Speculative Evolution, Prototype 1

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Speculative experiment on a future ecosystem under strict control. The narrative takes place in a simulation, 30 years in the future, where artificial intelligence and synthetic biology collaborate to optimize an environment for cultivated species. An AI-powered simulator helps visitors generate new species to balance the ecosystem. Inspiration comes from the book Under the White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert and artists’ stories about life on a damaged planet.

Bio

Marc Lee is a Swiss artist focused on real-time rendered audiovisual installations, AR, VR and mobile applications, critically exploring creative, cultural, social, ecological, political and speculative themes. His work has been exhibited in important museums and new media art spaces. Shervin Saremi is an Iranian musician and audio engineer specializing in sonic computing, procedural sound design and production. Currently researching immersive audio at UdK Berlin.

Stalking the Trace
Stalking the Trace est une installation VR multi-spectateurs qui se déroule dans une série d’enceintes, renforcées par l’audio, l’éclairage et les projections pour créer une atmosphère immersive sensorielle dans la galerie. Rossin utilise le mouvement du spectateur à travers l’espace comme méthode pour interroger le désir humain de contrôle et d’agence, et la notion de temps avec le sujet humain en son centre.
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Stalking the Trace is a multi viewer VR installation, takes place within a series of enclosures, heightened by audio, lighting and projections to create a sensory immersive atmosphere within the gallery. Rossin utilises the movement of the viewer through the space as a method to interrogate the human desire for control and agency, and the notion of time with the human subject at its centre.
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Stalking the Trace – это многопользовательская VR-инсталляция, действие которой происходит в серии ограждений, усиленных звуком, освещением и проекциями для создания чувственной иммерсивной атмосферы в галерее. Россин использует движение зрителя в пространстве как метод исследования человеческого стремления к контролю и свободе действий, а также понятия времени с человеческим субъектом в его центре.

Hot Pink Turquoise
Janssens’ works range wide, but they can all be described as sculptures that use the space as a stage for sensory activity. The simple white architecture of Louisiana’s South Wing becomes a resonating surface for Janssens’ both fragile and dizzying art – fragile because the works and their components are very simple while their effect elevates them above the material. Janssens herself often uses the word ‘fluid’ to describe the effect of her works – even for example when they consist of a 6.5 metre long iron girder polished at the top so the room is reflected and it is hard to fix your gaze on the object. Janssens seeks no control of either works or viewers, for as the Dutch theorist Mieke Bal has said, Janssens’ artworks are at one and the same time object and event. Many of the works in the exhibition can evoke the sensation of standing at the threshold of something. They stress transitions and transformations between on the one hand a material level – evoked by glass, colour, liquids and not least light – and on the other hand a dynamic experience of time and space.

Patriots, citizens, lovers was developed in conversation with Ukrainian journalist Maxim Ivanukha as a commission of the PinchukArtCentre’s Future Generation Art Prize 2014 and is composed of ten urgent interviews with Ukrainian LGBTI and queer activists who discuss the critical and dire situation of lesbian, gay, trans and intersex lives in Ukraine in times of war[…] Social invisibility, physical and psychological abuse, political violence, and a deeply patriarchal culture frame the context for the difficult work of LGBTI activists who denounce discrimination and demand the transformation of the system.

Treu
Treu is a real-time audiovisual installation that elaborates on the multiple meanings and implications of the concept of trust. On a macro level it observes how historical events have influenced its course and considers how this can evolve in the future. On a micro level, it, explores how the presence or absence of trust can shift the perception of our individual realities.
Trust is a fundamental element of our society. Politics, economics, and our whole modern system are not material realities – they are psychological constructs based on the trust in individuals, in institutions, in the market. We decide to believe in the value of money, to undertake social changes only if we trust the inventions of our collective imagination.
video

Erratic Weather
Despite some world leaders skepticism, climate change is a reality and the world isn’t just warming, in some parts of the planet the weather is becoming more erratic. During the last years, our generation has started to observe the effects and consequences of this shift, witnessing violent and unexpected climate phenomenons. Erratic Weather is a digital art project aiming to represent changing atmospheric conditions into an immersive multimedia experience. During the performance, the system uses various source of weather information retrieved from an online database and processed on real time to generate a visual and a surround sound composition. During 30 minutes the audience will experience the life cycle of swirling phenomenons such typhoon, hurricane and tropical cyclone , demonstrating the devastating power of the nature and the emergency to preserve it.

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.

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.

Maurice Benayoun and Tobias Klein
Brain Factory Prototype 2
Brain Factory is an installation that allows the audience to give a shape to human abstractions through Brain-Computer Interaction (BCI), and then to convert the resulting form into a physical object. The work examines the human specificity through abstract constructs such as LOVE, FREEDOM, and DESIRE. The project articulates the relationship between thought and matter, concept and object, humans and machine. Brain Factory uses Electroencephalography (EEG) data captured by BCI. As a brain activity is unique, we developed a novel calibration process of the individual data readings and associated emotional responses within a framework of binary outcomes. This is key for a real-time feedback – a biofeedback – between the virtual generative processes and the brain’s associated response.

