highlike

ALWIN NIKOLAIS

Noumenon

A truly universal artist, the American Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993) devoted his life to a radical form of staged art he called “dance theater.” Inspired (perhaps unconsciously) by the experiments of Bauhaus members such as Oskar Schlemmer and László Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s, Nikolais devised a style of abstract dance that encompassed costumes, stage sets, choreography, lighting, and music, all under his control. Also in 1963, Nikolais met analog synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog, who was at the time just starting his business in New York. He was fascinated by the sounds of Moog’s machines, and with the money provided by a a Guggenheim Fellowship, Nikolais bought the first ever commercially produced Moog synthesizer. It was the primary sound-source for all of Nikolais’ scores from 1963 to 1975. The instrument is now housed at the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

THOMAS LEBRUN

Lied ballet

“Lied, a word of German origin and gender neutral, which represents classical music sung about strophic poem, and Ballet. Lieder’s romantic themes are transformed into movement, creating choreographic writing that begins with mime and ends with abstraction. In the end, everything comes together in a great chorus challenging genres and categories, fundamentally expressing the artist’s confidence in the dancing body”. Marcia Peltier

ROBERT HENKE


光正在使用高精度激光在屏幕上绘制连续的抽象形,并与声音完美同步。强烈的光线与完全的黑暗形成对比,缓慢的动作和微小细节的演化与强而有力的手势一样重要。结果既是古朴的又是未来主义的。新兴的模式为许多可能的解释留出了空间。象形文字,一种未知语言的符,建筑图纸,数据点之间的连接或类似Tron的早期视频游戏放大了1000

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Light

Light is using high-precision lasers to draw continuous abstract shapes on the screen, perfectly synchronized with the sound. Intense light contrasts with total darkness, and slow movements and the evolution of small details are as important as strong gestures. The result is both quaint and futuristic. Emerging models leave room for many possible explanations. Hieroglyphs, symbols in an unknown language, architectural drawings, connections between data points, or early video games like Tron are magnified 1,000 times.

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Lumière

La lumière utilise des lasers de haute précision pour dessiner des formes abstraites continues sur l’écran, parfaitement synchronisées avec le son. La lumière forte contraste avec l’obscurité totale, le ralenti et l’évolution des petits détails sont aussi importants que les gestes forts. Le résultat est à la fois pittoresque et futuriste. Les modèles émergents laissent place à de nombreuses explications possibles. Les hiéroglyphes, les symboles dans une langue inconnue, les dessins d’architecture, les connexions entre les points de données ou les premiers jeux vidéo comme Tron sont agrandis 1 000 fois.

marnix de nijs

PIVOT POINT – ICHIHARA
‘Pivot Point – Ichihara’ is an interactive site-specific installation. Standing on a controller pod you navigate over and through a 3D terrain where gravity seems to have disappeared, you gradually become tele-present in a parallel projected space by exploring a mediated version of the venue, it’s direct surroundings and the Ichihara region. A cinematic journey to a fascinating point cloud realm, precise in details but simultaneously abstract and dreamlike.The kidney shaped interface is covered with capacitive sensors and mounted on a pole, touching this interface right, left, up or down aims the virtual camera accordingly. When you release the navigation pole the virtual camera automatically starts spiralling back to the initial starting point your journey and temporary centre of the universe, the Asohbara Art House.

Dmitry & Elena Kawarga

Down with Wrestlers with Systems and Mental Nonadapters!
file festival

“The work of Dmitry Kawarga normally deals a lot with ideas of biomorphism. A term and a small branch in art history that was very much influenced and formed by Hans Arp. Not just remaining in biomorphism, like Arp, Kawarga adds a whole new social and urban dimension to the works that make us think of terms like ”rhizome” developed by the post-structuralists Deleuze and Guattari. For Dada Moscow, Kawarga invented a totally new work, which seems to be quite different from the abstract biomorph works he normally does. It is an interactive installation that brings up a very powerful sense of the machine and technology fascination the society before the WWI had and it also shows the brutal consequence this fascination had. Kawarga creates a machine that brings the ideas of social models totally to the absurd.” Adrian Notz

