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.

أوسكار شليمر
奥斯卡·施莱默
אוסקר שלמר
オスカー·シュレンマー
오스카 슐 렘머
Оскар Шлеммер
Triadic Ballet
1-Margarete Hastings, Franz Schömbs, Georg Verden
1970
2-Super 16mm colour film, directed by Helmut Ammann.
Oskar Schlemmer saw the human body as a new artistic medium. He saw ballet and pantomimes as being free from the historical baggage of theater and opera and, therefore, capable of presenting his ideas of choreographed geometry, the man as a dancer, transformed by his costumes, moving in space. He saw the puppet and puppet movement as superior to that of the human, as this emphasized that the average of all art is artificial. This device could be expressed through stylized movements and the abstraction of the human body. Schlemmer saw the modern world being guided by two main currents, the mechanized (man as a machine and body as a mechanism) and the primordial impulse (the depths of creative urgency). He claimed that choreographed geometry offered a synthesis; the Dionysian and emotional origins of dance become rigid and Apollonian in its final form.
3-Bayerisches Junior Ballet München

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

DATA
In “DATA”, SpY offers a reflection on the rapid and widespread inclusion of algorithms in numerous aspects of our lives. In this audio-visual work, digital abstraction is used to explore and interpret how predictive tools operated through algorithms and artificial intelligence are highly beneficial in terms of aspects such as communication, research and medicine, but can also lead us to lose some of our freedoms if they are not used ethically.
Through this immersive audio-visual format, SpY explores new tools such as the holographic fabrics used to give the graphics an amazing sense of weightlessness. A 15-metre high screen made from this fabric was installed in one of Madrid’s smallest streets between the walls of the buildings.

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.

FILE SAO PAULO 2017
LES DISCIPLINES DU RECTANGLE
Inspired by Michel Foucault’s work, Les disciplines du rectangle is a videogame proposition about the nature of rules and norms at the digital age. If society provides models of accomplishment we are supposed to fit inside, then the rectangle is the pure abstraction of this idea. The geometrical shape works as a symbol of the very nature of normativity, blind to individual differences. The rectangle, existing only on the screen, reveals how digital technologies can in some ways become the new location for this normativity and the ambivalent results of their intangible and invisible nature. Besides, the installation offers an occasion to think about the way games can become manipulation tools. The fact that in the end, players act as if they were piloted by the rectangle (an inversion of the traditional relationship between player and avatar) gives an aesthetical highlight to this.

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Inspirado en el trabajo de Michel Foucault, Les disciplines du rectangle es una propuesta de videojuego sobre la naturaleza de las reglas y normas en la era digital. Si la sociedad proporciona modelos de realización en los que se supone que encajamos, entonces el rectángulo es la pura abstracción de esta idea. La forma geométrica funciona como símbolo de la naturaleza misma de la normatividad, ciega a las diferencias individuales. El rectángulo, que existe solo en la pantalla, revela cómo las tecnologías digitales pueden convertirse de alguna manera en la nueva ubicación de esta normatividad y los resultados ambivalentes de su naturaleza intangible e invisible. Además, la instalación ofrece la oportunidad de pensar en cómo los juegos pueden convertirse en herramientas de manipulación. El hecho de que, al final, los jugadores actúen como si fueran piloteados por el rectángulo (una inversión de la relación tradicional entre jugador y avatar) le da un toque estético a esto.

Landscape Paintings
Jardins d’Été by Quayola pays homage to the tradition of french impressionism and the late works of Claude Monet.The second iteration of this series of artworks investigates the ways in which nature is observed, studied and synthesized, becoming a point of departure towards abstration. Quayola recreated similar conditions to the classical impressionist landscape paintings, however he engaged with an extensive technological apparatus to capture the sensitive nuances of reality beyond our senses. Here natural landscapes are observed and analysed through the eye of the machine, and re-purposed through new modes of visual synthesis.

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

Loom
Loom showcases abstract animations developed with data from real-time Google Trends. Popular queries appear momentarily as overlaid text before dissolving into a smoky abstraction. These terms are approached with an accidental lyricism —each word appears and disappears in a trail of saturation. Colors within the animation are determined by the prevalence of a specific topic; the more viral the search is online, the warmer the tones become. Stripped from headlines, graphic imagery, and statistics, each phrase inspires a contemplative experience, a chance for the viewer to ruminate on what is streaming through the collective consciousness at any given time. Loom weaves a social fabric, mixing the transcendental with the banal, to present the spirit of our time in generative motion.

