinders containing genetic memorial plants. In this iteration we embed both human DNA and a gene for the scent of patchouli into lab-strain moss Physcomitrella patens.

The Self-Assembly Line
Can we create objects that assemble themselves — that zip together like a strand of DNA or that have the ability for transformation embedded into them? These are the questions that Skylar Tibbits investigates in his Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, a cross-disciplinary research space where designers, scientists and engineers come together to find ways for disordered parts to become ordered structures.

Space observer
This huge sculpture is placed in California’s Mineta San Jose airport, where high-tech art welcomes the passengers. At the top of the escalator at the new Terminal B you will find Schuelke’s absurd machine. This giant three-legged sculpture explores the interactivity between humans and modern technology. It will quietly rotate with the aid of two propeller-tripped arms. And its ‘eye’ reveals images picked up from embedded cameras.

菲力浦 畢斯雷

Hylozoic Ground

The project’s title refers to ‘hylozoism’, the ancient belief that all matter has life. Hylozoic Ground offers a vision for a new generation of responsive architecture. The Hylozoic Ground environment can be described as a suspended geotextile that gradually accumulates hybrid soil from ingredients drawn from its surroundings. Akin to the functions of a living system, embedded machine intelligence allows human interaction to trigger breathing, caressing, and swallowing motions and hybrid metabolic exchanges. These empathic motions ripple out from hives of kinetic valves and pores in peristaltic waves, creating a diffuse pumping that pulls air, moisture and stray organic matter through the filtering Hylozoic membranes.

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dot matrix loop
Rowan Smith’s work takes the form of a multidisciplinary semiotic investigation into the ways in which cultural signs and signifiers can be read as artefacts. He examines how the meaning embedded in these artefacts fluctuates (and frequently deteriorates) in relation to ever-shifting sociopolitical contexts; often assuming a self-critical position which responds to his locality.

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.

Strange Fruit
Using both sculpture and musical performance in his practice, Kevin Beasley explores the physical materiality and cultural connotations of both objects and sound. His sculptures typically incorporate everyday items like clothing, housewares, or sporting goods, bound together using tar, foam, resin, or other materials. Often they also contain embedded audio equipment that warps and amplifies the ambient tones of their surroundings. For Storylines, Beasley has created two new works specifically for the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building. Within this vast and open sonic environment, Strange Fruit (Pair 1) and Strange Fruit (Pair 2) (both 2015) offer an experience of intimacy, absorbing and reflecting the sound of the crowd at the scale of a personal conversation. Each work embodies this spirit of dialogue in its two-part structure—at its core are two athletic shoes, one merged with microphones, the other with speakers. Suspending these objects in space, Beasley compounds their technological interchange with additional layers of meaning, bringing to mind the urban phenomenon of shoes hanging from overhead wires or poles (itself an open-ended form of communication). At the same time the works’ titles refer to history of lynchings in the American South memorialized by Bronx schoolteacher Abel Meerepol in the 1937 protest song “Strange Fruit.” In these contexts, the hanging forms of Beasley’s sculptures resonate not only with his body, which molded them by hand, or with the bodies moving through the museum, but also with those inscribed in the problematic history of race and class in the United States.

Called Embedded Project

delicate boundarie

This interactive installation imagines that the worlds inside our digital devices can move into the physical world. Small bugs made of light crawl out of a computer screen onto the human bodies that make contact with them, often surprising their audience as they try to abandon a virtual existence. The magic of the illusion takes shape as the audience lets them explore their bodies, crawling from one person to the next in a strangely intimate way. As digital technologies have become embedded in everyday life, the line between the virtual and real is increasingly blurred. Delicate Boundaries playfully explores our expectations and understanding of interfaces and interactivity.