Mark Dorf

Contours
Contours proposes a distancing through de-familiarization of what has become concrete by way of image and language. Active contradiction and abstraction are central to the works through a mixture of variables often seen in opposition or as dis-harmonious. Through the presentation of puzzling symbols, both familiar and skewed, a legible illegibility is produced: information being transmitted, but the immediate read obscured and hidden from sight. Through this, current sight-lines are made visible allowing for critical reflection, while simultaneously revealing the flexibility of language and image in order to engender the possibility of alternative understandings of the world: a crucial consideration in context of our contemporary global social and political shifts.
video

Luke Jerram

Glass Microbiology
Avian Influenza, commonly known as Bird Flu, refers to “influenza caused by viruses adapted to birds”. The first version, made in 2005, is one of Jerram’s earliest Glass Microbiology artworks. As such it is more abstract than the later 2012 artwork. In 2009, The Mori Museum, Tokyo exhibited this work in an exhibition called Medicine and Art, with works from Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Marc Quinn and Leonardo da Vinci.

guillaume marmin & frederic marolleau

HARA
Guillaume marmin and Frédéric marolleau convey spiritual essence through visual abstraction in ‘hara’, an audio-visual collaboration for the 7th chromatic festival in montréal, québec. ‘Hara’, the anatomical home of energy according to japanese custom, is explored by various means. Music and light move through states of tension and calm, creating for each visitor a unique contemplative experience.

Bryant Nichols

Forms II
Mount Audio

Forms is a collaborative film series devised by London based, creative sound studio Mount Audio. The ongoing project sees Mount team up with leading visual artists each month to create unique audiovisual works.Forms II showcases the vibrant motion work of LA based designer Bryant Nichols. The artists’s warped figures bend and contort, twisting around one another to form abstract human structures.Inspired by Bryant’s alternate reality, Mount have created an entirely synthesised soundtrack layering rich, modulating textures to create an unsettling atmosphere. The effect is hypnotic yet disorientating.

Albert Omoss

Undercurrents

“Mostly the fact that I AM a human body. We can live our lives buried in complex abstraction, or in virtual reality, but you can’t separate your consciousness from the fragility of your physical form. Many of my own fears and anxieties revolve around that realization. I would probably say my pieces involving the human body are a kind of self prescribed therapy to deal with my neurosis”.Albert Omoss

Ouchhh

SAY SUPERSTRINGS

Ouchhh will take inspiration from the notes that exist in the universe while micro-strings vibrate (Subatomic Particles) in real time and define the melodies created by the notes as “Matter” and symphonies of these melodies as “Universe”. With dastrio, Ouchhh will take 11 dimensions in abstract directions in super grade gravity theory and move them beyond space in real time. The dimensions captured intuitively in living space will constantly change and turn into reality.

dastrio:
Bernhard Metz – Violin
Manuel Von Der Nahmer – Violoncello
Suyang Kim – Piano

Ouchhh

H OM E OMOR PH ISM

Dome A/V Performance

A homeomorphism, also called a continuous transformation, is an equivalence relation and
one-to-one correspondence between points in two geometric figures or topological spaces
that is continuous in both directions.Many forms observed in nature can be related to geometry. In accordance with classical geometry,the shapes that found in nature are consisting of lines and planes, circles and spheres,
triangles and cones. These shapes actually are a powerful abstraction of reality, so we need primitive objects to give a form and understand the complex structure that exists in nature.

 

Diana Thater

Abyss of Light

Abyss of Light is divided into three screens and into three acts, the traditional structure of classic narrative film. In the first act, all the images synchronize to form a single panorama of Bryce Canyon in Utah. In the second, the screens break away from one another into three parallel sequences wherein each projection shows the same one hundred images at different speeds. In the third, all three images synchronize once again to form a single wrapping panorama of Death Valley, California. The work is an ode to the American western, one of my favorite film genres. Despite my admiration, however, my desire is not to imitate westerns. Instead, I set up an abstraction in opposition to the idea of narrative, something that can be seen in all of my work. In Abyss of Light, continuous disruptions of the American landscape document my refusal to see the land as backdrop for man’s heroic conquering of the wild; instead I see it as a foreground, a subject to be contemplated for itself and for which wildness is a state of grace.

