The Witness

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

Image activated by augmented reality, where 3D animated subjects and scenarios are integrated into a physical photograph. Inspired by the work of Carl Jung, the image is part of a larger series that explores themes such as identity, introspection and transformation. Through AR, game elements were introduced into the piece, offering virtual content unlockable through interactions.

Bio

Camila Magrane is a Venezuelan-American visual artist known for her augmented reality images, integrating 3D animated scenes and subjects into physical photographs. With experience in video game development and a passion for analog photography, she explores the dialogue between the virtual and physical worlds. Magrane’s images are inspired by surrealist compositions and reference the graphic hyperrealism of contemporary video game design.

Smart Hans

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Max Haarich (Project Smart Hans) – Smart Hans – Germany

The Smart Hans project is a synthetic reincarnation of Clever Hans, a horse that became famous in the early 20th century for apparently answering mathematical questions by tapping its hoof. The interactive installation features an animated horse that can guess any number in its mind through posture recognition. At the same time a fun joke and an illustration of why we worry about artificial intelligence.

Bio

Max Haarich is an artistic researcher, ethicist and consultant focusing on artificial intelligence and web3. He studied communication science at RWTH Aachen and critical thinking at the University of the Underground. After his studies, he researched artificial superintelligence at RWTH Aachen and later worked as a communications manager at Europe’s leading startup hub.

Credits

Team: Anja Borowicz Richardson (UK), Bruce Gilchrist (UK), Akshita Gupta (IND), Max Haarich (Artistic Lead/DE), Martina Huynh (NL), Asad Imtiaz (PAK), Muhammad Qasim Khan (PAK), Adrian Ludwig (DE), Pekka Ollikainen (FI), Raphael Pickl (DE).

Relaxation

FILE 2024 | Interator – Sound Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Iskarioto Dystopian AI Films – Relaxation – Spain

Relaxation is an animated painting that transports you to a surreal natural landscape, hypnotically inviting mental relaxation.

Bio

Iskarioto Dystopian AI Films is an emerging Spanish artist, empowered with cutting-edge AI tools, a fusion of human creativity with machine potential. He is known as a visual alchemist, pixel manipulator, and graphic, dark, dystopian storyteller. Since its premiere in 2022, it has been shown in art galleries around the world, having won the Artistic Award at the AI ​​Film Festival Montpellier 2023.

Credits

Music: Relaxation by NPM

Рене Лалу
gandahar

René Laloux, criou Gandahar, seu último filme de animação. Baseado no romance de Jean-Pierre Andrevon Les Hommes-machines contra Gandahar Esta fascinante animação adulta combina a famosa imaginação de Laloux com a do designer de animação Philippe Caza. “A minha busca começou com um enigma. “Em mil anos, Gandahar foi destruído, e todo o seu povo massacrado. Há mil anos, Gandahar será salvo, e o que não pode ser evitado será.” -Sylvain. Este filme está no planeta Gandahar, onde a paz reina e a pobreza é desconhecida. O estilo de vida utópico é perturbado por relatos de pessoas nas fronteiras periféricas sendo transformadas em pedra. Enviado para investigar, o Príncipe Sylvain (João Shea) cai e é resgatado pelas experiências genéticas deformadas e horrendas que correram mal e deixado para defender-se por si mesmos. Com sua ajuda, Sylvain descobre que a Metamorfose, um cérebro gigante também criado em uma experiência, está tentando destruir Gandahar.
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René Laloux created Gandahar, his last animated film. Based on Jean-Pierre Andrevon’s novel Les Hommes-machines against Gandahar This fascinating adult animation combines Laloux’s famous imagination with that of animation designer Philippe Caza. “My quest began with a riddle. “In a thousand years, Gandahar was destroyed, and all his people slaughtered.