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.

Patterned by Nature
Patterned by Nature was commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences for the newly built Nature Research Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. The exhibit celebrates our abstraction of nature’s infinite complexity into patterns through the scientific process, and through our perceptions. It brings to light the similarity of patterns in our universe, across all scales of space and time.

Antrum
The installation looks like a grotto of the membrane, the surface of which is inhabited by strange creatures. It’s complex structure causes association with living creatures, space objects and architectural constructions. In this frontier word pure mathematical abstractions are mixed with natural shapes, resulting in formation of new entities. Viewers can push the membrane and try to contact with them.

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

Maurice Benayoun and Tobias Klein
Brain Factory Prototype 2
Brain Factory is an installation that allows the audience to give a shape to human abstractions through Brain-Computer Interaction (BCI), and then to convert the resulting form into a physical object. The work examines the human specificity through abstract constructs such as LOVE, FREEDOM, and DESIRE. The project articulates the relationship between thought and matter, concept and object, humans and machine. Brain Factory uses Electroencephalography (EEG) data captured by BCI. As a brain activity is unique, we developed a novel calibration process of the individual data readings and associated emotional responses within a framework of binary outcomes. This is key for a real-time feedback – a biofeedback – between the virtual generative processes and the brain’s associated response.

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.

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.

Glitch art
Finding his own niche between new media arts and conceptualism, Adam Ferriss creates unique digital coding that manipulates, distorts, and engineers images into psychedelic terrains. At times, his technicolor abstractions feel organic despite their technological roots – an ambiguous craft born of the RGB Tricolor separation process and pixel sorting algorithms he so carefully employs. Using these “procedural mechanisms,” Ferriss initiates iterative changes in light and pixel structure of his given source material – creating a literally infinite array of compositional possibilities that grapple with human perception during an era of ubiquitous manufacture.

moving in concert
Moving in Concert imagines a universe where humans, technologies and natural materials coexist to create an abstract set of movement. Inspired by how bodies are sensorially affected by living in a digitalized world, the performance explores a poetics of plasticity, abstraction and imagination.

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. “

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.

but does it float
The Montreal-based artist has been working in the arcane reaches of analog photography for over 14 years. Through obsessive experimentation, she has developed a method entirely her own, combining additive colour theory and what she calls “a really bastardized version of Ansel Adam’s zone system.” Eaton’s relentless inventiveness and exacting practice have made her one of the most successful Canadian artist-photographers working today. She’s represented by galleries in Montreal, LA, and New York, where she exhibits her work by turns on a bi-annual basis. Viewers and collectors are drawn to the unique tensions in Eaton’s work: the austere minimalism coupled with her daring colors; the hyper-abstraction undercut by a current of playfulness; the defiant impenetrability softened by an aura of warmth.

The Mind
The Japanese graphic designer, illustrator, and printmaker Kazumasa Nagai (b. April 20, 1929) began his career in abstraction — in masterpieces of graphic design exploring the discoveries and advances in physics and chemistry that scintillated — and sometimes terrified — the popular imagination in the 1960 and 1970s. Three of his works appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine’s Science Library series.

“Vantongerloo, who ascribes to the abstract language of form after 1917, applies himself to Abstract Art in order to get control of rules by which he develops an interest in geometrical relationships and algebraic formulas. In addition to his artistic practice, Vantongerloo also writes theoretical work about his research. Primarily after the publication of his pamphlet L’Art et son Avenir in 1924, he creates new impulses for geometric abstraction with his writings. In this way, for example, he subjects three neo-plastic works of Piet Mondriaan (1872 – 1944) to an analysis in the French publication Vouloir. In this way he opens up the way for his own ‘mathematical’ abstraction.” Sergio Servellón

His work is known for hard-edge abstraction, fabric constructions, and large paper collages, all exploring complicated color relationships.

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.

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.

Sergio Recabarren est un artiste media et photographe. Son travail explore à partir de l’abstraction des notions de psychédélisme inspirées par des symboles chamaniques et d’art visionnaire.

Infinite Cityscapes
Sack’s work explores architecture as a flexible medium capable of expressing the unique space between realism and abstraction; where interpretation and our ability to create meaning is in flux. Within this space, Sack, furnished with pen and ink, encapsulates both the infinite and infinitesimal. His work invites the eye to explore drawings of the “big picture,” to gaze into a kaleidoscope of histories and to look further into the elemental world of lines and dots.

