Distortions of The Past

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Michael Sadowski (aka derealizer) – Distortions of The Past – Austria

Fractal elements that resemble cosmic structures evoke the illusion of traveling through a fractal universe. Rules, in the form of prompts, and chance interact with each other to create a visual fantasy.

Bio

Using Stable Diffusion, a visual synthesizer, the artist turns fantasies into videos using just a PC, similar to the invention of printing 600 years ago. Exploring the interplay between software algorithms that create visual worlds and the artist’s mind guiding this process is incredibly exciting. Unlike traditional cinema, there is no ‘reality’ or humans involved, making it a satisfying medium for creating visual art.

Credits

Visuals: Michael Sadowski
Music: Distortions of the Past by Dreamstate Logic

Somatic Echo
“Somatic Echo” is an experimental sound art and research project that utilizes bone conducted sound as a method to investigate human audition and create an unusual and mesmerizing aesthetic of the body as a medium of sound. The installation uses a reclining chair and a sound mask to play an 8-channel sound composition through 8 transducers placed on the user’s head: 6 channels in the face and 2 in the back of the head. The transducers transmit sound through the bone structure of the skull directly to the listener’s inner ear, bypassing the outer ears, which normally are the gateway for auditory signals. The listeners experience the soundscape through both their auditory and tactile senses perceiving a sonic image shaped by the sound traveling through the head structure and through vibrations applied to the skin. This set up lets us experience sound through our body and our body through sound.

Squint
file festival
I was inspired by how the sunlight bounces around in our artificial forest.
“Squint” is a kinetic light installation consisting of 49 mirrors that reflect lights in a bright space. The mirrors track and reflect lights on audiences’ face with composed patterns of movements. It extends the generated perception by focusing on how lights pass across our visual senses physically, and combines with our perception of images through flickering. “Squint”, which extracts various daily experiences to an abstraction brings the audience to expand their interpretation of lights and perceived imagination into a non-linear experience.
“Squint” simulates light source and intentionally shines lights on audience’s faces. Bright light is projected in the gallery, a clean bright space.
Everyday people are dynamically moving around in the city. Sunlight reflects and flickers even when it is indirect and hidden behind the artifacts. While we are traveling, we are experiencing motion. We are also experiencing the shift of light intensity, visual patterns and textures. The varieties of light forms inspire the artist to explore the potential of light textures, select and sort out the combined complexity in urban space. The artist turns them into a minimal form of light experience, while maximizing its diversity of perception.

Heimweh
‘Heimweh’ displays the breaking of waves on a sandy beach fragmented across 12 screens. The waves and their sound move gradually towards the feet of the spectator. At one point the waves turn into a green haze. ‘Heimweh’ started as a reflection on earthly life by considering what most embodies being on earth. When traveling to Mars, for instance, the major missing element would be the sea. As the waves turn green, they deform, similar to memories that get blurred over time. When the green finally subsides, the clear sky and sea emerge again with a sense of relief.

Linie II
One second of white rope is traveling through time and space. The white rope is moving at a constant pace along the contours of an imaginary shape, traversing the whole space in several directions and angles. For following that second in the vast space, it requires the viewer to look up while moving his whole head. While passing through long distances as a straight line, it appears to be slow and content. Other passages require quick shifts of direction and the perception changes to fast and sudden movements.

Everything
FILE GAMES 2017
Everything is an interactive experience where everything you see is a thing you can be, from animals to planets to galaxies and beyond. Travel between outer and inner space, and explore a vast, interconnected universe of things without enforced goals, scores, or tasks to complete. Everything is a procedural, AI-driven simulation of the systems of nature, seen from the points of view of everything in the Universe.

Riverbank House
Located on a narrow strip of land, sandwiched between a quiet riverbank and a residential neighborhood, the home’s unique form was inspired by the juxtaposed views offered by the surrounding environment. Standing on the riverbank you had views of the calm stream traveling to an unknown destination, unfazed by the birds, joggers and other small life form taking advantage of its natural serenity. However, a few steps down the bank, away from the river, revealed a startlingly contrasting view; homes and more homes, so grounded and monumental.