БОХЬЮН ЮН
윤보현
To Reverse Yourself

FILE FESTIVAL

My work poses the question: how does reality becomes exquisitely animated by certain social control systems such as politics, mass media, technology, science, and etc. It is my artistic goal to reveal how human beings are fragile and delicate in these social environments. By living in Korea, Japan and the U.S, I have first-hand experience in diverse social systems and have come to view my life experiences as raw material for my research. With my research in mind, my art utilizes the body as the tool for an intensive investigation of the public and private; examining the relationship between how people understand their body and how this understanding represents themselves in the greater context.
Currently, I am curious about human perception developing parallel with the ever-evolving progression of technological world. Thus, I question technology’s relationship to reality and illusion; asking what is reality? My work takes advantage of illusion to explore and answer this question, and often my artistic materials consist of the body and mirrors. I use mirrors for integrating reality and illusion.

Three Supermarkets
Three Supermarkets is an infinite loop film with a shopping cart riding across multiple coexisting fictional supermarkets. As the first episode of the Phygital Supermarket Trilogy, this film explores the hybrid compositing of the emerging physical and digital media and techniques. The production process of this film uses industrial-grade six-axis Staubli robot arm as shooting equipment, green screen shooting, volumetric video capture, photogrammetry, Cinema 4D Mograph, Redshift shading & rendering, 2D/3D compositing, and other custom build techniques and workflows. Familiar but neglected objects, such as apples and snack bags, were scanned as either static models or animated model sequences from the physical world to the digital space.

super consumers floral

Superconsumers is a response to the luxury consumer products on sale within the department store. Universal Everything created a series of extreme digital-pop-art amplifications of these products, bringing them to life as a diverse, animated parade of characters – from metallic puffer jackets to elaborate jewellery, gastronomical creations to bold floral arrangements.

FILE FESTIVAL
Animated Positions
This work draws reference from 19th century European nationalist paintings and explores the role of art in the portrayal of jingoistic patriotic ideals that have become culturally symbolic in the formation of the nation state.

Halo
In these six animated paintings presented as a single channel video, the artist reenacts situations and motifs from the first-person shooter series Halo and the erotic videogame Dream Stripper. Conceived as a dynamic, virtual collage, HALO shows short stock animation loops of characters dying over and over, with koi, dining chairs, asteroids, guns, flowers, torches, pinball machines, candles, and discarded pillows floating around them, creating a hypnotic motion.

SOL
SOL is a minimalistic environment, leading visitors into the reaches of their perception. The installation builds on loss of control, shifts in awareness and a feeling of dislocation and timelessness. SOL is the third work in an ongoing series of phenomenological environments, after the live performance FEED, 2005 and the installation ZEE, 2008. The all encompassing darkness of SOL is lifted, in intervals and for parts of seconds only, by animated bursts of intensely bright light. Falling back into darkness, visitors experience abundant retinal after-images, that gradually drift away until eventually the next eruption of light is triggered. In the surround sound-scape of SOL, electronic drones mix with swarming field recordings, amidst a sea of infra-bass.

Interstella 5555

Daft Punk’s Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem is a 2003 Japanese-French animated science fiction film and the visual realization of Discovery, the second studio album by Daft Punk. Interstella 5555 tells the story of the abduction of an interstellar pop band. The film was produced by Daft Punk, Cédric Hervet and Emmanuel de Buretel with Toei Animation under the supervision of Leiji Matsumoto. The film has no dialogue and uses minimal sound effects.

cinema full

Morphogenetic Creations
Created by a mathematician, digital artist and Emmy award winning supervisor of computer generated effects – Andy Lomas, Morphogenetic Creations is a collection of works that explore the nature of complex forms that can be produced by digital simulation of growth systems. These pieces start with a simple initial form which is incrementally developed over time by adding iterative layers of complexity to the structure.The aim is to create structures emergently: exploring generic similarities between many different forms in nature rather than recreating any particular organism. In the process he is exploring universal archetypal forms that can come from growth processes rather than top-down externally engineered design.Programmed using C++ with CUDA, the series use a system of growth by deposition: small particles of matter are repeatedly deposited onto a growing structure to build incrementally over time. Rules are used to determine how new particles are created, and how they move before being deposited. Small changes to these rules can have dramatic effects on the final structure, in effect changing the environment in which the form is grown. To create these works, Andy uses the GPU as a compute device rather than as a display device. All the data is held in memory on the GPU and various kernel functions are called to do things like apply forces to the cells, make cells split, and to render the cells using ray-tracing. The simulations and rendering for each of the different animated structures within this piece take about 12 hours to run, Andy explains. By the end of the simulations there are over 50,000,000 cells in each structure.The Cellular Forms use a more biological model, representing a simplified system of cellular growth. Structures are created out of interconnected cells, with rules for the forces between cells, as well as rules for how cells accumulate internal nutrients. When the nutrient level in a cell exceeds a given threshold the cell splits into two, with both the parent and daughter cells reconnecting to their immediate neighbours. Many different complex organic structures are seen to arise from subtle variations on these rules, creating forms with strong reminiscences of plants, corals, internal organs and micro-organisms.