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

ユナイテッド·ビジュアルアーティスト
美国视觉艺术家
our time

Our Time (2016) is the latest large-scale installation by United Visual Artists investigating our subjective experience of the passing of time. How long is a moment? At what rate does time actually pass? The work joins a series of kinetic sculptures that began with Momentum (2013); an installation designed as a ‘spatial instrument’ that was to reveal the relationship between expectation and perception when intersected with a physical space.
Our Time defines a physical environment where pendulums swing at a pace apparently unhindered by the laws of nature and where no single time measurement applies. The installation combines movement, light and sound as a multi-sensory, multi-dimensional canvas the visitor can enter. Pendulums swing, each to their own rhythm, as time flows through the grid. With light tracing the path and sound its echo, the passing of time becomes almost palpable.

Improvisation on 4 Sequences

So now, I have the time to release some of these quadraphonic performances. It’s not entirely feasible to release a quad performance on vinyl — I did it, with help —the first quad vinyl release in at least 30 years, complete with enclosed hardware decoder. As a collector’s item, that’s fine, but I want to make the quad files available in a more practical way. This Geneva recording is my first release solely on my Atmospheric label. The piece is titled “Improvisation on Four Sequences” and those four sixteen-stage sequences have been the “raw material” of most of my Buchla concerts since the early 70’s. We’re making this performance available in several formats, including quadraphonic, 5.1, stereo and ambisonic.; all at 44.1 and 88.2.

goldberg variations
Bach’s Goldberg Variations—a set of 30 contrapuntal variations beginning and ending with an aria—were outside the standard piano repertoire, having been recorded on the instrument only a few times before, either on small labels or unreleased.The work was considered esoteric and technically demanding, requiring awkward hand crossing at times when played on a piano (these passages would be played on two manuals on a harpsichord). Gould’s album both established the Goldberg Variations within the contemporary classical repertoire and made him an internationally famous pianist nearly “overnight”. First played in concert by Gould in 1954, the composition was a staple of Gould’s performances in the years following the recording.

Globe of Science and Innovation
History of the universe
Did you know that the matter in your body is billions of years old?

According to most astrophysicists, all the matter found in the universe today — including the matter in people, plants, animals, the earth, stars, and galaxies — was created at the very first moment of time, thought to be about 13 billion years ago.
The universe began, scientists believe, with every speck of its energy jammed into a very tiny point. This extremely dense point exploded with unimaginable force, creating matter and propelling it outward to make the billions of galaxies of our vast universe. Astrophysicists dubbed this titanic explosion the Big Bang.
The Big Bang was like no explosion you might witness on earth today. For instance, a hydrogen bomb explosion, whose center registers approximately 100 million degrees Celsius, moves through the air at about 300 meters per second. In contrast, cosmologists believe the Big Bang flung energy in all directions at the speed of light (300,000,000 meters per second, a million times faster than the H-bomb) and estimate that the temperature of the entire universe was 1000 trillion degrees Celsius at just a tiny fraction of a second after the explosion. Even the cores of the hottest stars in today’s universe are much cooler than that.
There’s another important quality of the Big Bang that makes it unique. While an explosion of a man-made bomb expands through air, the Big Bang did not expand through anything. That’s because there was no space to expand through at the beginning of time. Rather, physicists believe the Big Bang created and stretched space itself, expanding the universe.

بوب ويلسون
鲍伯·威尔逊
בוב וילסון
ロバート·ウィルソン
밥 윌슨
Боб Уилсон
Bertold Brecht
Kurt Weill
Berliner Ensemble
Die Dreigroschenoper

Revel in this 30-strong ensemble of actors and musicians performing one of the most familiar scores in musical theatre today. Be warned, with a strictly limited engagement in Perth and following sellout seasons in New York, Hong Kong and Berlin, you need to be quick. In 1928, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill created a masterwork that would change the shape of theatre forever. Eighty-five years later, visionary director Robert Wilson leads Brecht’s own company, the Berliner Ensemble, to perform in Australia for the very first time. Mack the Knife is the original city crim who’s never met a law, a woman or a cop he couldn’t seduce – but when he challenges the supremacy of the Beggar King and his empire of manufactured woes, the fallout threatens to tear the town apart.
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АРВО ПЯРТ
Silentium
Tabula Rasa – II.

