highlike

Sanja Marusic

Moonflight
The fashion short was inspired by the symbolic abstract forms and geometric shapes of the avant- gardist Triadic ballet. Sanja Marusic simplied bodily shapes by substituting them with cylinders and circles, she made her own costumes and then abstracted the human form even further by incorporating stylised dance movements by filming herself dancing. The result is a surrealist symbiosis of the human body moving through time and space.

doris chase

Circles II
Doris Chase has achieved international stature as a pioneer in the field of video art since she moved from Seattle to New York City in 1972. An artist of remarkable and continuous creativity, Chase now divides her time between her video headquarters in New York and a Seattle studio where she works on new projects in painting and sculpture.Beginning as an innovative painter and sculptor in Seattle in the 1950s, Chase created sculpture that was meant to be touched and manipulated by the viewer. Chase then developed large-scale kinetic sculptures in collaboration with choreographers, and her art was set in motion by dancers. In New York, her majors contribution to the evolution of artists’ video has been her work in videodance. On videotape, dancers and sculpture evolve into luminous abstract forms which represent some of the most sophisticated employments of video technology by an artist of the 1970s. In the 1980s, Chase began working in the nascent genre of video theater. In these productions, she uses the imtimacy of the video screen to achieve a new synthesis of visual and dramatic art. Her video theatre compositions present multicultural and social commentary, utilizing scripts by writers such as Lee Breuer, Thulani Davis, and Jessica Hagedorn in the “Concepts” series. Collaborating with actresses Geralding Page, Ann Jackson, Roberta Wallach, Joan Plowright, and Luise Riner in the “By Herself” series, she focuses on the viewpoints and experiences of older women. Today, coming full circle, Doris Chase in Seattle is exploring a renewed interest in painting and sculpture as well as in the modernist aesthetic she never really ceased pursuing, even during her most adventuresome multimedia years.

QUBIT AI: SurrealismToday.com

The Legend of Ogie

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
SurrealismToday.com – The Legend of Ogie – United States

What worlds exist beyond Einstein’s speed limit? Inspired by Eric Weinstein’s theory of Geometric Unity, the work explores the idea that space-time is like a melody playing over an eight-dimensional universe. Abstract and metamorphic forms transition from organic forms to parastatic patterns, creating a dance of visuals and sounds that merge into an immersive experience of fractal unfolding.

Bio

SurrealismToday.com is an artist collective and educational platform dedicated to the proliferation of surreal and visionary ontologies in contemporary art. The group began as an esoteric cargo cult dedicated to discovering the beautiful, the fantastic, and the transcendent in the pseudo-philosophical landscape of the art world. His methods include searching for gems in the digital world and infusing mystical enchantments into generative diffusion models.

QUBIT AI: Infratonal

Useless Hands

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Infratonal – Useless Hands – France

When our hands become useless, what will we choose to do with them? We can use AI to visualize the unthinkable, the strangely familiar yet indescribable forms and structures. Generative AI could be used as an amplifier of our ability to explore abstraction and surrealism rather than a simple mirror of our usual perceptions.

Bio

Infratonal is an artistic project led by Louk Amidou, a Paris-based multidisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of digital arts, electronic music and interaction design. He uses algorithms to create hybrid visual and sound pieces which aim to be performed by the human gesture as intangible instruments. He questions the artwork’s nature at the age of AI and the relationship between the artist and the algorithm.

Kenny Wong

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.

Fabrice le Nezet

Elasticity
With an urge to constantly explore the intersection between architecture, fashion, and product design, london-based artist Fabrice le Nezet has created ‘Elasticity.’ the work materializes the idea of tension by making the notion of weight and stretch palpable through the use of four massive and abstract metal structures. These components run perpendicularly across the long edges of rectangular voids in the ceiling. by presenting this normal condition, several of the wires bend to support large prisms of concrete that provide a feeling of force and motion. as they drop down to occupy spaces below, movement is emphasized by their strategic orientation below clerestory windows shining light onto the forms. As observers move around the constructs, a contrast is created between the real properties of the materials and the way they are perceived.

Andy Thomas

Audio life forms
Australian artist Andy Thomas specializes in creating ‘audio life forms’: beautiful abstract shapes that react to sounds. In this animated short, he visualizes two recorded bird sounds from the archives of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum.

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.

DANIEL BUREN

دانيال بورين
丹尼尔·布伦
다니엘 뷰렌
ダニエル·ビュラン
ДАНИЭЛЬ БЮРЕН

Daniel Buren a french conceptualist who is well known for his trademark work with stripes is oftentimes referred to as an abstract minimalist.
Challenging the conventional methods of displaying and presenting art, Buren gained notoriety at his first solo exhibition in 1968 when he glued green and white striped materiel to the exterior door of the Apollinaire Gallery in Milan. With a philosophy of reducing art into its more elemental forms while exploring the impact of repetitive motifs, his work with pattern, form and color draws attention to the surrounding environment and architectural framework rather than combating it. Instead of rejecting the environment in which his installations are produced, Buren integrates his art with the space and changes the fundamental nature of the space itself.

