balenciaga collaboration
A 25 minute video loop with previously unreleased tracks by DJ Hell, made in collaboration with Balenciaga.

Here is a dramatic tension in his work between the real and the imagined in his use of often-appropriated digital objects to create virtual landscapes, which frequently contain elements – animals, machines, fragments of videogames – that are recognisable from our day to day life. This creates a symbiotic relationship between the digital and the real. In a very real way digital space has now become an intangible reality. The worlds built by Robak have a distinctly cinematic sensibility that hyperbolises the shine and dramatic effects of 3D rendered animation. The aesthetic of his work is supremely important, drawing the viewer into a truly alluring, indulgent and strangely gratifying environment. There is a further challenge to the void between high-art and the worlds of 3D animation and gaming, in the intersection between depiction and simulation. This can be partially attributed to the vernacular of advertising Robak is so proficient at utilising.

Great Chain of Being
FILE FESTIVAL
The great chain of being, an ancient philosophical concept, attempted to explain the structures and relationships of the world as a form of hierarchy or set of strata. This philosophical idea is here expressed in the form of the entities that constitute the contemporary world. The philosophers of the past believed that the structure of the world had at its top a god, and that beneath there were angels, animals, plants, and elements. But this conception of the world, as a result of the changes in civilization and culture, resulted in the elements that constitute the world undergoing a transition and sustaining an unforeseen hierarchy. The works of art depict the contemporary structure in the form of robots, machines, people, animals, and virtual or digital entities. Within virtual systems, these entities undergo a process of creation, arrangement, use, disposal and recycling, through which they emerge and disappear. The work depicts the stories emerging from these processes, against the background of a systemically designed landscape akin to a factory.
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Cloud Face
Humans see figures in clouds: animals, faces and even god. This kind of perception also appears in machine vision. Face-detection algorithms sometimes find faces where there are not any.’Cloud Face’ is a collection of cloud images that are recognized as human faces by a face-detection algorithm. It is a result of machine vision’s error but they often look like faces to human eyes too. Humans, yet, know these are not actual faces. Humans rather imagine faces from the clouds. Here, the error of machines and the imagination of humans meet.

PANGOLIN DRESS

The Pangolin Scales Project demonstrates a 1.024 channel BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) that is able to extract information from the human brain with an unprecedented resolution. The extracted information is used to control the Pangolin Scale Dress interactively into 64 outputs.The dress is also inspired by the pangolin, cute, harmless animals sometimes known as scaly anteaters. They have large, protective keratin scales covering their skin (they are the only known mammals with this feature) and live in hollow trees or burrows.As such, Pangolins and considered an endangered species and some have theorized that the recent coronavirus may have emerged from the consumption of pangolin meat.Wipprecht’s main challenge in the project’s development was to not overload the dress with additional weight. She teamed up 3D printing experts Shapeways and Igor Knezevic in order to create an ‘exo-skeleton’ like dress-frame (3mm) that was light enough to be worn but sturdy enough to hold all the mechanics in place

GoatMan

I tried to become a goat to escape the angst inherent in being a human. The project became an exploration of how close modern technology can take us to fulfilling an ancient human dream: to take on characteristics from other animals. But instead of the ferocity of a bear, or the perspective of a bird, the characteristic most useful in modern life is something else; being present in the moment perhaps.

Anyway I ended up in the Alps, on four legs, at a goat farm, with a prosthetic rumen strapped to my chest, eating grass, and becoming a goat.

Princess of Parallelograms
What will happen when our imagination itself is externalized in machines? Artificial intelligence constructs its own world-truth that is beyond our sensory perception. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) use algorithms to synthesize and generate images in a completely new way. These images have almost uncanny aesthetic characteristics, seeming to emerge from an ocean of data, a kind of pixel soup. Rather as if we were observing the emergence of artificial “thought.” The machine learns to understand the “essence” of a thing, be it an animal, the face of a celebrity or a body of text. It is then able to generate new images of this thing, including faces of celebrities who do not exist, mutant animals, or new texts. Eventually, AI will be capable of instantaneously and dynamically emulating all representations. The era of the optical machine and the capture of reality will then be at an end, supplanted by the era of machines that generate their own reality.

SONNTAG aus LICHT

Sonntag aus Licht takes as its subject our solar system and the relationships of all the planets that orbit the sun. In this opera, the earth and life on it is represented as the result of the union of light and water. These two elements are presented in the first scene, and the rest of the opera celebrates the evolution of life, of plants, animals, humans, and above all this the planets, moons, and heavenly constellations. The opera has a pronounced ritualistic and meditative character, with very little that can be described as dramatic action.

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

FLORA 2

The animation in FLORA is generated by overlapping sine waves that travel through a string of lines. This wave principle often appears in nature when energy is transmitted through a medium like water, air or simply a rope. It can also be observed in the locomotion of animals and human-beings, in which kinetic energy is transmitted successively through joints.
The FLORA algorithm of is based on the discovery that a simple system of rotating lines can create endless variations of abstract shapes – ranging from curved harmonious lines to edgy and chaotic patterns. The resulting aesthetics combine computational accuracy with an organic playfulness, and tend to trigger diverse associations in the mind of the viewer.