Mike Pelletier

FILE FESTIVAL
Performance: Capture Part 2

In “Performance Capture: Part 2”, open source motion capture sequences are mapped onto stock low-polygonal unsmoothed 3D characters. Bodies inflate, deflate and oscillate between states, while movements shift and repeat in offset patterns as information transfers from one body to the next. In the animation, what should be used to record, simulate and create perfect virtual realities instead collapses into the uncanny, the abstract and the unreal.

Cocolab

White Canvas
“CoCoLab engages in the area of programming languages. We provide frameworks for the analysis and the transformation of programs. Our technology is based on know-how from compiler construction. The frameworks contain parsers and preprocessors which convert source code to abstract syntax trees and symbol tables. These data structures are the foundation of program analysis and program transformation.”

EJ Hill

A Monumental Offering of Potential Energy
Hill’s installation and performance, A Monumental Offering of Potential Energy (2016), places him atop a plywood platform embedded in the sculpture, which resembles a classic wooden roller coaster. Embodying the abstracted vehicle for which the track is laid, Hill’s physical presence in the work is undeniable and a central part of a 512-hour long performance that runs the course of the exhibition.

Michael Manning

迈克尔·曼宁
Most known for his series Phone Arts and Microsoft Store Paintings, these works explore the boundaries and limitations of stock image making software like Microsoft Paint. Manning uses these technologies to create his digital works, that are Abstract Expressionist in nature but persistent in their idiosyncratic Manning aesthetic. While these works begin as JPEGS, they are then printed onto canvas and brushed with a clear acrylic for texture, able to transcend the screen into the three dimensional gallery.

ANDREAS LUTZ

FILE SAO PAULO 2017
HYPERGRADIENT
“Hypergradient” analyzes the different interpretations of an impartial consistent statement. The installation repeatedly changes between two states: the “statement” state and the “interpretation” state. The statement state displays a sequence of characters of a distinct semiotic system, which can be described as a deputy for all known semiotic systems. These single characters are grouped to strings and then form string orders into an abstract proposition.

Jordan Wolfson

요르단 울프슨
ジョーダンウォルフソン
Colored sculpture
“Colored Sculpture” is a work in animatronic that becomes a mechanical theatre, with its spectacular performance brings us reflections on a dark past that we want to reject.“With a highly polished appearance, the work is suspended with heavy chains from a large mechanized gantry, programmed to choreograph his movements. The sheer physicality of the installation, which fills the entire space of the gallery and includes the work being hoisted and thrown hard on the floor, viscerally obscures the distinction between figuration and abstraction, in addition to promoting the formal and narrative possibilities of sculpture. “

Cod.Act

振り子の合唱団
Pendulum Choir

Pendulum Choir is an original choral piece for 9 A Cappella voices and 18 hydraulic jacks. The choir stands on tilting platforms, constituting a living, sonorous body. That body expresses itself through various physical states. Its plasticity varies at the mercy of its sonority. It varies between abstract sounds, repetitive sounds, and lyrical or narrative sounds. The bodies of the singers and their voices play with and against gravity. They brush and avoid each other creating subtle vocal polyphonies. Or, supported by electronic sounds, they break their cohesion and burst into lyrical flight or fold up into an obsessional and dark ritual. The organ travels from life to death in a robotic allegory where the technological complexity and the lyricism of the moving bodies combine into a work with Promethean accents.

KURT HENTSCHLAGER

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.

