The Museum of Faces

Designed to record and tell the stories of the local community and beyond, this futuristic invention by Synarcade Audio-Visuals is an astonishing communal forum of the city at a unique moment of growth and change.
Visitors are invited to approach the work and press a glowing button to make the faces come alive and speak. Then, they can step into a special Video Capture Booth and contribute their own face, voice, and story to become part of the ever-changing Museum.
The Museum of Faces is based on Synarcade Audio-Visuals’ award-winning invention, The Lumiphonic Creature Choir, an eerie mechanical choir that can sing together in unison, beatbox, or recite poetry at the touch of a button. The Lumiphonic Creature Choir has performed to sell-out audiences in Melbourne, Croatia, New York, and at TEDxSydney 2018.

Useless Hands

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Infratonal – Useless Hands – France

When our hands become useless, what will we choose to do with them? We can use AI to visualize the unthinkable, the strangely familiar yet indescribable forms and structures. Generative AI could be used as an amplifier of our ability to explore abstraction and surrealism rather than a simple mirror of our usual perceptions.

Bio

Infratonal is an artistic project led by Louk Amidou, a Paris-based multidisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of digital arts, electronic music and interaction design. He uses algorithms to create hybrid visual and sound pieces which aim to be performed by the human gesture as intangible instruments. He questions the artwork’s nature at the age of AI and the relationship between the artist and the algorithm.

بوب ويلسون
鲍伯·威尔逊
בוב וילסון
ロバート·ウィルソン
밥 윌슨
БОБ УИЛСОН
Arvo Pärt
Adam’s Passion
Estonian Arvo Pärt is one of the three most performed contemporary composers worldwide. His music has been described as contemplative, sacred, and timeless. “Time for us is the time of our own lives. It is temporary. What is timeless is the time of eternal life. Like the sun, we cannot look at these two directly, but my intuition tells me that the human soul is connected to both of them—time and eternity,” says Pärt. Much like Robert Wilson’s own universe, where time and space are the basic architecture of everything, it is as if these two artists have been waiting to collaborate with one another! ADAM’S PASSION will be a journey into the worlds of sound, light, visual art and performance. It will celebrate Arvo Pärt’s 80th birthday—all in a spectacular venue, the Noblessner Foundry, a vast, old industrial building by Tallinn’s harbo

Torus
Directed by British fashion photographer Nick Knight of SHOWStudio, Torus is a film on human connection and loneliness featuring choreography by Wayne McGregor and styling by Norwegian designer Fredik Tjærandsen. Performed by Company Wayne McGregor, Torus shows dancers wearing inflatable balloons designed by Tjærandsen, orbiting in darkness as isolated entities, occasionally lit as they transition through a temporal universe, a mirror to the life that many are only passing through, barely connecting.

Bleu Remix
In his spectacle-installation Bleu Remix, Yann Marussich returns to a theme originally explored in Bleu Provisoire (2001), a spectacle in which a mysterious blue liquid oozes through the layers of his skin as though it were the final effect or by-product of his body’s inner processes. In Bleu Remix, the artist once more invites the viewer to experience an intimate journey through the corners of his body. Each time the spectacle is performed, a different (local) musician accompanies Marussich. This unique, singular confrontation establishes a new relationship between the sound and image. The meeting of the two artists brings an element of risk and uniqueness to the event, as if the music explores the spectacle repeatedly, resulting in new ways of perception.

Cunningham Clip -Summerspace
CUNNINGHAM is a 3D cinematic experience about the legendary American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, orchestrated through his iconic works and performed by the last generation of his dancers. This poetic film traces Merce’s artistic evolution over three decades of risk and discovery (1944–1972), from his early years as a struggling dancer in postwar New York to his emergence as one of the most visionary and influential choreographers worldwide. 3D technology weaves together Merce’s philosophies and stories, creating a visceral journey through the choreographer’s world.

EONTA
“Eonta (beings) is so entitled as a homage to the ancient Greek philosopher and poet Parmenides. The original printed form of the title word is Cypriot orthography of Creto-mycaenean origin, lost for over 24 centuries and only recently deciphered. Eonta, written in Berlin during 1963-64, was first performed at the Domaine Musical concerts in Paris, conducted by Pierre Boulez, in December 1964. It makes use of stochastic music (based on the theory of probabilities) and symbolic music (based on logistics). Some of the instrumental parts, notably the piano solo at the opening, were calculated on an IBM 7090 computer at the Place Vendôme, Paris.”
(Iannis Xenakis)

Bilateral Feedback
Performed Sep. 27-28th 2019 @Platform-L, Seoul, Korea

Automač
Fantastic Smartphones
Built around a simple mechanism, Tinder reduces the act of dating to a single swipe. This slide of the finger to the right or the left is enough to show our interest or disinterest in a profile that comes up. Although high-stakes, even when performed repeatedly, this movement can become purely mechanical and lose its meaning. As its name indicates, Automač is a device that enables us to automatically match with a maximum number of potential partners on Tinder. The automaton consists of a smartphone holder, a camera that observes the screen and a rotating mechanism to swipe on the smartphone screen. Via a screen interface, the user has the possibility to choose selection criteria. By automating this process and delegating it to a machine, Automač positions itself as an optimal machine to have a maximum amount of matches in a minimum amount of time.