STEVE WILHITE
R.I.P
dancing baby
GIF (JIF)
graphics interchange format

The inventor of the Gif file has revealed that the world has been mispronouncing his creation.
Steve Wilhite, who invented the Gif file in 1987, told the New York Times that the word is pronounced “jif” not “giff”.
“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story,” he said.
The internet has reacted strongly to Wilhite’s claim, pointing to a range of evidence from the White House announcing their allegiance via a note on their Tumblr: “Animated GIFs (Hard ‘G’)”, to simple common consensus.
Others have suggested that the hard ‘G’ relates to the acronym that the word springs from, which stands for Graphical Interface Format.
The Gif has enjoyed a surge of success in the last five years thanks to Buzzfeed-style listings of puppies and kittens and ‘live-giffing’, a form of on-the-spot reporting that had its first major outing during the 2012 presidential debates.
Wilhite may be the parent of the Gif, but most agree that the creation has outgrown its creator.
When even the White House is on the other side of the debate, it seems it might be best if Wilhite concedes defeat with grace.

CYBERDANCE

This net art by Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto offers us a split, fragmented, impossible dance, in a divided, multiplied space. Cyberdance consists of the combination and recombination of elements that represent the different parts of the human body. A mannequin was photographed as a model in different positions. These images were later converted to the animated form, allowing users to combine them in different ways, as well as link them to different dance terms, to the names of postures and positions of classical ballet. On a page divided into frames containing fragments of the mannequin, we can see his head, legs, torso and arms rotating, while allowing us to subdivide each frame by clicking on it, each frame composing an aberrant doll whose fragments dance, silently, independent one from the other. There is no music, no rhythm, no space. It is a digital dance, a dance in which time and space have become a platform.

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.

The Movement of Air

A frontal show for three dancers evolving in an immersive environment made up of images projected, generated and animated live. A show where two impossible ones come together: the body that flies, thanks to suspension devices and the body that fits into the image. An acrobatic and digital choreographic writing which outlines a body language opening onto other relationships to time, space and the world. Beyond the search for technical prowess, it is that of a dreamlike movement and writing through images.

digital sculptures

Motion sculptures for CCTV Documentary Channel is a digital metaphor of phenomenal blinks and moments that life consists of. A visual performance of organic and vital substance, animated using data of actors movements. Dents visualize four different themes. Motion sculpture of steel reflects old Chinese adage that true power is mastering yourself. Youthful energy of dancers evolve into beautiful organic sculpture.

Cocoon
“Cocoon is a 360° x 220° spherical, immersive video installation we designed, directed and produced in house. Cocoon places the participants inside several shells of abstract and figurative architectural spaces, which slowly peel away. Cocoon believes architecture is not static, but is transitory, evolving and animated. Our city is our cocoon.” Factory Fifteen

Eyes
Eyes is an interactive art installation and a series of biometric data artworks with my previous artwork Digiti Sonus. It’s an interactive biometric data art that transforms human’s Iris data into musical sound and 3D animated image. The idea is to allow the audience to explore their own identities through unique visual and sound generated by their iris patterns based on iris recognition and image processing techniques. As a part of the installation, selected distinctive iris images are printed in 3D sculptures, and it replays the sound generated from the iris data and projects 3D converted image images. The audience members can compare their iris-based sonic results with others, and question the “problem of disembodied identities’ in the digital era through the existence of audiovisual representations of individuals.