Train Performance
Recently, I have found that traveling has made my anxiety peak. I suddenly feel trapped on a train, or in a car, and start being unable to breath. In order to both face this fear as well as do a performative piece about it, I taped myself up on a train. This is putting in to a literal sense the emotions I feel when traveling.

Prismverse
Hong-kong based design studio, XEX, presents ‘prismverse’, an interactive diamond-themed installation in shanghai. The installation was completed for american skincare brand, Dr. jart+, to serve as an experiential pavilion for their ‘instant V7 toning light’ at raffles city mall. The immersive installation is inspired by light rays traveling through a diamond. With a 10 meter-long LED floor and the complex geometrical tessellated mirror wall, the highly illuminated interior becomes a metaphor for the instant tone-up effect of the skin product.

Precarious Situation
Marc-Anthony Polizzi was born in 1983 in the post-industrial city of Utica, NY. He attended PRATT at Munson Williams Proctor Institute of Art, The New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and received his Masters in Fine Art from Tulane University in New Orleans. His education was punctuated by time spent as a traveling carnie, factory brazier, video store clerk, set designer, among other jobs. These diverse and happily demeaning experiences would later help shape his work. Also heavily influential was his time spent living in post-Katrina New Orleans and growing up in the failing rust belt city of Utica, NY.

Construction N
Often occupying both physical and temporal space, my sculpture has always incorporated both conventional and experimental media, including woodcarving, metalworking, installation, kinetics, microelectronics and video. While it tends to be visually diverse, the friction between object and memory has been at the conceptual core of my sculptural practice since 1994. The images, objects and narratives of a particular place or experience undergo distortions each time they are represented, and it is these forms of abstraction I explore in my sculpture.
Earlier bodies of work have utilized the physical residue of my traveling – the souvenirs, postcards, snapshots and videotapes – as central elements of the sculpture, forcing them to reveal their own inadequacy, disengagement or transformation, to subvert the nostalgic ideal, or to disrupt the usual implications of value and validation in a cultural artifact. In later works I utilize the physicality of scale, motion, and orientation to extend and challenge the conventional representation of landscape. These pieces define specific places as indefinite spatial constructs that complicate the certainty of “being there,” and are part of a larger attempt to relate a fragmented travel narrative through architecture, landscapes and souvenirs.
I have been using IKEA products as raw material for several years, and continue to be interested in extracting conceptual value from it. I am currently exploring the relationship between the Modern avant-garde and contemporary consumer design culture. In my recent work, I attempt to articulate various points of connection and rupture between IKEA and the Bauhaus by constructing scale models of demolished or unrealized buildings by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius using “hacked” IKEA products such as tables, bookshelves and flooring.

Венсаном Калебо
Mangrove Towers

as the name indicates, the design of ‘mangrove towers’ references the shape and form of the distinctive tree. to be built at paris’ busy gare du nord railway station, the structures will accommodate a mixed program of offices, hotels and housing dedicated to international and traveling customers. the station’s platforms will be full of piezoelectrical captors polarizing under the action of the mechanical constraints generated by its inhabitants. the tubular façades will be composed of grätzel cells forming a photo-electrochemical skin.

Mobius Strip

Many people first pick up a camera to record their passions whatever they may be. But sooner or later, the best of them find that photography itself is their real passion. That’s true of Robert Whitman. Along the way, he found not just a pastime, but a way of life.
As a young hippie traveling the world after college, Robert found that with his camera he had entree to people and places he never would have encountered. He’s been on a life long journey of discovery ever since, with stops in Brazil, Cuba, Arizona, Miami Beach, Moscow, and Uruguay, just to name a few of the places where he’s lived and worked.

traveling chairs

ANALOG