Uncanny State: Notion of Acceptance
In his latest exhibition Uncanny State: Notion of Acceptance, Eyal Gever presents six newly created metaphysical representations of human movement, performed by internationally acclaimed contemporary dancer and choreographer Sharon Eyal to the music of world-renowned contemporary pianist and composer Rosey Chan.

Nomad
Inspired by the concept of digital nomads of 21st-century and based on various pieces and algorithms from TUNDRA’s previous highly acclaimed audio-visual installations premiered across the globe from USA to China, NOMAD brings the polar atmosphere of different TUNDRA site-specific installations into a randomly changing sequence of visual themes and patterns triggered by live-performed sound.

田中功起
Everything is Everything

The eight-channel video installation, Everything is Everything, was created for the first time to be shown at the 2006 Taipei Biennial, curated by Dan Cameron. For this work, the artist and two assistants spent a total of eight days recording their interactions and interventions with readily available items, including hangers, glasses, towels, air mattresses and toilet paper, all found in the city of Taipei. The physical properties of these objects have been tested (a metal hanger is stretched to the breaking point) or their uses have been expanded (a level placed on two table legs becomes an improvised obstacle). Tanaka and his assistants experimented with these objects several times indoors and in public, and their explorations were compiled into eight separate video loops lasting from 1:19 to 1:50 minutes. Tanaka’s narrowly cut frame of each scene often features performers from the neck down or removes them completely from the scene, thus focusing the viewer’s attention on the simple, repetitive objects and acts being performed.

Exformation, an interactive installation inspired by the concept of “exformation,” was developed for a composition by Jesper Nordin performed by the Diotima string quartet and combines musical, luminous and colorimetric scores. Around the musicians, positioned on a technically equipped stage, three aluminium-edged cubes with LEDs mounted on circular rails move and angle their light in keeping with an algorithmic programme based on analysis of the spectrum, timbre and intensity of the music. This sensitive object becomes a total composition, a poetic, digital entity responding to the work played at its centre.

Self-contained II
A neural network, trained to see the world as variations of the artist’s body, enacts a process of algorithmic interpretation that contends with a body as a subject of multiplicity. After training on over 30,000 images of the artist, this neural network synthesizes surreal humanoid figures unconstrained by physics, biology and time; figures that are simultaneously one and many. The choice of costumes and the movements performed by the artist to generate the training images were specifically formulated to optimize the legibility of the artist within this computational system. self-contained explores the algorithmic shaping of our bodies, attempting to answer the question: how does one represent themselves in a data set? Building on the first iteration of the series, the synthetic figures in self-contained II proliferate to the point of literally exploding. Through the arc of self-contained II, this body that grows, multiples, and dissolves never ceases to be more than a single body.

Scary beauty
“Scary beauty“ is a mono opera performed by “Skelton”(humanoid android) with human orchestra. This android has been developed by Hiroshi Ishiguro(professor in Osaka University) and improved the degree of freedom in motion like human by Takashi Ikegami(professor in Tokyo University). The music has three parts, each part is composed of a collage of text in each works by Michel Houellebecq, Yukio Mishima and William Burroughs. This texts is selected as imaging a weird scene after all mankind become extinct.

Marsha
Marsha is a AI SpaceFactory’s NASA-award-winning design and prototype for a 3D printed Mars habitat. The prototype was printed nearly autonomously in 2019 within a 30-hour construction window. “Our 3D print technology uses a recyclable biopolymer composite which outperformed concrete in NASA’s strength, durability, and crush testing. ASTM lab tested and certified to be two to three times stronger than concrete in compression, our space-grade material is also five times more durable than concrete in freeze-thaw conditions.” Ai-Spacefactory

Symphonie Cinétique

The exhibition project focuses mainly on the cor­relation and inter­action of three elements: reflection, sound and movement. Symphonie Cinétique narratively inter­relates the three elements, and brings out their inherent, almost mystic harmony. The result of this process is an artistic synthesis, a unique spatial experience. At the premiere, Arnalds performed the Symphonie Cinétique live on piano and tablet. This fascinating interplay between music, light and movement served as a prelude to the exhibition.