Interactions of the Abstract Body
With ‘Interactions of the Abstract Body’ McElheny pushed these ideas further, creating a large and varied body of work that looks at how fashion and modernism have intersected and influenced each other, especially through the common language of the body. Crucially, McElheny animated this dynamic with the constant presence of a performer. By combining a continuous flesh-and-blood performance with static sculpture in the same gallery space, a first for White Cube, McElheny radically fractures the distinction between performance and exhibition.

Solar Pink Pong
file festival
Solar Pink Pong” is a hybrid of street and video game. Players of this game can interact with an animated pink sunlight reflection on the street using their bodies and shadows. The device that makes this game possible can be mounted on utility poles or building sides.

Flypast Sunset
“In this series of animated artworks, which are essentially slowed down versions of the series Time in Motion, I invite you to experience the passage of moments across a landscape. Perhaps understanding that even though all moments are transient, all moments are equally worthy of our respect because they are parts of a larger whole. Each Time Loop is made manually. I captured every moment across a sunset or sunrise using a digital camera, and manually stitched these moments into Time Paintings. Finally, different sequential time paintings were put together to create a sense of motion  almost imperceptible in some of the works, in the manner of clouds drifting across a sky.” Fong Qi Wei

Energie!
Thorsten Fleisch creates films that reveal the shapes and patterns of natural forces and phenomena. In this work he reveals what energy in one of its simplest forms looks like in motion. Energie! is a sequence of still images created on light-sensitive photographic paper. The artist exposed dozens of sheets of paper to enormous electrical discharges, each leaving its imprint as a trail of light. Animating these images reveals patterns in their flow of energy, akin to tracing the flow of electricity at each moment of a lightning strike. As the images are photographs created without cameras, they are records of single moments. Accordingly we see dozens of split-second documents animated to reveal the shape and power of energy.

After Deep Blue

ADB is a modular robot designed for tactile interactions with people. It is composed of a chain of prism-shaped robotic modules. Through the modules’ coordinated behavior, the robot writhes, wriggles and twists in response to the presence of skin and force. The robot is animated only when actively engaged by a person, otherwise it is at rest. Stroking, rubbing or grasping ADB results in it pushing back, retreating or occasionally grasping onto a body part, depending on the combination of stimulus. Participants may experience the object at their leisure. They can play with the device, exploring how it feels, and how it responds to their touch.

The Masking Machine
Using a custom wearable computer I can walk around any space wearing the still images now animated by my facial expressions. When seen through the screen hovering in front of my face I wear the images like an avatar, but unlike with the stills on a wall or images online I can reach out from behind the screen to shake hands and talk with viewers.

Organic Cube
GIF
In early 2011 I was exploring the relations of geometry, nature and the human being in a series of 25 pictures that I called ”Fractal Experience”. This is part two – continuing the exploration of geometric shapes, patterns, and fractals with an added element: space-time. This time I’ve worked in 3D and produced a set of animated looping gif’s.
I’ve limited each animation to at most 48 frames, most are around 10-15 frames – to keep the file size small and to maximize the creativity with in these frames.

Ada
File Festival
Similar to Tinguely’s “Méta-Matics”, “ADA” is an artwork with a soul. It acts itself. At Tinguely’s it is sufficient to be an unawarely struggling mechanical being. He took it wryly: the machine produces nothing but its industrial self-destruction. Whereas “ADA”, by Karina Smigla-Bobinski, is a post-industrial “creature“, visitor-animated, creatively acting artist-sculpture, self-forming artwork, resembling a molecular hybrid, such as a one from nanobiotechnology. It develops the same rotating silicon-carbon-hybrids, midget tools, miniature machines able to generate simple structures. “ADA” is much larger, esthetically much more complex, an interactive art-making machine.

Melita
FILE FESTIVAL 2019
A 20’ (minutes) animated real-time VR (Virtual Reality) short film about Anaaya, a brilliant scientist working to find a new planet for humanity while the world that we know dies slowly due to extreme climate change; and Melita, an AI designed to help her on her herculean task. This is the first part of a much bigger tale, that will take us into Melita’s journey to find Aurora, the next cradle for humanity.

NUFONIA MUST FALL
Kid Koala’s celebrated “live animated graphic novel”. Directed by oscar-nominated production designer K.K. Barrett (Her, Lost In Translation, Being John Malkovich). Performed, filmed, edited and scored in real time by a team of 15 performers including puppeteers, cinematographers, a string quartet and Kid Koala on piano/turntables. A romantic story about a robot on the verge of obsolescence.

