Echo Echo
Echo Echo è un’installazione multimediale interattiva che utilizza gli assistenti virtuali per creare un eco digitale. Attivato dall’interazione umana, ogni dispositivo ascolta il suo predecessore e risponde di conseguenza. Nel corso di questa eco digitale, l’input originale diventa sempre più alienato. Simile al gioco Telephone (tedesco: Stille Post), le informazioni che riceviamo alla fine molto spesso non hanno nulla a che fare con il messaggio originale. Il lavoro è un approccio giocoso e un commento su uno dei problemi più grandi delle nostre attuali vite digitali.

퐁 치 웨이

‘Time is a Dimension’

The beauty of photography, in its essence, is conveyed by capturing a moment in time and freezing it out of its context. Singapore-based photographer Fong Qi Wei, however, uses photography to show the passage of time. In his time lapse series called ‘Time is a Dimension’, Fong doesn’t use a typical long exposure trick. He captures the passing time by layering different photos of the same spot with clear edge lines of each frame. Each collage is digitally cut and created from pictures Fong takes within 2 to to 4 hours. Fong usually works at sunrise or sunset, as the light and color palettes are most varied at those times.
“The basic structure of a landscape is present in every piece. But each panel or concentric layer shows a different slice of time, which is related to the adjacent panel/layer. The transition from daytime to night is gradual and noticeable in every piece, but would not be something you expect to see in a still image. Similarly, our experience of a scene is more than a snapshot,” explains Fong.

Work in progress
The motionless figure of an androgynous giantess occupies almost the entire gallery space in her entangled posture. On its body and around it, small scaffolding grows upwards. But the construction site is deserted. Only the figure, which resembles an avatar, remains in a calm state. A state of “being in between”. Between day and night. Between dream and reality or even between life and death? It almost seems as if the figure is still being brought back to life. One is inclined to think of Mary Shelley, whose novel character Victor Frankenstein created an artificial human being 200 years ago – in a time of great upheaval and discovery. Today we find ourselves once again at a turning point in society and technology, which makes us question ourselves as well as platforms on which we construct our selfs… Is that what Evelyn Bencicova and Enes Güç are alluding to here?

Throne
This work attempts to express that premonition as an immense “floating vacant throne”. If instances of power and authority have ruled since ancient times, and the pyramids provide one example—we must ask what the future will hold. Created with reference to the forms of festival floats and portable shrines that appear in the rituals and festivities of the East, the sculpture fuses today’s 3D modeling techniques with gold leaf applications that date back to ancient Egypt. In the frontal center is an empty room, space enough for a 2 to 3-year-old child to sit, suggesting that the new intelligence is still in a young state. Shining, spherical mirrors placed at the center in front and back. Made of platinum foil, they represent “the eyes overlooking the world”, where the frontal one faces the future and the back reflects into the past.

TH-42PH10EK x 5
Five screens were installed by the artist as pendulums that swing continuously. As soon as all five have come to a standstill, they are pulled back into their original positions with the help of cable winches and are made to swing again – triggered by pulling a rip cord, a performative act that cannot take place without human intervention and which involves the exhibition supervisor in the installation. Each cycle, which lasts approximately 45 minutes, ends as soon as all five screens have come to a standstill and no more sound is produced by their movement. The sound is produced by the amplification of the friction to which the joints of the moving pendulum are subjected. Multiplication thus creates five oscillating loops that merge into one another with a time offset.

Brume
Brume is a series of works and installations by Joanie Lemercier, using a custom made device made of atomized water. Joanie frees his work from the screen and usual physical devices. He is using space and immateriality as a canvas, creating a mid air floating projection feeling. Thanks to this volumetric tool, he is modifying our frontal relationship with screen and allowing new interaction between the viewer and the projected image. Joanie Lemercier is still exploring the possibilities of this new medium with a series of experiences and chapters, questioning our view of reality. In his work, Joanie is researching timeless subjects like light, matter, geometry. With Brume, he is also interested in the link between water and light.

Supraspectives
In the process of creating Supraspectives, the artist duo Quadrature has gathered the data of 590 (recent & former) spy satellites, whose trajectory the installation follows. A third of them can be considered space trash, as they are obsolete or damaged, but still, they continue overflying us. The installation calculates the paths of all those satellites in real time and speculatively reconstructs the view they are capturing, offering artistically intervened images of what the satellites could be observing. Mainly satellites passing near the exhibition venue are selected, combined with other specially interesting or suggestive satellite images. Additionally, a specifically built motorized antenna on the roof connects live with the satellites overflying Tabakalera, transforming their real radio signals into sound. Everytime the installation connects with a satellite, the screen shows the data relative to it, such as country of origin or year of launch.