Deva:Alpha

Deva: Alpha was a series of five live performances blending dance, performance art, music, and concept fashion. The goal of the project was to explore a hypothetical fashion language, one unencumbered by the historical functions and cultural signifiers of fashion as we know it. The peformances were highly improvisational, with a distinct theme for each one, along with distinct live musicians and choreography. Deva: Alpha took place over three days, and was performed in San Francisco.

The Geometry of Musical Rhythm: What Makes a “Good” Rhythm Good? ” is a book on the mathematics of rhythms and drum beats. It was written by Godfried Toussaint, in order to study rhythms mathematically, Toussaint abstracts away many of their features that are important musically, involving the sounds or strengths of the individual beats, the phasing of the beats, hierarchically-structured rhythms, or the possibility of music that changes from one rhythm to another. The information that remains describes the beats of each bar (an evenly-spaced cyclic sequence of times) as being either on-beats (times at which a beat is emphasized in the musical performance) or off-beats (times at which it is skipped or performed only weakly). This can be represented combinatorially as a necklace, an equivalence class of binary sequences under rotations, with true binary values representing on-beats and false representing off-beats.

imagen: Ethan-Hein-blog

Skid
Pushing further his exploration of a more intense and intimate relationship of the body to the force of gravity, Damien Jalet created “Skid” (2017) for the Gothenburg Dance Company. The dancers performed for 40 minutes on a 34 degree inclined platform of 40 square meters. Together with dancer Aimilios Arapoglou and other members of the company, they developed an alphabet of new physical possibilities, alternating control and surrendering, of accelerations and slow motions, to be performed alone or with partners.

NUFONIA MUST FALL
Kid Koala’s celebrated “live animated graphic novel”. Directed by oscar-nominated production designer K.K. Barrett (Her, Lost In Translation, Being John Malkovich). Performed, filmed, edited and scored in real time by a team of 15 performers including puppeteers, cinematographers, a string quartet and Kid Koala on piano/turntables. A romantic story about a robot on the verge of obsolescence.

Cellogram
composed by James Tenney
performed by Ashley Walters – cello
James Tenney made significant early musical contributions to plunderphonics, sound synthesis, algorithmic composition, process music, spectral music, microtonal music, and tuning systems including extended just intonation.

Post Silentium
Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra
Jens Goerg Bachmann

24 Preludes for Piano, Op. 41
Performed by Hyeri Choi

Ludwig’s Nightmare
Performed by Yael Weiss

Born in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on the border of Siberia, Russian-American composer,
concert pianist, poet and visual artist Lera Auerbach has become one of today’s most sought
after and exciting creative voices. She has published more than 100 works for orchestra, opera
and ballet, as well as choral and chamber music.

Holoscenes
Lars Jan is a director, media artist and artistic director of Early Morning Opera, a Los Angeles-based art lab specializing in live performance. Along with co-producers MAPP International Productions, Early Morning Opera is currently developing HOLOSCENES, a hybrid of performance, installation and public spectacle featuring a series of rituals gathered from sacred and secular spheres and performed in a triptych of hydraulically-animated, jumbo aquariums.

マイケル·クラーク·カンパニー
Tate Project Part I ]
The choreography rehearsed and performed in 2010 paired the rigour of classical steps with contemporary movement, a juxtaposition that paralleled Clark’s training as a ballet dancer at the Royal Ballet, and his later anti-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian choreographic experiments. Balletic poses, jumps and steps were isolated from traditional narrative sequences and made strange through repetition. The graceful leaps and turns of the trained dancers seemed awkward and uneven, just as they were often out of sync and oriented in different directions. This choreography paralleled the performance space, which was demarcated by geometric and striped floor mats designed by Charles Atlas, which resembled the large windows at the back of the hall and the black beams that extend vertically from floor to ceiling.

with Allen Ginsberg
Hydrogen Jukebox
The creation of the chamber opera Hydrogen Jukebox can be traced to a chance meeting in 1988 between composer Philip Glass and poet Allen Ginsberg at the now defunct St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York City’s East Village. When Ginsberg plucked a book with a copy of his 1966 antiwar poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra” off the shelf and said he’d be reading it at a Broadway theater, Glass decided to compose a piano piece to accompany the reading. The collaboration was a success, so the two decided to expand the performance into a longer music-theater work. The result, Hydrogen Jukebox, a rarely performed piece for six voices and a chamber ensemble[…]

Since its founding in 2008, TAO Dance Theater has taken China‟s dance world by storm. The company has performed in every modern dance festival throughout the country and has collaborated with leading Chinese artists across genres including theatre, experimental music, film, visual arts and installation. TAO has been featured in performances as well as choreography and teaching residencies in festivals worldwide, including Europalia (BE), Culturescapes (CH), M.A.D.E. Festival (SE), Singapore Arts Festival, and the American Dance Festival (US).