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.

Charles Lindsay

CARBON
CARBON merges the aesthetics of space exploration and scientific imaging with the interpretation of abstract symbols. I’m interested in extremophiles, the origins of life on earth, and what forms sentience might assume elsewhere in the universe. Would we recognize it hovering in front of us? What began with a camera-less method I discovered while experimenting with photograms, and drawing, has grown into immersive environments including large stills, video, multi-point sound and inter-active sculptures.

Kimchi and Chips

Line Segments Space
An architectural web of threads subtends a null space. It hangs abstract and undefined, a set of thin positive elements segmenting the dark negative space between. Dynamic imaginary forms are articulated into the physical volume by the material of this thread, and the semi-material of the light. The visual gravity of the filaments occupying the space between. A 2D canvas is reduced from a surface piece into a line segment, but then constructed into another dimension, a volume. Light creates contrast and order on the lines to articulate digital matter. Digital forms inhabit the interconnected boundaries of space, becoming incarnate as visual mass.

Foam Studio

KVADRAT Exploration
R&D for Danish textile company Kvadrat that predominantly revolves around the idea of coating fragments of furniture with fabric rather than falling back on the more commonly seen real world simulation of fabrics. Employing a fluid, almost water-like approach to motion we see abstract furniture fragments emerging from the fabric; its amorphous forms continually re-configuring itself for a graphic, textural delight.

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.

 

Sanja Marusic

Dutch-Croatian photographer Sanja Marušić uses an experimental approach to colour, composition, materials, and manipulations in her work to create dreamlike scenes that are at once cinematic and alienating.She travels the world in her production of these otherworldly images, finding settings and forms that play with our relation to the subconscious, simplifying the bodies of her subjects with geometric shapes, and abstracting the human form even further by incorporating stylised dance movements.Putting places above people, many of Sanja’s photographs are set in wide open futuristic spaces in an attempt to create surreal and alienating visual emotions. She often uses cool and bright colours as well as singular objects and accessories in order to create unique and enigmatic narratives.

Ameen Ul Insan

The Flat Arc
​Intent: Experimenting artistic freedom on data, a road to explore possibilities of telling abstract yet emotional stories not with literature but visuals corresponding to datasets. Method: Generative visual parameters based on World Urbanization Prospects data are governed by real time image/video synthesis, with the help of graphic manipulative software platforms and creative coding.

Greg Dunn

brain art
To capture their strikingly chaotic and spontaneous forms, the neurons in Self Reflected are painted using a technique wherein ink is blown around on a canvas using jets of air. The resulting ink splatters naturally form fractal like neural patterns, and although the artist learns to control the general boundaries of the technique it remains at its heart a chaotic, abstract expressionist process.

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.

CLAUDIA COMTE

HOW TO GROW AND STILL STAY THE SAME SHAPE
If Comte’s sculptures are rooted in the naturalness of biomorphic forms, her mural interventions transform surfaces into optical sequences and infinite graphic signs with a digital age aesthetic. The monochromatic vocabulary that invests all her work brings her visually close to the abstraction of Sol LeWitt, Bridget Riley and even John Armleder, an artist with whom she studied. On the occasion of her exhibition at Castello di Rivoli, Comte has carried out a gigantic mural intervention consisting of eleven individual wall paintings specially designed for the galleries on the third floor of the historic residence. Also inspired by some eighteenth-century decorative motifs present on the ceilings and walls of the main museum building, the work develops repeated modules through space.

Matteo Zamagni

Nature Abstraction

Nature Abstraction is an immersive sensory experience that explores the arcane forms of fractals, mathematical visual representation of natural and biological forms.
The project gives an insight of their aspects through virtual reality, where they appear as three planets: Birth, Communion and Aether; Each accompained with scores designed to facilitate meditative state and relaxation;The audience is guided to explore these planets and dive into their vast complexities as well as observing the contrast between the entirely digital created world inside the VR against the fully analogue created film projected onto the faces of the cube which have been filmed in real life, recreating using analogue visual effects and various chemical elements.

Gerda Scheepers

Body Corporate
Through Scheepers’ methodised application of her materials; painting with pieces of fabric, a pair of scissors and familiar forms, she has created a pathway back to painting through sculptural means. A pair of colourful wall works that resemble soft, unlikely shelves are simultaneously abstract paintings. Similarly ambiguous, another work acts like either a window blind that rolled in a possible pictorial message, or a painting that quit and became a roller blind.