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

Atmospheric Forest
Atmospheric Forest is a large scale VR point-cloud installation that visualizes and sonifies the relations between the forest and climate. It reveals the interaction patterns between the pine-tree emissions in Pfynwald, an ancient Swiss Alpine forest, and weather conditions in this valley, effected by drought. The trees do not only produce oxygen, but they are living bodies who breath too. I.e., they emit part of carbon dioxide, sometimes even up to 20 perc. from what they have consumed. When trees die, they release all the carbon they have collected during their lives back into the atmosphere. Atmospheric Forest explores the effects of drought on local forest ecosystems, and how such stress situations influence production of resin and volatile emissions (such as usual pine-tree scent).

n-Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound after Iannis Xenakis
N_Polytope: Behaviors in Light and Sound After Iannis Xenakis is a spectacular light and sound performance-installation combining cutting edge lighting, lasers, sound, sensing and machine learning software inspired by composer Iannis Xenakis’s radical 1960s- 1970s works named Polytopes (from the Greek ‘poly’, many and ‘topos’, space). As large scale, immersive architectural environments that made the indeterminate and chaotic patterns and behaviour of natural phenomena experiential through the temporal dynamics of light and the spatial dynamics of sound, the Polytopes still to this day are relatively unknown but were far ahead of their time. N_Polytope is based on the attempt to both re-imagine Xenakis’ work with probabilistic/stochastic systems with new techniques as well as to explore how these techniques can exemplify our own historical moment of extreme instability.

surveillance exclusion
Camera’s and other technologies create a safer living environment than ever before. Mega databanks and high resolution cameras stock hundreds of exabytes a year. But who has access to this data? Not only the security department but also the advertisement industry is interested in this technology. They pay to use real time data to their advantage. They create advertisements that call your name, keep records of your personal interests and they follow you everywhere you go. By wearing this mask formed like a lens it possible to become unrecognizable for facial recognition software and because of it’s transparence you will not lose your identity and facial expressions. So it’s still possible to interact with the people around you.

a little death

Despite the broader reference to the traditional pictorial genre of “still life”, disseminated from the Dutch and Spanish painters of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, ‘Still life’ from 2001 and ‘A little death’ from 2002 refer especially to the painting of transient elements of the French Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) to discuss the distortion and inexorability of time, the finitude of life or, above all, the interdependence between life and death. The title makes a direct reference to the expression with which the French philosopher Georges Bataille defined the orgasm: ‘une petite mort‘.

Zee
File Festival 

Immersive Audiovisual Environment Artificial Fog, Stroboscopes, Pulse Lights and Surround Sound, 2008

ZEE proposes a state of tabula rasa and unfolds without a narrative or reproducible imagery.The audience wanders freely in a space filled with extremely dense fog that fully obscures all of its boundaries. Stroboscopic- and pulse lights illuminate the fog, in a softened and evenly dispersed manner, creating kaleidoscopic three-dimensional structures in constant animation. An ambient and minimal sound-scape connects to the imagery, without directly synchronizing to it.The core visual impression of ZEE is of a psychedelic architecture of pure light, an abstract luminescent landscape enveloping the visitor. Time appears to stand still.

Cloud Light III
“Kinetic sculpture resides at the intersection of artistic inspiration and mechanical complexity. The making of one of my pieces relies on creative expression, metal fabrication, and a slow design process in equal parts. It aims to alter one’s experience of time and space when witnessed. It also needs to weather winds of 90 mph and still move in a one mile per hour breeze and do so for hundreds of years.” Anthony Howe

МАРИ ШУИНАР
Soft virtuosity, still humid, on the edge
“My source has always been the body itself, and especially the silence and the breath which make up the “invisible” stuff of life. At the root of each new work there is always what I call the “mystery”, an unknown wavelength that calls out to me in an almost obsessive manner. My work consists of capturing this primordial wavelength, of “tuning” it in a sense, and of arranging it in space and time with a structure and form proper to it. Since 1978, this is what I have been doing: listening attentively to the vital pulsation of the body to the point of crystallising it in a new order. Each time, I start afresh from zero. Each time, I focus and re-direct my “antennae[…]”

Spheres
Dutch designer Maria Blaisse is one of those legends. She began in the early 80s’ by creating spherical foam forms that moulded and folded in ways that were revolutionary at the time and she worked primarily in dance wear where she is still breaking new ground today. Blaisse then went on to collaborate with Issey Miyake for whom she made mitre-like rubber hats.

SPIEGEL
‘I like to challenge my obsessions by imposing new rules on them,’ he says. The easy way is never an option: ‘I like things difficult, so as to be able to enjoy it afterwards and to be able to say that it was all worthwhile.’
Which is why, after 25 years of Ultima Vez, Vandekeybus still loves creating performances. ‘Sometimes I can’t face the start of the process. There’s always that stress and sleepless nights with five ideas running around in my head at the same time, but then the production’s own world takes shape and it instantly becomes captivating and fun again.’

פיונה טאן
フィオナ·タン
Фиона Тан
فيونا تان
Rise and Fall
Fiona Tan explores storytelling, memory, and the part they play in the formation of identity throughout this exhibition of five video installations, various associated sketches and one single-channel video. Rise and Fall (2009), elongated projections onto two large, side-by-side screens, is a wordless meditation, set to music, of a woman no longer young but still conscious of her looks; she was clearly a beauty in her youth. As the video proceeds we gather that the young woman pictured on the second screen is the memory of her younger self. They often move through domestic activities (sleeping, bathing, dressing) in parallel; this is inter-cut with scenes of violently rushing water (shot at Niagra Falls, it turns out). It’s a hackneyed metaphor – the water’s endless surging as an image of time’s relentless uni-directionality – but in Tan’s hands that doesn’t seem to matter; she creates extraordinarily emotional work out of simple stories and well-worn themes.