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.”

Кристофа Сенсена
dead man float
CAVEman 3-D Virtual Patient Is a Holodeck For the Human Body

The virtual-reality rig at the University of Calgary visualizes aspirin’s journey through the body in 3-D. First stop: the stomach and intestines [red], where the drug is absorbed. Next up is the bloodstream [light green] and finally the kidneys [dark green], which flush by-products into the urine
In this image, three stereoscopic projectors mounted on the floor and one on the ceiling display a computer-animated body. Looking through the goggles, researchers can watch its bloodstream turn from white to red as aspirin travels through it. Sensen hopes to develop computer simulations that will model the progression of diseases like Alzheimer’s and diabetes and help scientists quite literally look for cures. Updated to reflect what’s happening inside a real patient, the technology could also help doctors diagnose and treat cancer. “You could stand inside your patient,” Sensen says, “and see how big the tumor is, how to treat it, and what the outcome will be.”

Holoscenes
Lars Jan is a director, media artist and artistic director of Early Morning Opera, a Los Angeles-based art lab specializing in live performance. Along with co-producers MAPP International Productions, Early Morning Opera is currently developing HOLOSCENES, a hybrid of performance, installation and public spectacle featuring a series of rituals gathered from sacred and secular spheres and performed in a triptych of hydraulically-animated, jumbo aquariums.

Mountain Tour 2
Kim Asendorf is a conceptual artist working with digital media incorporating Internet culture and technology. His work ranges from online projects and performances to visual art and installations. He is widely know for the invention of Pixel Sorting, an image altering algorithm he made Open Source, the creation of file formats as work of art or The First Animated GIF Send Into Deep Space.

Рене Лалу
Moebius
Time Masters
Time Masters (Les Maitres du Temps) is a dazzling animated space epic from the director of the cult classic “Fantastic Planet” and the celebrated graphic artist Moebius, best known for his work on Heavy Metal magazine. Jaffar, a hero for hire, finds himself on the adventure of a lifetime as he races across the galaxy to save a young boy from a menacing evil. Can he stop the heartless Masters of Time from turning back the clock and stealing his home planet?

Woos
FILE SAO PAULO 2015
ANIMA+
Our friends at PetPunk in Vilnius, Lithuania have created this surrealistic ride through a digital arboreal world in their short film “Woos”. Designed by Gediminas Å iaulys, animated by Andrius Kirvela, the project was commissioned by Computer Arts Magazine and is featured in (and on the cover of) their recent issue #172. Sound by Huma-Huma.

Лукас Самарас
卢卡斯·萨马拉斯
لوكاس ساماراس
ルーカスサマラス
루카스 사마라스
Chair
Since the 1960s, Lucas Samaras has devoted his art to the evocation of an intensely private, obsessional, sometimes hallucinatory realm. Among the many motifs that occur in his work, the chair is especially prominent. The “Chair Transformation” series has included provocative sculptures executed in a variety of materials including wood, wire mesh, and mirrored glass. Throughout the series, Samaras transforms the ordinary object into a fantastical one, evoking a dreamlike metamorphosis. Here the artist suggests an animated flight of stacked chairs. A deceptively simple form, the sculpture appears from different viewpoints to be upright, leaning back, or springing forward.

Sometimes, no matter how focused you are, you need to step out of the pressure zone and just have fun. That’s precisely what photographer Romain Laurent decided to do when he opted to create an animated portrait of his friends each week. Rather than photographing the stock standard personal portraits you so often see around the web, he decided to experiment with his subjects and animate the bizarre. The result of his work is a series of hilarious and decidedly ludicrous images the traverse the line between nonsensical & strangely hypnotising.

The handmade, digital and animated collages of French artist Matthieu Bourel, currently living and working in Berlin, are based on the power of images and the diversions resulting from various visual combinations. He defines his work as ‘data-ism’, and when mixing elements, he often seeks to evoke a story that, although absent from the known reality, is powerfully present before the viewer and inspires ‘nostalgia for a period in time that never truly existed’.