FILE FESTIVAL
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The Trophy (Animals have no religion)
This work is inspired by Raden Ayu Kartini (21 April 1879 – 17 September 1904), a pioneer in the area of the emancipation of women and education in Indonesia. Through letters she shared her thoughts about the problems of her society which seems still topical nowadays. She expressed the view that the world would be more peaceful if there was no religion to provide reasons for disagreements, discord and offence.

Sportswoman installation
Born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1961, Kulik graduated from Kiev Art School in 1979. In 1982 he went on to graduate from the Geological Survey College and moved to Moscow in 1988. In Moscow, while developing his own artistic practice, Kulik also became the art-director at the renowned Regina Gallery between 1990-93. In 1996 he was awarded a scholarship by the Berlin Senate and was given the medal ‘The Worthy’ by the Russian Art Academy in 2005. Now an infamous international artist, he won the III Annual Russian National Award for contemporary visual arts Innovation 2007 and the Kandinsky Prize in London at the Louise Blouin Foundation in 2009. In 2009 Kulik came officer of the Order of Arts and Letters, France. A performance artist, sculpture and curator, Oleg Kulik is best known for his work with animals, particularly his violent performances where he assumes the character of a dog. Channeling specific cultural discontent through his performances at a time of rapid change in Russia, Kulik’s work has continued to provoke and unsettle audiences globally.

Betweenness
“Installed in the main gallery is Betweenness (all works 2018), a video montage that sorts the natural world, including a few humans, into simple, line-drawn motion graphics. There’s a frolicsome quality to the animations: when the animals move, grow, shift, and, quite literally, evolve, the scenes appear to follow a playful intuition, rather than exhibiting any scientific fact.”more…

Jacobson’s Fabulous Olfactometer
Created by Susanna Hertrich, Jacobson’s Fabulous Olfactometer (JFO) is a sensorial prosthesis that mimics mammalian ‘flehmen’ when air pollution levels are high. The prosthetic is designed around a new human sense modeled after a mammalian sense organ called the vomeronasal or “Jacobson’s” organ. This olfactory sense organ enables certain animals to sense odourless chemicals. When a mammal senses chemicals, it lifts its upper lip to expose this organ. This behaviour is called ‘flehmen’ (wikipedia).Two air chemical sensors located at the top part of the prosthetic register small particles (smoke) and CO2 levels. This data is fed into an Arduino board. When air pollution levels are registered as ‘high’, two stepper motors on either side of the head set exaggerated bone gears in motion and the wearer’s lip is slowly pulled upwards. Thus, JFO enables its wearer to ‘sense’ airborne chemicals and modifies his/her face similar to mammalian flehmen.Sensing and data processing is achieved using an Arduino with a Smoke detector (fine particles) & a Co2 sensor. The device also includes Adafruit stepper motor shield, two stepper motors and a custom designed gears carved from camel bone.

manimals

Der alte chinesische Tierkreis besteht aus einem Zyklus von zwölf Tierzeichen, die mit Geburtsjahren verbunden sind. Sie sind: Ratte, Ochse, Tiger, Kaninchen, Drache, Schlange, Pferd, Schaf, Affe, Hahn, Hund und Eber. Es wird angenommen, dass eine Person Verhaltens- und Persönlichkeitsmerkmale, manchmal sogar körperliche Merkmale, in Bezug auf das Tierjahr aufweist, in dem sie geboren wurde. In den zwölf Porträts der Serie „Manimals“ interpretiert der Künstler Daniel Lee den chinesischen Tierkreis in der Gegenwart Begriffe durch Computermanipulation von fotografischen Bildern. Jedes Porträt repräsentiert das Tierzeichen dieser Person. Die “Manimals” -Serie besteht aus zwölf 24 “x 30” -Farbfotos. Die Originalbilder wurden mit Ektachrome in einer Mittelformatkamera fotografiert, dann digital konvertiert und mit der Adobe Photoshop-Software auf einem Macintosh Quadra 950 neu angeordnet.

孙原和彭禹
ВС Юань и Пэн Юй
Old persons home
Sun was born in Beijing and Peng in Heilongjiang. Sun and Peng are contemporary conceptual artists whose work has a reputation for being confrontational – they have previously used live animals in their installations. As their contribution to the 2005 Venice Biennale, the duo invited Chinese farmer Du Wenda to present his home-made UFO at the Chinese Pavilion. They won the Contemporary Chinese Art Award in 2001. Their 2009 solo exhibition, “Freedom”, at Tang Contemporary in Beijing, was seen by some critics as a memorial to the Tiananmen Square incident. The installation featured a large fire-hose hooked to a chain that erupted water spray at a distance of 120 meters.