The Coppelia Project
via highlike submit
The Coppelia Project is inspired by the story about a clockwork girl from the 1870 ballet ‘Coppelia’ by Saint-Léon, Nuitter, and Delibes, based on a story by Hoffmann. It also draws the commonplace metaphor of clockwork music boxes, with the little ballerinas that pop up and rotate in front of a mirror when you open the lid. Coppelia is part of the traditional classical ballet repertoire and is performed frequently by ballet companies around the world. It belongs to a small group of enduring stories in Western Culture that directly address the limits of humanity when confronted by our creations. The Coppelia story is unusual in approaching this theme through love and attraction, rather than horror and revulsion, as emphasised by Mary Shelly in ‘Frankenstein’. The Coppelia story deals with some of the issues at the edge of humanity; machines interchangeable with persons, love and attraction confused at this boundary.

Oyster
oyster is a new opera (in progress) about a surprising precursor to last.fm and Pandora. In the 1960’s, renowned American folklorist Alan Lomax developed a wildly ambitious system called cantometrics for coding and analyzing folk songs from every corner of the world. The opera is structured as a public lecture of Alan Lomax’s folk song analysis as demonstrated by four singers, who embody the IBM360 mainframe computer used to correlate his vast amounts of data. Working with the BOTCH vocal ensemble, I am reconstructing the folksong styles from regions as disparate as Bali, West Africa, and Central America using only the data from Lomax’s study. Things like melodic complexity, vocal blend, and nasality, are adjusted by the singers as they circumnavigate the globe. This data vocalization is further mediated by the ensemble’s distinctive extended vocal techniques, and is accompanied by a film narrative that unravels connections between cybernetics, surrealism and ethnography. The film also features a wide range of material drawn from the Alan Lomax archive at The Library of Congress.
.
oyster will be performed by BOTCH ensemble: Christina Campanella, Michael Chinworth, John Rose, and Saori Tsukada

THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER
THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER will be a work that tries to reveal the person behind the dancer. To reach this, a very complex, mathematical, dynamic and tiring choreography is constructed, which is performed almost completely in unison. The difficulty degree of the choreography is so high, that the dancers eventually will go wrong. It is there where the mask falls. The dancer is defined as an idle and purely executing species, striving for perfection.

le plateau
The exhibition at le plateau marks an important and new step in Epaminonda’s practice, which, as the title suggests, shall be seen as one large work building up over time through different volumes and chapters. For this occasion the artist has devised an extensive environment that occupies the cleared spaces of le plateau with a series of cubicles, platforms and screens conceived both as sculptures and presentation devices. Including other elements, films and sound—the soundscapes of the installation will be composed by the music duo “Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides”, with whom the artist often collaborated in the past—, the whole set exceeds the exhibition space itself with parallel and temporary appearances connecting the inside and outside of le plateau. Like an emphatic homage to the Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, these performed interventions shape a kind of inhabited archipelago in constant evolution.

Animatronic Teen Head & Arm
Project: The Worlds End

Waldo Mason “Decapitated Teen “Blank” Head This is the first reveal of the Blanks in THE WORLD’S END after Gary, played by Simon Pegg, gets into a fight with a teenager in the Cross Hands toilet culminating in the teen’s head being knocked off against a urinal! The head was a self contained radio controlled animatronic model, with eye movement & blinks, frown, jaw open & close and slew. The mechanics were built by Gustav Hoegen & supervised and performed by Matt Denton.”

Monkey Business
file festival

A cuddly toy monkey, hanging on a wall like a Jumping Jack. With a friendly hello the puppet starts to react to the visitor’s movements and immediately apes every gesture with its arms and legs, its head and body. You can let the ape act smoothly or invite him to a wild dace.
But in a subtle way the monkey asks for another move you have never ever performed before. Playing the game you will lose control unconsciously and after the seductive encounter you might start wondering: What is all this monkey business about? Who pulls the strings?

Do You Remember When?

