highlike

Jon & Vangelis

VANGELIS
R.I.P
Horizon
In amongst the rings of confusion
Silencing the thought powers one by one
It seems all so incredible
Our own ability to confuse – to sacrifice
To enlighten like a shakespearian play
We foolish and happily hold on to sanity
While all around the pushing feelings
The twisting and turning of our hearts
Displaying an almost indefinable strength
Of purpose – a reason a reason a reason
Where no reasons seems to exist
Yet, as in a vision, a voice transcending
All our imagination, jewel of life
Guiding light heralding a joyous new dawn
Clear and gifted time
Divine nature – super nature
The supreme gift of knowledge and space
In this cacophony of life
Peace will come

TERMINALBEACH

The Heart Chamber Orchestra
File Festival – Hipersonica 

In the TERMINALBEACH Heart Chamber Orchestra (made up of artists Erich Berger and Peter Vatava), twelve musicians played pieces from the heartbeat, recorded by an electrocardiogram from data sent by sensors placed on their bodies. As the live score created in real time from the physical and emotional states of the musicians, their beats further influenced the resulting musical composition. In this way, the biological feedback loop becomes a self-generating, organic and evolving system, which creates a musical score and a show that adopts the form of open or network art, in which chance and interdependence, thus how emotional changes and computational reasoning create a biological and psychological dynamic at the same time.

Lech Majewski

The Roe’s Room
opera movie

In this “absolutely singular autobiographical film opera” (Time Out London), multi-talented composer, writer, director and artist Lech Majewski presents a stunning, intimate, and ultimately magical work of unbridled creativity. A ravishing ode to the imagination, THE ROE’S ROOM is a place where the energy of youth and the eternal power of the natural world triumph over the banalities and deprivations of the commonplace.Within their apartment, a father, mother and son bear the dulling yoke of an ordinary urban life. His mind and heart borne aloft by the cycle of the seasons and the images and music within him, the son transforms his cloistered existence into a richly poetic emotional utopia. As autumn arrives, cracking flakes of plaster become falling leaves. With spring, a cold hard floor comes alive with meadow grass and love beckons in the form of a beautiful young girl’s outstretched hand.

Ai-Da

“Poem for an artificial intelligence”

the sun is a beautiful thing

in silence is drawn

between the trees

only the beginning of light

this realm of rain

grey sky and cloud

it’s quite and peaceful

safe allowed

And, arguably, worse:

I am a coal-truck

by a broken heart

I have no sound

the sound of my heart

I am not

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.

Alexander Raskatov

A Dog’s Heart
Dutch National Opera
Libretto by Cesare Mazzonis
based on a novella by Mikhail Bulgakov

A Dog’s Heart is based on the book of the same name that the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov wrote in 1925 and which was banned for decades due to social criticism. It is a masterly “modern” parable in which Soviet society, which was still young at the time, is shrewdly filleted. A starving mutt is used by a doctor as a pilot project. He will have human testes and a pituitary gland implanted. Subsequently, however, the mutated animal develops into an unscrupulous human criminal. The only option is to surgically return the animal to a dog.

OPN Studio

Give my Creation… Life!
Give my creation… Life! Is a project which links Art, Science and Technology. It is based on the generation of energy through the heart beating, with the aim of granting autonomy to a machine. During the research of this subversive goal, multiple issues have been addressed, such as the extension of a removed organ´s life, its artificial feeding of nutrients and its use as a source of natural energy, among others.

Verena Friedrich

Vanitas Machine

The installation VANITAS MACHINE addresses the desire for eternal life and the potential of life-prolonging measures. Based on a candle which – by means of technical intervention – burns down very slowly, vanitas machine creates a contemporary analogy to the endeavour of prolonging the human lifespan with the help of science and technology.Being one of the classical vanitas symbols, a burning candle recalls the futility of the moment, the transience of human life and the certainty of the end of all existence. But is this end really still inevitable?In the course of the last two centuries, average human life expectancy has increased significantly in the industrialised countries. Moreover, in the context of scientific research the biological causes of ageing are being explored. Numerous theories of aging have already been developed pointing both towards physiological as well as environmental factors.One of the first theories of ageing was the so-called »metabolism theory«, which claims that the lifespan of organisms is reciprocally related to energy turnover and therefore connected to calorie intake, oxygen consumption and heart rate: The higher the metabolic rate, the shorter the lifespan of the organism.

DOUG FOSTER

the psychotron installation
Now one of Doug’s stunning installations is available in edition format. The Psychotron Framed – a video piece based on the 12-petal lotus flower symbolising eastern spirituality’s heart chakra – has been harnessed into a purpose-built viewer that can hang on a wall or stand freely on a flat surface. The piece is currently only available by collection from The Outsiders London gallery. Order now and Doug will assemble the materials in two weeks.“For centuries, circular figures containing symmetrical patterns have been used as a tool for meditation,” says Doug of his original Psychotron on display at Bedlam. “The mandala, the yantra and visualisations of the various chakras, all conform to radial design principles that have been refined throughout the ages. Now those principles have been ruthlessly plundered for the creation of The Psychotron.

RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER

Рафаэль Лозано-Хеммер
拉斐尔·洛萨诺 – 亨默
ラファエル·ロサノ=ヘメル
라파엘 로자노
רפאל לוזאנו, המר
Pulse Room

Pulse Room is an interactive installation featuring one to three hundred clear incandescent light bulbs, 300 W each and hung from a cable at a height of three metres. The bulbs are uniformly distributed over the exhibition room, filling it completely. An interface placed on a side of the room has a sensor that detects the heart rate of participants. When someone holds the interface, a computer detects his or her pulse and immediately sets off the closest bulb to flash at the exact rhythm of his or her heart. The moment the interface is released all the lights turn off briefly and the flashing sequence advances by one position down the queue, to the next bulb in the grid. Each time someone touches the interface a heart pattern is recorded and this is sent to the first bulb in the grid, pushing ahead all the existing recordings. At any given time the installation shows the recordings from the most recent participants.

Bart Hess

바트 헤스
巴特·赫斯
בארט הס
БАРТА ХЕССА
Heart to Mouth
Sheath your arrows: the voluptuous red heart, international symbol of love, is reimagined in this a visceral new short by genre-defying Dutch artist Bart Hess. With echoes of high-tech fetish fashion and Jeff Koons’ contemporary pop art classic “Hanging Heart,” Hess’ latest video stages a Sapphic encounter from within crimson latex balloons.

Greg Dunn

brain art
To capture their strikingly chaotic and spontaneous forms, the neurons in Self Reflected are painted using a technique wherein ink is blown around on a canvas using jets of air. The resulting ink splatters naturally form fractal like neural patterns, and although the artist learns to control the general boundaries of the technique it remains at its heart a chaotic, abstract expressionist process.

ALICE HALDENWANG, LAURA COUTO ROSADO AND TINGTING ZHANG

Telepathy 2012-2112
“TELEPATHY” immerses the viewer in the heart of a fiction where telepathy would become the predominant means of communication at the expense of means of current communication. The ten glass helmets enable to visualize a telepathic communication, by definition invisible. “TELEPATHY” proposes to reverse the current trend which consists in basing its communication on technology, and in exchange it reveals the parapsychological and subjective communication of psychic phenomena.

olga kisseleva

anthropOcean

AnthropOcean, interactive project created by the artist-researcher Olga Kisseleva, brings the public to question its implication in an environment which we keep adjusting to our aspirations, with a particular focus on the ocean. At the heart of this project is an online database dedicated to climate change and to the broader ties between ocean, climate and society. This database is the source of all visual displays seen by the public and it also has an interactive dimension: the public itself is able to feed the database thanks to a specific barcode. In other words, the art piece takes the shape of a visual display installation composed of digital objects that it visually maps and connects to one another.

olafur eliasson

オラファー·エリアソン
اولافور الياسون
奥拉维尔·埃利亚松
אולאפור אליאסון
ОЛАФУР ЭЛИАССОН
earth perspectives
The earth as viewed from above the SouthPole, one of nine-part series
The pole is at the heart of the virtually uninhabited continent of Antarctica, a vital ice-covered wildlife haven that is under threat from rapid warming and ice loss.

Alice Pegna

Ex-Nihilo
Nothing comes from nothing … With Alice Pegna, Epicure’s Latin phrase “Ex nihilo nihil fit” is at the heart of a design adventure as strong as it is elegant. Visual artist and interior designer, the young lady is inspired by this reflection on the source of the material to create arachnid sculptures between exoskeleton, armor and ornament.

FRITZ LANG

فريتز لانغ
弗里茨·朗
הפריץ לאנג
フリッツ·ラング
Фриц Ланг
Metropolis
Made in Germany during the Weimar period, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and follows the attempts of Freder, the wealthy son of the city master, and Maria, a saintly figure to the workers, to overcome the vast gulf separating the classes in their city and bring the workers together with Joh Fredersen, the city master. The film’s message is encompassed in the final inter-title: “The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart“.
cinema full

BERNARDO SCHORR

Heart Pillow
File Festival
“Heart Pillow” is a transhuman artifact that reproduces a person’s heartbeat remotely and in real time. It allows the very pulse of life to be transferred into an everyday object – a pillow – making it serve both as an extension to the user’s body and as mimicry of life itself, playing with the perceptions we might have on how life can be defined. It raises interesting questions on the meaning of the words “emotion” and “affection” and their scalability to the various modes of interaction that may arise from an augmented object. “Heart Pillow” can be used in any situations in which transferring a heartbeat into an everyday object can be interesting or useful, such as connecting a couple that is apart, to calm down new born babies with the known feeling of their mother’s heartbeat or as an extension of the self into an everyday object as a mean of reflection.

KARINA SMIGLA-BOBINSKI

SIMULACRA
file festival

“SIMULACRA” is an optophysical experimental arrangement. At its heart are four LCD monitor panels, which are assembled in the form of a hollow square, and installed at eye level in the middle of the room. The ensemble appears internally gutted, overgrown and embraced. A tangle of cables and control devices pours out of the middle of the square. All around it several magnifying lenses dangle from chains. The imageless glaring ray of the monitors looks as if the images had fallen out of them. What remains is the essence of the medium: Light.It is an impressive, wondrous experience when images suddenly appear from the pure white by the mere glance through a seemingly transparent film. But if you turn the lens in front of your eyes, the polarizing structure of the film creates wild color shifts or even complementary negative images.