GREYWORLD

The Source
The Source, an eight storey high kinetic sculpture, is the new symbol for the London Stock Exchange. Every morning, millions of viewers around the world will watch the installation come to life, signifying the opening of the London Markets.
“The Source is formed from a grid of cables arranged in a square, 162 cables in all, reaching eight stories to the glass roof. Nine spheres are mounted on each cable and are free to move independently up and down its length. In essence the spheres act like animated pixels, able to model any shape in three dimensions a fluid, dynamic, three dimensional television.Visitors to the atrium are greeted by this motion: its particles rising and falling, generating an infinite range of figurative and abstract shapes that rise, dissolve and reform at different heights in the atrium. The shape of the sun rising on a new day of trade, the names and positions of currently traded stocks, the DNA helix at the center of life formed by the work, and floating in the 32m void of the atrium.”

mike winkelmann (Beeple)

迈克·温克尔曼
Майк Винкельман
minor peon

La cantidad no es lo mismo que la calidad, ya lo sabemos, pero el diseñador gráfico estadounidense Mike Winkelmann (alias Beeple) ha logrado hacer coincidir las dos cosas. Beeple, con su carácter autocrítico, decidió que la mejor manera de mejorar su talento artístico era completar una obra completa en un día, todos los días. Así nació el proyecto Everydays, que ya se encuentra en su octavo año consecutivo, y en 2015 la ciencia ficción es la principal inspiración. Cada año Beeple utiliza un medio diferente para crear sus obras artísticas, y este año el artista ha utilizado herramientas digitales como Cinema 4D, Octane Renderer, Z-Brush y X-Particles. En menos de 24 horas, Beeple es capaz de crear una ilustración digital hiperrealista que parece haber tardado mucho más en hacer. Los increíbles resultados resaltan paisajes y escenarios futuristas que parecen sacados de una película de ciencia ficción, donde hay un claro contraste entre la pequeñez de la figura humana (a veces casi imperceptible) y el aparato tecnológico que tiene frente a él. Otras obras, en cambio, representan formas más abstractas, que, sin embargo, nunca se apartan de su carácter futurista. Profundamente detallada y minuciosa, parece imposible que cada una de estas obras se cree y complete en un día, pero lo cierto es que la estadounidense El artista ya está en el 3030 de trabajo consecutivo y no parece querer frenar el ritmo. Es decir, es un artista reacio a la dilación.

Mathieu Merlet Briand

Google red marble

Digital native et issu d’une famille d’agriculteur, Mathieu s’intéresse à l’influence des technologies sur la perception de notre réalité contemporaine. Il s’interroge sur la matérialité d’internet et ses représentations. Il cherche à traduire l’expérience du web surfer, l’imagination de l’internaute face à ce flux infini d’informations.
Dans ses projets se dégagent de façon récurrente des questions environnementales. Inspiré par la lecture de l’essai philosophique d’Ariel Kyrou « Google God » de 2010, il interroge cette image presque divine associés aux géants du web.
Il utilise comme médium les big datas. Via ses algorithmes qu’il développe, par des processus de recyclage et des analogies à la nature, il façonne des flux de données afin d’en créer des matérialisations tangibles. Abstractions, reliques, cristallisations ou fragment du World Wide Web, son travail protéiforme se matérialise principalement en sculptures et installations multimédia.
Influencé autant par l’histoire de l’abstraction, les artistes du Land Art, que par les Nouveaux Réalistes, ses créations sont associées au Culture Digital, au mouvement Post-Digital ou Post-Internet Art.

 

ANDREW HIERONYMI

move
File Festival
MOVE is an interactive installation divided into six distinct modules, JUMP, AVOID, CHASE, THROW, HIDE and COLLECT. Each module offers a single-user interaction, based on a verb corresponding to the action the participant is invited to perform. Each verb corresponds to a common procedure acted out by avatars during videogame play. Each module offers an interaction with abstracted shapes (circles, rectangles) behaving according to simplified rules of physics (collision, friction). Each module is color-coded with consistency, where the color red is used for the graphical element that poses the core challenge. Each module increases difficulty in a similar linear manner.What makes MOVE unusual is that unlike most computer vision or sensor based games like Eye-toy or Dance Dance Revolution, the participant IS the avatar, he is not seeing a representation of herself or an indirect result of her actions on a separate screen but instead interacts directly with the projected graphical constituents of the game. Because those graphical elements are non-representational they do not allow for a projection in a fictional space. The combination of abstracted shapes and direct interaction reinforces in the player the focus on the action itself (JUMP, AVOID, CHASE, THROW, HIDE or COLLECT) instead of an ulterior goal.

