FILE 2024

QUBIT AI | quantum & synthetic ai
Electronic Language International Festival
July 3rd to August 25th
Tuesday to Sunday, 10am – 8pm
FIESP Cultural Center

Design: André Lenz
Image: Iskarioto Dystopian AI Films – Athena

QUBIT AI

In its 25 years of existence, the International Electronic Language Festival (FILE) is an internationally renowned Brazilian project that since 2000 has explored the intersection between art and technology. With more than two decades of history, the festival stands out for fostering exhibition spaces and debate about artistic innovations driven by disruptive and innovative technologies, inviting the public to get involved with experimental forms of art that challenge the boundaries of conventionality. Currently, two of these technologies stand out in the contemporary scenario: the accelerated development of quantum computing and artificial intelligence corroborated by synthetic data.

Quantum computing, an emerging revolution in the technological field, offers a new range of creative possibilities for contemporary artists. This new era allows the exploration of unprecedented frontiers through a new computational format that consists mainly of quantum superposition and entanglement, a new field of exploration for synthetic computer science, as well as for the arts in general; on the other hand, artificial intelligence, fueled by synthetic data, offers artists a new way of making and understanding art, opening up space for new forms, concepts and artistic expressions.

Entitled QUBIT AI, the exhibition delves into this unexplored territory presenting a selection of works of art resulting from the connection between artistic creation and technology, proposing a theoretical reflection on what the interrelationship between quantum computers and synthetic artificial intelligence will be.

Visitors will be invited to experience immersive installations, experimental videos, digital sculptures and other forms of interactive art, which intertwine reality and imagination. The exhibition encourages reflections on the influence of technology on art and contemporary society, while at the same time providing an environment to compare already established technological arts (analog and digital) with the possible futures of art in the synthetic era, enhanced by quantum computing. The QUBIT AI exhibition at FILE SP 2024 transcends the mere presentation of works of art; it is a journey to the limits of human creativity, driven by the convergence of art, science and technology.

Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto
co-organizers and curators of FILE
International Electronic Language Festival

The Right to Flight

A Londres, l’installation aérienne «The Right to Flight» de l’artiste britannique James Bridle explore la notion de surveillance depuis les airs et revient sur les utopies dévoyées des premiers aérostats.
Dans le ciel limpide de Londres flotte depuis le mois de juin un étrange ballon noir. Localisé dans le quartier populaire de Peckham, dans le sud de la ville, il est arrimé au niveau supérieur d’un parking désaffecté, vaisseau brutaliste dont les deux derniers étages hébergent depuis huit ans Bold Tendencies, un projet artistique estival, ainsi qu’un bar de plein air très couru avec une vue stupéfiante sur la skyline londonienne.Connu pour ses projets sur les drones ou son blog de recherche The New Aesthetic, James Bridle, né en 1980, a aussi posé sur le toit du parking une station de recherche expérimentale explorant l’histoire des aérostats, via des ateliers, des conférences et projections. Constituée de trois modules circulaires, fabriqués à partir de silos de grains lestés par des sacs de sable, l’architecture évoque tout à la fois les hangars des compagnies aériennes et la maison en kit Dymaxion de Buckminster Füller

Re-Wired / Re-Mixed: Event for Dismembered Body
“Re-Wired / Re-Mixed: Event for Dismembered Body” was a five-day, six-hour a day internet enabled performance, that explores the physiological and aesthetic experience of a fragmented, distributed, de-synchronized, distracted and involuntary body – wired and under surveillance. The artist wears a HUD (head up display) that enables him to see with the “eyes” of someone in London, whilst hearing with the “ears” of someone in New York. The body is also augmented by an 8 degrees-of-freedom exoskeleton so that anyone anywhere can generate involuntary movement of his right arm, using an online interface. The artist becomes optically and acoustically de-synchronized and performs partly involuntarily.

poster sky3

Deja’s work is so effective because it engages with the aesthetics of new technologies in order to critique their sociological, psychological, and physical impact on our embodied selves. At times idealistic and others damning, Deja avoids sorting technology into a
good-bad binary, but instead allows both ends of that spectrum to proliferate, allowing visitors to her supersensory exhibitions come to their own conclusion. She just asks “Technology enhances
and simplifies communication, but are we really more connected?”

Avatar of the artist
Taiwan in Venice 2019
“For those who don’t know her, Shu Lea Cheang is a figure of Net art and the cyberfeminist movement that emerged in the 1990s. Living in New York at the time, she was also an active member of the activist video collective Paper Tiger Television (as was French filmmaker Nathalie Magnan). Since then, Cheang’s work has dealt with “concerns including sex, futures, gender, ecology, money, media, and food [to] encompass film, installation, online work, social processes, and direct intervention in the sociopolitical, technical and aesthetic systems, and the imaginaries which co-compose them,” writes Matthew Fuller

TriangPaint

Holger Lippmann describes a part of his work as digital painting. What distinguishes digital painting from traditional painting on canvas or paper? We need to distinguish between two categories of digital painting. The first includes works created on the computer with ready-made graphic tools like virtual paint brushes or pens, in something like the way that non-digital pictures are created on paper or canvas. David Hockney’s painting of a sunflower on an i-pad is an example of this. The second category includes works using computer generation, in which programs coded by the artist continually produce new aesthetic concepts as images or animations. Every execution of the software creates new works within the pre-defined boundaries of the system. This process can be called generative painting.