Мэнди Грир
曼迪·格里尔
Imagined Exotic
“In her works, haunting vignettes of half-told stories are littered with crocheted entrails and vines of thick, cloying mud that evoke a sense of elegant foreboding. They deal with a sense of vague narrative that, through abstraction, finds archetype; her installations whisper of timelessness, of a buried, invisible power that runs below the surface of the world that we cavalierly inhabit. ”

ЯНИС КСЕНАКИС
ヤニス·クセナキス
Stratégie
per due Orchestre e due Direttori
Iannis Xenakis est né en 1922 (ou 1921), à Braïla (Roumanie), au sein d’une famille grecque. Il passe sa jeunesse à Athènes, où il achève des études d’ingénieur civil et s’engage d’abord contre l’occupation allemande, puis contre l’occupation britannique (guerre civile). En 1947, après une terrible blessure et une période de clandestinité, il fuit la Grèce et s’installe en France, où il travaille pendant douze ans avec Le Corbusier, en tant qu’ingénieur, puis en tant qu’architecte (Couvent de la Tourette, Pavillon Philips de l’Expo universelle de Bruxelles de 1958 – où fut donné le Poème électronique de Varèse – célèbre pour ses paraboloïdes hyperboliques). En musique, il suit l’enseignement d’Olivier Messiaen et, dans un premier temps, emprunte une voie bartókienne qui tente de combiner le ressourcement dans la musique populaire avec les conquêtes de l’avant-garde (les Anastenaria, 1953). Puis, il décide de rompre avec cette voie et d’emprunter le chemin de l’« abstraction » qui combine deux éléments : d’une part, des références à la physique et aux mathématiques ; d’autre part, un art de la plastique sonore.

ジェシカ·イートン
杰西卡·伊顿
polytopes
Jessica Eaton’s photographs dissect chemical and optical phenomena, the materiality of film, and the language of light itself. Eaton came to international acclaim through her Cubes for Albers and LeWitt (commonly referred to by the acronym cfaal)—a series of vibrant photographs that deconstruct her studio practice. Like the majority of Eaton’s works, these optically charged images are made by taking multiple in-camera exposures of common studio supplies. Through her abundant use of traditional analog photography practices—such as colour-separation filtering and in-camera masking—Eaton imbues her large-format images with an aesthetic more reminiscent of the paintings and drawings of hard-edge geometric abstraction than the photographs of traditional studio work.

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.

Well bronze age
Melissa Gamwell is an artist and writer based in New York. A recent graduate from the Royal College of Art, she currently works with a focus on abstraction of functional industrial objects, creating one-off pieces primarily in ceramic and metal. In addition to making objects, she researches and writes on her interest in both historical and modern object mythologies, contributing to publications such as Ceramic Review, PIN-UP magazine and Arc magazine.

Choosing first to major in industrial design, Pai was deeply interested in a basic yet comprehensive coursework in three-dimensional design, which was founded on Bauhaus principles and focused on abstraction, visual analysis, and form and structure. After graduation, he was deeply moved by the constructivist work of Theodore Rosjak, a master of welded sculpture, and subsequently worked for two years as his assistant. Constructivism is the most notable tendency in Pai’s early work, and also played an important role in training the artist to comprehend the structures of objects by examining and analyzing them into basic elements.

Flying Stone No.2
Zhan Wang’s most celebrated work to date is his series of “artificial rocks” – stainless steel replicas of the much-revered “scholar’s rocks” traditionally found in Chinese gardens. The mirrored surfaces of these often monumental objects absorb the viewer and its surrounding environment, enticing them to become part of the work, an abstraction and distortion of reality, thus creating a visual interplay between positions of tradition and modernity.

THE MASQUERADE OF THE REAL
“I am a German artist based in Berlin working in the field of photography, video and installations. The main focus of my photographs is identity and the role of the human body within society. Image-generating media like photography, television, and film and their use in advertising and the internet impose increasing demands on the body and subject it to a process of abstraction, while at the same time leading to the emergence of a public opinion, the solidification of images as role models with gender-specific attributes.”

МАТИАС ФАЛДБАККЕН
Matias Faldbakken’s work, a combination of iconophilia and iconophobia, is primarily concerned with the various tensions between proposition and cancellation, aggression and retreat, and language and its abstraction into illegibility or absurdity.

Syphon Solutions
Alisa Baremboym is an American artist based in New York who draws her source from domesticity and the handling of objects that are affiliated to this environment. Blurring the line between photography and other mediums such as sculpture and painting, she creates hybrid objects that investigate, appropriate, and extend critical aspects of materiality, process, abstraction, and pictorial ideas.

