GUDA KOSTER
Wandering Mind
Guda Koster è un’artista e fotografo olandese che crea sculture viventi, installazioni montate su più paralleli che poi fotografa. Coi tessuti utilizzati in queste opere, l’artista vuole sottolineare i significati che i nostri abiti trasmettono. Andando oltre alla sua funzione, l’abito divulga un messaggio: “Nella nostra vita quotidiana, comunichiamo identità e posizione sociale principalmente attraverso i nostri vestiti. L’abbigliamento può essere visto come una forma di arte visiva che esprime il modo in cui vediamo noi stessi e il nostro rapporto con il mondo che ci circonda. “
Broersen & Lukács
Point Cloud Old Growth
Forest on Location
In the video work Forest on Location, we see the avatar of the Iranian opera singer Shahram Yazdani walking through a forest. One moment, the forest wraps around him protectively, the next moment the trees crumble away into loose pieces of bark, or melt into a static green mass. At the same time, the forest as a whole floats around in darkness, uprooted. It is a forest without a location, except on our screen. The young man’s avatar appears to be wandering around there aimlessly. It is a wonderland that he exits from towards the end of the video, when his body slips straight through the green wall. This finally breaks the spell of the illusory forest, and everything is revealed to be no more than staged decor. But the forest does exist as a real forest, somewhere. This virtual green world is a digital back-up of Bia?owie?a Forest: the last remaining stretch of primeval low land forest that once covered much of Central Europe. Inspired by what the historian Simon Schama wrote about Bia?owie?a in Landscape and Memory (1995), Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács journeyed to Poland to capture the forest suffused by old-Germanic nostalgia and mythical atmosphere.
Patricia Olynyk
Oculus
Oculus is a large-scale, collaborative light sculpture that depicts a colossal abstracted drosophila eye, replete with compound faceted surfaces. It both recalls the circular opening at the apex of a cupola and alludes to a surveillance device or drone hovering in mid-air. Oculus is inspired in part by a series of scanning electron micrographs produced in a transgenic lab while researching human and non-human sensoria. The work evokes affective encounters with scale such as viewing miniature particles through the lens of a microscope or wandering through monumental physical environments. As each viewer’s reflection plays across the sculpture’s undulating surface, the apprehension of the self affects both individual and collective behavior in unexpected ways. This affective dynamic plays on the precariousness of our coexistence with other lifeforms in the world, one that is always contingent upon viewers’ bodies and the variability of the environment around them. The act of gazing at Oculus also puts into play the reciprocal condition of both seeing and being seen.
ROBERT WILSON
بوب ويلسون
鲍伯·威尔逊
בוב וילסון
ロバート·ウィルソン
밥 윌슨
БОБ УИЛСОН
Odyssey (Οδύσσεια)
The great epic work of ancient Greek poetry tells the story of Odysseus’s journey home after the Trojan War and what happens when the hero arrives at Ithaca. It is a transcendental tale that has always been the symbolic text par excellence about human adventure and the wanderings of existence in a harsh but exciting world.
Robert Wilson’s encounter with Homer is one of the major artistic events of this season. One of the most influential and acclaimed artists in world theatre brings his own unique approach to the material. The sensitivity, inventiveness and imagination of the great American director resonate with the Homeric spirit, creating a spellbinding new theatrical language. Eighteen carefully chosen performers and Wilson’s own internationally renowned collaborators bring all their artistry to bear on this unique venture, which is intended for all audiences, regardless of age or experience of the theatre.
DOMINIK STRZELEC
FREESTYLE WANDERING MACHINE
Driven by its immediate surrounding, little by little, the machine deposits material while sensing and moving within its territory. Traces left by its passing alter the landscape it operates within, step by step. Instant decisions solidify, aggregate and therefore shift or constrain its possible future trajectories.
SONICE DEVELOPMENT
emerging colorspace
Julian Adenauer and Michael Haas
Emerging Colorspace was a robotic drawing installation, realized by the Berlin based duo of artists, designers and inventors Julian Adenauer and Michael Haas, aka Sonice Development, as part of the Red Never Follows exhibition the Saatchi Gallery in London last summer. A new version of the studio’s Vertwalker, a machine with the ability to move on vertical surfaces, walking on buildings, and crawling on interior walls. The machine autonomously applied paint to the wall using a marker, referencing the vertical streets in Minority Report, the flying cars in Bladerunner and 5th Element, or Spiderman, the Silver Surfer and the Green Goblin – just to name a few sources of inspiration that expressed the supernatural. Thousands of lines drawn with different colors gradually formed an increasingly dense colorspace that emerged during the more than 200 exhibition hours, while the wandering behavior of the machine followed simple algorithmic rules with random elements. The result was a web that constantly changed, and never looked the same, exploring new territories and the future in a way ordinary mortals can’t.
BEN JACK
Elucidating Feedback
File Festival
The more we look, the more we see, the more we see the more we look. “Elucidating feedback” is a brain-controlled installation about the creativity inherent in the act of observation. The more attention that is paid to the installation, the more order is reflected in the video and audio. The idea is that we create the finer details of our experience through the act of being attentive. The more we observe our environment, the more we discover, and the result of this active process is the creation of the rich details of our experience. The project uses neuro feedback supplied through interaction between the user and a BCI (brain-computer interface) device. The mindset (the BCI device) reads your brainwaves and this alters how the installation creates form from static. The more attention is paid, the more pattern is formed; as less attention is paid, the pattern breaks back into static. This is intended to form a feedback loop between the user’s attention and the subject of their attention (the projected patterns). The audio-visual aspect of the installation produces pattern, order and detail in direct proportion to the attention that the user is currently paying. If the user is in a state where the mind is freely wandering and not focused on any one thing, the patterns decay into static, bringing the installation back to a state of stasis.
LIDA ABDUL
ليدا عبدول
What We Saw Upon Awakening
In my work, I try to juxtapose the space of politics with the space of reverie, almost absurdity, the space of shelter with that of the desert; in all of this I try to perform the ‘blank spaces’ that are formed when everything is taken away from people. How do we come face to face with ‘nothing’ with ‘emptiness’ where there was something earlier? I was a refugee myself for a few years, moving from one country to another, knowing full well that at every juncture I was a guest who at any moment might to asked to leave. The refugee’s world is a portable one, allowing for easy movement between borders. It is one that can be taken away as easily as it was given: provisionally and with a little anxiety on the part of the host.
Sometimes people say, I am post-identity, post-nation, etc.. I don’t know what this means. For me the most difficult thing is precisely to go past the memory of an event; my works are the forms of my failed attempts to, what others call, transcend. But what? For me art is always a petition for another world , a momentary shattering of what is comfortable so that we become more sophisticated in reclaiming the present. The new wandering souls of the globe, the new global refuseniks —stubborn, weak, persecuted, strong—will continue to make art as long as people believe in easy solutions and closures of the most banal kinds.