Angelika Loderers work is refering to the basic research of form and space. She uses fragile, everyday materials that are derived from the vocabulary of domesticity and combine them with sort of traditional sculptural techniques. In the process the play between chance and control defines the aesthetics of her work. The experimenting with attidudes – via a very specific amalgam of materials, shapes and objects- brings forth a new, metaphysical result. “In transience, fragility and decline, I see the formal expressions to which I refer in my designs, and which to some extent provide the framework conditions for my processoriented work. From the abundance on offer, however fragile and vulnerable in composition, the elements fall into place, becoming worthless once again when dismantled.”

바트 헤스
巴特·赫斯
בארט הס
БАРТА ХЕССА
SIlVERNanine Linning
Nothing has changed as radically in the last few decades as the technology we surround ourselves with on a daily basis. Modern means of communication let the world shrink to a pocket size Global Village. Medical technology promises life beyond its natural limits. Robotics, cybernetics and developments in the field of artificial intelligence put the equally fascinating as disquieting idea of artificial life within our grasp. Nanine Linning’s new production SILVER addresses the intimate – and increasingly intrusive – relationship between the human and the technological, showing the beauty of its aesthetics, but also questioning its promise of ever increasing progress and self-improvement.

МЯО СЯОЧУНЬ
缪晓春
مياو شياو تشون
The large-scale nine-panel installation, Microcosm, is based on Hieronymus Bosch’s 15th century masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Microcosm is an imaginative reinvention of the sumptuous landscape of sin, salvation, and tawdry visions of those who never made it to paradise. The structure and narrative pattern of Bosch’s triptych, such as the architecture of heaven, earth and hell, as well as the basic forms of Bosch’s pictures, have been preserved in Miao Xiaochun’s work. But new digital means and computer technologies have allowed Miao Xiaochun to explore a contemporary visual vocabulary. He abolishes the traditional fixed single-point perspective aesthetic, instead favoring the Chinese tradition of multiple points of view in a single landscape.

阿克塞尔利伯
Axel Lieber uses everyday items as objects of reference and alienates their materiality by coring them semantically and then filling thus evolving empty spaces with new content. In this way, new synthetic-aesthetic crossovers and oppositions arise that enliven the sculptures and guide the viewer into an intimate sphere at the same time.

罗斯·洛夫格罗夫
רוס לאבגרוב
ロス·ラブグローブ
로스 러브그로브
Liquid Crystal
Inspired by the logic and beauty of nature his design possess a trinity between technology, materials science and intelligent organic form, creating what many industrial leaders see as the new aesthetic expression for the 21st Century.

袖岡由英
13-compositions #10
gif
Yoshi Sodeoka is an artist based in New York for over two decades, whose work is characterised by his neo-psychedelic aesthetic and exploration of multiple media and platforms. Primarily comprising of video, GIFs and print his practice also simultaneously inhabits the world of fine art, music, publications, and advertising.more…

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.

Vivisector

o what extent does the quality of movement of the virtual world influence real sequences of human movement? Will the real world of the 21st century assume via nanotechnology attributes of the virtual world? Are there still significant differences between a body that is made of synthetic material and warmed artificially and the deep glow of trillions of living cells? VIVISECTOR is an examination of the different speeds of people/nature and technology/information society and of their acceleration; an experiment to overcome the space-time continuum in the real world. It breaks the linearity of movement and in doing so shows the absurdity of momentum. Based on the video-technological concept of the moving body-projection that made D.A.V.E. an international hit, VIVISECTOR now goes one step further: the exclusive concentration on video light and video projection produces a new stage aesthetic in which light, body, video and acoustic space form an unprecedented unity.

The Splits (Rehearsal)

The Splits begins with the bisecting of various string instruments into two halves, cutting them along their length, creating two separate instruments. The two halves must then be played together to complete a tune and are, thus, for duets (or quartets, octets or dectets) only—pieces which she is creating in collaboration with musicians and composers. The act of splitting at once destroys the integrity of the instrument as an object, and disrupts the conventional process of aesthetic creation that the instrument traditionally permits. Splitting is not merely an act of destruction, however. Instead, it opens graceful passages for imagined evolution: the split instrument becomes a newly creative instrument, permitting the creation not only of new music, but new communities (visual artist, the composer, the musicians, and the audience). Ms. Benson has “split” two violins, a viola, cello and double bass: all, cheap, mass-produced string instruments made in China.

“Hannes Van Severen makes the connection between reality and imagination in his work. The artist starts with an existing, everyday object, usually a piece of furniture, which he then transforms and changes. In this way, he deprives the object of its original functionality and allows its aesthetic value to prevail. As a result, the original usefulness of the everyday object no longer predominates, but his work nevertheless continues to be a visual reference to the original. With this paradoxical construction, Hannes Van Severen creates a fictitious world of images with alternative, intrinsic meanings and potential. The observer has to let go of the explanatory and allow his or her imagination to take flight. In combination with the personal experience of the observer, a richer dimension of the reality experienced will emerge with the new reading and interpretation of things that are apparently obvious. With this transformation, Van Severen wants to break down our recognition, to question the obviousness of our reality, and to show us the absurdity that surrounds us. Like the cubists and the surrealists, the artist divides into pieces and rearranges  an existing reality, which means that he can be described as a saboteur of the obvious.” Stef Van Bellingen