The hole and exposed earth of Do You Remember When? becomes a spiritual, cultural and physical portal – a point of transformation between worlds – from which emerges an Indigenous worldview engaging a discourse on sustainability. The block of concrete on the pedestal – the foundation of the institution constructed on top of tribal lands – functions as a trophy celebrating Indigenous intervention in opposition to a Western scientific worldview. The closed-circuit audio broadcast of a Pee Posh social dance song performed by the collective provides the psychosocial soundtrack of the transformation process. The work shifts the sustainability from a focus dominated by Western science to a balanced approach inclusive of Indigenous knowledge systems.

كلاوس ويبر
克劳斯·韦伯
클라우스 베버
Клаус Вебер
32 death masks
32 death masks grew out of Weber’s fascination with a practice traditionally performed in Western societies, whereby facial impressions of recently deceased persons are made in plaster. Prior to the invention of photography, the act of producing casts or “masks” from these molds was undoubtedly the most accurate way of preserving a particular person’s visage for viewing long after their death.

Requiem

In REQUIEM choreographer Nanine Linning imagines the tension between life and death, the profane and the sacred, the carnal and the spiritual. Themes, which are inextricably linked together and are at the same time absolute opposites. Inspired by Fauré’s “Requiem”, Dante’s “La Divina Commedia” and the absurd and surreal images of the artist duo “Les Deux Garçons”, Linning is searching for her own paradise on earth.REQUIEM is a multidisciplinary production with 25 dancers, live orchestra, two soloist singers, a choir, a sound artist and video. It is a triptych where the public will first walk on stage through dance installations; the dancers create a frozen, silent world.In the second part Fauré’s “Requiem” is being performed while singers and dancers follow Linnings choreography in a world of immense video images on stage. In the last part a Sound Artist will break apart Fauré’s “Requiem”. The frozen world of part one will melt and the energy of life will be released in a dynamic choreography for the choir and dancers.

ליאון טרמין
레온 테레민
Лев Термен
théremin

he invented an electronic device known as the theremin, which was a unique musical instrument that could be played without physical contact. Rather than plucking strings or pressing keys, the musician need only move their hands around antennas located on the device.The device became a popular curiosity and he proceeded to tour Europe in order to demonstrate it. In 1928, he moved to New York City in the United States, where he played a theremin in the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1928. In 1929, he was granted a patent for the device by the United States. He decided to give RCA the rights to manufacture and sell the theremin for a lump sum payment and a percentage of the sales.In the early 1930s, Theremin purchased a laboratory in New York that he used for experimenting with electronic musical instruments. One of the products of his lab was the Rhythmicon, which was purchased by Henry Cowell, a composer. In 1930, a group of ten “thereminists” performed at Carnegie Hall.Theremin also began researching a method to cause lights and sound to respond to the movement of dancers. His system became popular with ballet and dance clubs throughout the country.

UNDER TOMORROW’S SKY
Eindhoven has a tradition to uphold when it comes to thinking about the future, with technology and design together playing the leading role. It was therefore inescapable that the English think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today (TTT) would eventually find its way to Eindhoven. By now TTT has almost become part of the family.Not only did they contribute to the Great Babylon Circus at MU, with the intriguing ‘Landscape of unnatural history’, and conceive the luminous drones that performed an interactive choreography over the river Dommel during GLOW, but behind the scenes they also worked together with Philips Design on the Design Probes programme.This cooperation led to our curiosity about TTT’s many-sided practice and visions of the future being roused even further. More than any other they know how to link up contemporary, and in particular future-oriented thought on nature, urbanism, technology and culture, into inspiring and bizarre stories that tell us as much about the future as about the present day.

The Sultan’s Elephant was a show created by the Royal de Luxe theatre company, involving a huge moving mechanical elephant, a giant marionette of a girl and other associated public art installations. In French it was called La visite du sultan des Indes sur son éléphant à voyager dans le temps (literally, “Visit from the Sultan of the Indies on His Time-Travelling Elephant”). The show was commissioned to commemorate the centenary of Jules Verne’s death, by the two French cities of Nantes and Amiens, funded by a special grant from the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.The show was performed at various locations around the world between 2005 and 2006.

Pierrot Lunaire
In his desire to expand his art to other forms of dance, Rudolf Nureyev performed this choreography by Glen Tetley many times and in many countries, and included it in the repertoire of his “Nureyev and Friends”.
He identified with this tragic character as with Fokine’s Petrouchka, another of his favourite roles. Glen Tetley resisted during five years before giving him this choreography, fearing that the intense personality of the dancer would overwhelm the innocence of Pierrot, but Rudolf revealed a deep vulnerability in this role. While he was rehearsing Pierrot lunaire with Tetley, he was being filmed in Valentino, and had started to choreograph his version of Romeo and Juliet. It is just an example of the extraordinary density and variety of his schedules. Martine Kahane