Jennifer Steinkamp

Jennifer Steinkamp uses computer animation to create video projections and immersive installations, dynamic works that explore the relationship between architectural space, motion, and perception. When projected, Steinkamp’s dimensionally modeled images create the illusion of receding space, generating a dialogue with the real space occupied by the viewer. Steinkamp’s imagery ranges from abstract undulating forms to subjects drawn from nature, such as the cascade of flowers in her 2008 series, “It’s a nice day for a white wedding.”

TERRY HAGGERTY

British-born artist Terry Haggerty, who currently lives and works in Berlin, is known for his paintings that express the formalist vocabulary of abstraction in a new way. Light-colored stripes alternate with darker ones to form regular, often horizontal arrangements, which also have a pattern like quality due to their dense structure. The special thing about them is, that Haggerty breaks this linear formation at the edges of the painting by bending the lines in a different direction as the boundaries of the painting would support. His method transforms the structure of the painting into a illusory perception of three-dimensionality within the image. The surface seems to continue beyond+the+boundaries of the picture and reflects the illusion of a third dimension back onto the pictorial motif.

RYAN JOHNSON

Райана Джонсона
pedestrian

Ryan Johnson’s pieces made from found and repurposed materials are very much rooted in traditional figurative sculpture, but he has abstracted the forms, making his work have a weird gestural quality. The drawing and writing he does on the casting tape he uses plays on the idea that it’s usually wrapped around broken limbs, but it also allows him to use it to create another thread of communication within his work. His ‘Pedestrian’ series of figures made out of wood and paint is also really stunning – they look like people zapping between dimensions.

Luiza Kurzyna

Sunset Park
Luiza Kurzyna is a Brooklyn-based artist working on both paper, and immersive sculptural installations. Inspired by relationships within nature, Luiza combines the many ways that living things relate to each other (for example, through touch, mating rituals or gender roles) with elements of fantasy. Growing, bulging and decaying forms give objecthood to emotion and life’s transitions. The fantastic elements are intuitive, abstract; they create a space where the emotional inside can merge with the physical outside.

Julia Dault

Julia Dault is known for richly textured paintings on pleather, silk, and spandex, and for sculptural works fixed to gallery walls with string and knots. Plexiglas, formica, and Everlast boxing wraps—Dault’s materials of choice—lend her sleek abstract sculptures a raw, industrial aesthetic, while they retain a certain naturalness through their rounded organic forms. In her paintings, Dault likewise focuses on depth and materiality by building up colorful layers of paint and vinyl and then scraping parts away.

Chanjoong Kim

Cubrick

The Art Folly Cubrick by Chanjoong Kim is an interactive public space exhibited outside the walls of the Korean National Museum of Contemporary Art. A fusion between bricks and cubic forms, this abstract architecture piece is both artful and interactive.A spatial installation, this bold piece dares to test visual boundaries. A dynamically designed piece, the pavilion provides an intriguing experience for its visitors, showcasing a multitude of materialized textures. From stacked shapes to three-dimensional structural elements, this boldly built environment displays six different surfaces.With an aim to display high art outside of museum walls, The Art Folly Cubrick by Chanjoong Kim is an interactive sculptural piece few will soon forget. Gaining attention for all the right reasons, this spatial sculpture is all about art exploration.

Jeff Carter

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.

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.

JENNIFER STEINKAMP

Street Views

Jennifer Steinkamp uses computer animation to create video projections and immersive installations, dynamic works that explore the relationship between architectural space, motion, and perception. When projected, Steinkamp’s dimensionally modeled images create the illusion of receding space, generating a dialogue with the real space occupied by the viewer. Steinkamp’s imagery ranges from abstract undulating forms to subjects drawn from nature, such as the cascade of flowers in her 2008 series, “It’s a nice day for a white wedding.”

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.

BRIGITTE NIEDERMAIR

女权艺术家 摄影作品
the antidote

Brigitte Niedermair is an artist who expresses herself through photography. At the same time, she is a photographer who ventures deep into the disciplinary challenges of art. This cross-fertilisation between two worlds, an osmosis that she performs with great determination, has become the characteristic feature of all her work. The poetic content of her art has always found ideal form through her great mastery of the medium of photography. But never more so has the compositional balance and iconic component of her work been executed in such a lean and essential manner. They almost dissolve before the eye of the viewer, allowing the work to appear in its most subtle and immaterial dimension. Extending far beyond the subjects they portray, the photographs we see directly communicate Niedermair’s thoughts, feelings and personal inner journey. The concepts emerge with great power and immediacy, making space for themselves within the substance of photography. The abstraction creates figures which are authentic portraits.