Dmitry Zakharov

Black Liquid
FILE FESTIVAL
ANIMA+

Black Liquid is an abstract 3D animation showing different aggregation states. Matter transforming from liquid into solid and shatterly.
The spectator is free to understand the video exclusively as an illustration of physical processes or as an metaphor for the human being. The interpretation of the Video is dedicated by Zakharov to the spectator himself.

NONOTAK STUDIO

DAYDREAM V.02

DAYDREAM is an audiovisual installation that generates space distortions. Relationship between space and time, accelerations, contractions, shifts and metamorphosis have been the lexical field of the project. This installation aimed at establishing a physical connection between the virtual space and the real space, blurring the limits and submerging the audience into a short detachment from reality. Lights generate abstract spaces while sounds define the echoes of virtual spaces. Daydream is an invitation to contemplation. The frontality of the installation leads the visitors to a passive position.

PAKUI HARDWARE

Shapeshifter Heartbreaker

Shapeshifter, Heartbreaker, is an installation on two levels composed of sculptural work and 3D computer animations that are both abstract and figurative. On the first level Pakui Hardware has designed an office desk using the typical components of a trading floor. However, this is not a work station for individuals; it is for computer aided trading, non-human activities which are approximated in the three channel videos atop desks noticeably lacking keyboards and mice. These activities often occur at an exceedingly fast pace, in the blink of an eye, an expression that lends its name to a video installed on the second floor. There, the blinks of a humanoid form have been accelerated to illustrate how fast the body would have to consciously react if it were operating at the speed of decision making that resulted in the stock market’s ‘flash crash’ of 2010.

pakui hardware

Shapeshifter, Heartbreaker

Shapeshifter, Heartbreaker, is an installation on two levels composed of sculptural work and 3D computer animations that are both abstract and figurative. On the first level Pakui Hardware has designed an office desk using the typical components of a trading floor. However, this is not a work station for individuals; it is for computer aided trading, non-human activities which are approximated in the three channel videos atop desks noticeably lacking keyboards and mice. These activities often occur at an exceedingly fast pace, in the blink of an eye, an expression that lends its name to a video installed on the second floor. There, the blinks of a humanoid form have been accelerated to illustrate how fast the body would have to consciously react if it were operating at the speed of decision making that resulted in the stock market’s ‘flash crash’ of 2010.
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Chris Klapper & Patrick Gallagher

Symphony in D Minor

‘Symphony in D Minor’ is an interactive sound and video installation on an epic scale. A thunderstorm contained within a series of large hand cast resin sculptures, each individual form is a unique instrument hanging from the ceiling. Suspended just within reach and activated by touch, the viewer sets the symphony in motion by pushing the forms through the air to trigger the various sound elements of the storm. Sensors relay individual recordings of thunder, lightning, wind and rain with alternating intensities to a full-scale sound system. Acting as both conductor and musician, the viewer creates an evolving composition out of atmospheric sounds, forging an environment that envelops the audience. Housed within each piece are 2 video projectors employing mapping software to evenly fill the surface of the forms. Like giant illuminated pendulums each sculpture radiates video projections that in their dormant state display abstractions of water droplets and slow moving clouds. As the sensors detect movement different ranges initiate more visual elements of the storm. Once activated, the form then shifts to a swirling torrent of clouds.

EELCO BRAND

1.movi
The oeuvre of Eelco Brand belongs to a pictorial tradition in which landscape and genre scenes play a leading role, but goes beyond the traditional forms of this genre. Realistically looking landscapes are combined with abstract components, absurdity and humour are constantly accompanying the artworks of Eelco Brand. The landscapes seem familiar to us, evoking the impression of having seen them before – stereotypes, completely virtually constructed, but of a strong expressive power. But is not any form of visualisation of landscapes constructed, even those we see in our mind’s eye when we imagine a landscape? The artworks of Eelco Brand encourages us to think about our perception of reality.