The second movement of Tabula Rasa, “Silentium,” or silence, is composed in the key of D minor, giving the impression of a V-I cadence in relation to “Ludus” in A minor. The movement begins with an arpeggiated D minor second inversion chord, played by the prepared piano. “Silentium” expands as a mensuration canon. Pärt divides the instruments into three sections; solo violins, violin I and violin II, and viola and cello. Each pair, divided into melodic and tintinnabuli voices, begin on a central pitch, and move at a different rhythmic speeds. Pärt expands the music by adding one pitch above and below the central pitch of each pair in each successive section. Every time the solo violins reach their central pitch, “D,” the piano again plays a D minor chord and the contrabass plays an octave “D.” Once each of the sections reach their expanded octave range, they fade out of the texture. The solo violins, moving at the slowest rhythmic speed, reach their octave span in measure 130, and then begin a downward descent of a D minor four-octave scale.

The Blur Building (an architecture of atmosphere)
The Blur Building is a media pavilion for Swiss EXPO 2002 at the base of Lake Neuchatel in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland.From piles in the water, a tensegrity system of rectilinear struts and diagonal rods cantilevers out over the lake. Ramps and walkways weave through the tensegrity system, some of them providing a counterweight for the structure. The form is based on the work of Buckminster Fuller.The pavilion is made of filtered lake water shot as a fine mist through 13,000 fog nozzles creating an artificial cloud that measures 300 feet wide by 200 feet deep by 65 feet high. A built-in weather station controls fog output in response to shifting climatic conditions such as temperature, humidity, wind direction, and wind speed.The public can approach Blur via a ramped bridge. The 400 foot long ramp deposits visitors at the center of the fog mass onto a large open-air platform where movement is unregulated. Visual and acoustical references are erased along the journey toward the fog leaving only an optical “white-out” and the “white-noise” of pulsing water nozzles. Prior to entering the cloud, each visitor responds to a questionnaire/character profile and receives a “braincoat” (smart raincoat). The coat is used as protection from the wet environment and storage of the personality data for communication with the cloud’s computer network. Using tracking and location technologies, each visitor’s position can be identified and their character profiles compared to any other visitor.In the Glass Box, a space surrounded by glass on six sides, visitors experience a “sense of physical suspension only heightened by an occasional opening in the fog.” As visitors pass one another, their coats compare profiles and change color indicating the degree of attraction or repulsion, much like an involuntary blush – red for affinity, green for antipathy. The system allows interaction among 400 visitors at any time.Visitors can climb another level to the Angel Bar at the summit. The final ascent resembles the sensation of flight as one pierces through the cloud layer to the open sky. Here, visitors relax, take in the view, and choose from a large selection of commercial waters, municipal waters from world capitals, and glacial waters. At night, the fog will function as a dynamic and thick video screen.

Glow
Glow is an illuminating 30-minute choreographic essay by Artistic Director Gideon Obarzanek and interactive software creator Frieder Weiss. Beneath the glow of a sophisticated video tracking system, a lone organic being mutates in and out of human form into unfamiliar, sensual and grotesque creature states. Utilising the latest in interactive video technologies a digital landscape is generated in real time in response to the dancer’s movement. The body’s gestures are extended by and in turn manipulate the video world that surrounds it, rendering no two performances exactly the same.

Walking Truck -Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine

In den 1960er Jahren bauten General Electric und Ralph Mosher einen 3000 Pfund schweren Vierbeiner namens “The Walking Truck”. Obwohl sich der Walking Truck nie durchgesetzt hat, können Sie sich immer noch fantastisches Filmmaterial dieses vierbeinigen Versorgungsfahrzeugs in Bewegung ansehen. Jahrzehnte bevor Roboter wie Big Dog und Quattroped auf die Bühne kamen, untersuchten Robotiker die praktischen Anwendungen von Lauffahrzeugen. Im Jahr 1962 stellte The Times Record fest, dass die US-Armee ein Roboter-Pack-Biest untersuchte: Der Mechanismus, für den der Boston Ordinance District einen Studienvertrag vergeben hat, würde als “Pedipulator” bezeichnet. Es wäre für unwegsames oder schlammiges Gelände ausgelegt und seine 12-Fuß-Beine würden mit einer Geschwindigkeit von 35 Meilen wandern. Der menschliche Bediener, der direkt mit dem Mechanismus verbunden wäre, würde in die große Maschine gehen und die 12-Fuß-Beine würden nehmen die gleichen Schritte. Die Arme der Maschine würden den Bewegungen der Arme des Bedieners folgen.

EMERGENT
According to wikipedia, “emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” Thus “EMERGENT” was created using a particle system that was given basic rules of behavior, this is very similar to swarm algorithms using in architecture to create 3D forms. The application/particle system was created/simulated using Processing and OpenGL. The particle trails (locations over time) were imported to Maya using a MEL script and then animated to show their growth over time. I developed a (pretty complex) Processing application that helped me simulate the particle system (300 particles, with per particle interaction) in real-time.