Still Life

Still Life is the newest release of interactive art. The project  was created by the American Scott Garner and aims to enable a very different way of interacting with our staff. With it, the task of tidying up the works on the wall can become less monotonous. Garner framed an LCD screen with a rotating base, grouped a motion sensor and connected it to 3D software (which generates images in real time). The result is an interactive work of art; that simulates suffering the effects of gravity. A picture in which, in perfect synchrony, all its elements move.

Canoe
The work here in Dawson is like an old vehicle in which I’ve put a new engine. Entitled Canoe, it consists of an approximately 20 foot long trough of water, that resembles some kind of boat. This provides a means for a gunwales tracking mechanism to slowly, endlessly paddle its way back and forth. It was first constructed in 2001 in a studio beside Halifax harbour. It draws visual inspiration from the bridges and water vessels of this port. Conceptually, it grew from an interest in technological obsolescence: how things (like canoes) make shifts from utility to leisure.
It has experienced several major rebuilds since 2001. Most of them have been practical, but for Dawson I’ve opted for an experimental configuration that changes significantly the nature of the work. Previously, Canoe has only ever been shown indoors. Normally in runs on rechargeable batteries, with a continuous, smooth motion. In Dawson, it is shown outdoors, alongside the Yukon river, showing up in an absurd way the paleness of its artificial river. Here, the primary source of power is sunlight.
Making use of the long northern day, solar panels receive light, storing energy in an array of super-capacitor cells. At this time, Canoe remains still. A custom circuit monitors the amount of charge, and when a predetermined trigger point is reached, it is dumped into Canoe’s electric motor in a burst, allowing it to make a few strokes. Then Canoe rests, while the charging cycle begins again. Motion is intermittent, entirely dependent on the amount and intensity of sunlight. It ranges from near standstill in overcast conditions to perhaps 1 or 2 strokes every minute in full light. The technical term for this type of circuit is a relaxation oscillator. I like this term because, if you remove it from its technical context, it points back to ideas about leisure and utility.

Music of Changes

Music of Changes was the second work Cage composed to be fully indeterminate in some sense (the first is Imaginary Landscape No. 4, completed in April 1951, and the third movement of Concerto for prepared piano also used chance), and the first instrumental work that uses chance throughout. He was still using magic square-like charts to introduce chance into composition, when, in early 1951, Christian Wolff presented Cage with a copy of the I Ching (Wolff’s father published a translation of the book at around the same time). This Chinese classic text is a symbol system used to identify order in chance events. For Cage it became a perfect tool to create chance-controlled compositions: he would “ask” the book questions about various aspects of the composition at hand, and use the answers to compose. The vast majority of pieces Cage completed after 1951 were created using the I Ching.

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.

Face Substitution

Faces is an interactive installation result of the work on face substitution in collaboration with Arturo Castro

“The installation is based on the idea of wishing for a new identity: when the subject first steps up, they see their face unmodified. After closing their eyes to make a wish and opening them again, they discover they are wearing a new face. The result is a mixture of a playful, surprising and some times scary experience.This installation takes advantage of the unique experience of slowly recognizing yourself as someone else playing also with the concept of the uncanny valley by showing a face that perfecly matches the visitors facial expresion but still has some lighting and texturing imperfections. This elicits everything from laughter, to surprise, or repulsion.Knowing that it takes approximately one second for someone to respond to a completely unexpected event, we store a photograph at 1.5 seconds after the swap — capturing that moment of realization.”Arturo Castro

Crazyflie
The Crazyflie quadcopter was started late 2009 as a competence development project in the Swedish consulting company Epsilon AB in which all three of us where employed. This project was done on our free-time with component cost handled by Epsilon. In 2010 we finally decided to send to a video of the Crazyflie to Hackaday.com and that’s when things really took off. More development was done and we decided to make a Crazyflie kit that could be manufactured and sold as an open source development platform. To finance the development and manufacturing of the kit we created Bitcraze AB. At this point we felt that the project had outgrown the Daedalus Projects and decided to launch Bitcraze.se. The Daedalus projects website still exists to show off and advertise other Epsilon competence development project but the Crazyflie now lives in Bitcraze.Crazyflie is a small quadcopter that stated with a simple idea: get an electronic board to fly. We are three electronic engineer from Sweden and we wanted to make a small flying machine that could fly indoor (Sweden is often cold outside ) and with as few mechanical parts as possible. The result of this idea was a small quadcopter that uses its electronic board as main mechanical frame and with motors glued to the PCB:This fist prototype was as simple as possible while following our initial target to be small with the minimum of mechanical thought. After a couple of month of programming and debugging it actually flew and had some success when Hackaday featured it. This prototype was however a lot more frustrating to fly then it appears: each crash was potentially fatal for one or many motors. That made it quite stressful to fly as it would not allow mistake and we eventually broke all 3 prototypes (the red board is the 2.4GHz radio and was also a weak point).