Gloria
Oliver Herring’s stunning sculptural portrait Gloria (2004) was a hit at the recent international art fair Art Basel Miami Beach. Created from thousands of fragmented digital chromogenic prints, this lifelike and expressive construction exists at the intersection of photography and sculpture and between realism and abstraction.

Джейсон Миддлбрук
Falling Water
[…] Middlebrook’s work consistently references art-historical traditions, styles, and movements. For instance, his sculptures crafted from hardwood planks, which he began in 2008 after relocating from New York City to Hudson, New York, feature painted abstractions. They are collisions of nature, art-making, and history that exemplify the artist’s approach.

Relational Aesthetics
Bringing painting into three-dimensional space, Stockholder uses everyday objects as building materials, celebrating the potential for color, form, and abstraction to generate meaning in tandem with the environment and surrounding architecture.more…

Waterfall
Sabrina Ratté est une artiste vidéo établie à Montréal. Son travail est caractérisé par la création d’environnements virtuels générés par des signaux électroniques. L’électricité, comme matériel brute, est sculptée, manipulée et altérée numériquement pour renaître en une architecture vibrante et lumineuse. Ses oeuvres se situent à la limite de la science-fiction, à mi-chemin entre l’abstraction et le figuratif, l’utopie et la dystopie, l’architecture et le paysage. Elle travaille avec les divers aspects de la vidéo, tels que l’installation, le GIF animé, l’impression et la performance live.

Pocket Landscape
L’installation est composée de quatre segments de ligne principale qui remplissent la galerie: deux rails de train posés directement sur le sol et deux poteaux électriques connectés au réseau électrique local qui, à leur tour, apportent de l’énergie aux ampoules au sodium – la foudre réelle du exposition. Ces lignes fortes traversent la galerie, dépassent les murs et les plafonds, et évoquent le plan cartésien: les rails et les poteaux jouent le rôle des axes x et y d’un graphe, transfigurant l’espace d’exposition en un cube géométrique, l’aire de l’abstraction mathématique. et la rationalisation.

Tornado Warning
Tornado Warning, draws from the filmmaker’s early memories of the tornado alerts in his childhood town of St Louis, Missouri. The piece contrasts an orderly space of grids and numbers with a chaotic environment of found images cut from old films, news footage, and the Internet. Ordinary objects fly around an empty room, swirling abstractions dominate the walls, and distorted bodies dance over images of radio waves. Seemingly in motion, the space of Tornado Warning appears unruly, alarming, violent and relentless.

ЯКОБ ДАХЛГРЕН
雅各布·达尔格伦
ジェイコブダールグレン
야곱 달 그렌
The Wonderful World Of Abstraction

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.

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.

Abstraction Installation

À l’aide d’outils et de matériaux simples que l’on trouve couramment dans l’atelier d’un peintre, l’artiste Lisa Hamilton construit des images, des sculptures et de courtes vidéos qui interrogent les limites de la perception, la transmission du sens et la relation entre le spectateur et l’objet visuel. Dans des enquêtes récentes, elle engage le langage formel de l’abstraction, la théorie des couleurs et la dynamique psychologique du voir pour examiner le point de rencontre de l’observation et de la participation. Ici, elle propose, est le site critique où la forme produit du contenu. Dans son travail, les expériences de perception, d’enquête intellectuelle, d’émotion et d’invention matérielle convergent pour générer du sens à travers l’expérience du regard. Dans sa recherche d’articulation des idées sous une forme concrète, Hamilton a revigoré et élargi le discours contemporain sur l’abstraction.

Simple Harmonic Motion study #5d

Behind the different incarnations, at the heart of the project lies the concept of creating complexity from simplicity. Through the use of custom software, a number of ‘agents’ are created and assigned a simple behavior. Each follow an extremely simple repetitive pattern of movement and sound. On their own, each agent is relatively monotonous, basic and mechanical. The repetition duration, motion and sound of each agent is precisely tuned such that the collection of all agents moving together, creates a unique, evolving and complex composition – both visually and sonically. The seed of inspiration comes from the motion of pendulums and other fundamental oscillatory phenomena which exhibit simple harmonic motion. The project extracts and amplifies these complex patterns, both through visual abstraction and emphasis; and also through sonifying the phenomena and creating musical patterns driven by the same equations that dictate the behaviour.