平田晃久
아키 히사 히라 타
АКИША ХИРАТА
animated knot
Hirata vê a arquitetura como um emaranhado complexo que estabelece o equilíbrio e a ordem entre a arquitetura e a ecologia, à medida que se caminha lado a lado com a natureza e a vida, e se coexiste com o ambiente envolvente. Assim, Hirata advoga que a arquitetura estimula e interage com os sentidos humanos de uma forma positiva e natural. Ele é internacionalmente ativo enquanto arquiteto emergente; encabeça uma nova geração de designers no Japão.

Sculpture bicycle wheel
Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. In a now-signature technique, Kentridge photographs his charcoal drawings and paper collages over time, recording scenes as they evolve. Working without a script or storyboard, he plots out each animated film, preserving every addition and erasure.

KIBLIND MAGAZINE
gif
Stephen’s original use of the GIF format mixes illustration, comics and animation, with no order of preference. His animated comics “Lycéennes” (“schoolgirls”) started to turn heads in 2011 (featured in Vice, Wired, cartoonbrew…)
His compositions include opulent palettes, where sci-fi meets fashion and lifestyle, on a sometimes vulgar, sometimes grandiose mode.

Cliff Hanger

Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher started their collaborative practice in 2002. Trained as a visual artist, Jeff Shore develops the visible sculptures and mechanisms, while Jon Fisher builds the electronics, writes the software, and creates the original soundtracks; for this he uses both digital and analog audio sources. The result of their collaboration is a series of kinetic devices and installations that generate live animated video and musical compositions. Similar to cinema storytelling, the movement in the pieces relate to the accompanying soundtrack or animation, and similar to a theater of automata, the pieces create precise and captivating sequential events. Bridging high and low-tech devices and instruments, the collaborative team creates mechanically activated moments of wonder, explores the relationship between automatism and chance, and comments on the impact of technology interfaces in our lives.

the project is the result of experimenting with a minimalistic shape, low-resolution aesthetics, an animated three-dimensional texture, and RGB LED technology. once works, such as the mona lisa and girl with a pearl earring, are applied to the construct via computer-generated programming, the screen displays them in a constant state of fluctuation and variability.

Stressato – Samurai Serpents
File Festival
Samurai Serpents” resembles Jean-Pierre Gauthier’s drawing machines (such as Marqueurs d’incertitude). Like many of the artist’s creations, the work emphasizes graphic quality and the movement of a line in space. On a large panel covered by an “action painting” (that is reminiscent of the textured and dark surfaces of a Borduas, Soulages or Kline), which looks like a (drawing?) table, cables are activated by an approaching viewer and begin to wiggle all over the place, twisting and intertwining in a surprising way – as though they were actually reacting to a threat. In moving about in this way, these silver lines on a black ground continuously change the “painting’s” composition and transform it into an animated image. Like a musical improvisation, the line’s disorganized movements create sounds that vary each time.

The Boy And The World
Academy Award nomination for Oscars 2016 Animated feature film

Marionettes
FILE FESTIVAL 

“Marionettes” is a seven-minute computer animation about collapse. Marionettes are controlled by strings: if there is no string, they collapse. Nobody animates the body. If nobody animates the body, it will be animated by natural forces. Mass. Gravity. Collision. Randomization. In this animation, the animator does not animate in traditional terms. Thus, we might say it is an anti-animation.
The forces that control the movements of the marionettes are calculated by physical simulation algorithms. Therefore, these movements are strictly mathematical ones. They are dramatic, too. They visualize collapse in its physical and – amazingly enough from puppets animated by machines – psychological sense.

Untitled Kinetic Sculpture #2
The old train station, having itself become a contemporary art museum, presents another kinetic sculpture within the exhibition dedicated to Cory Arcangel: “Untitled Kinetic Sculpture #2”. It is majestic and almost as banal as it is intriguing. Banal because it is composed of two columns of shelves on rollers and intriguing because these literally dance, synchronised in their bending. It takes a bit of time to get used to the work. The time needed to convince oneself that it is not an hallucinatory vision but shelves very much like every day ones, except for the fact that they are not inert. Powered by electricity, they are animated by perpetual undulatory movements that sublimate them while conferring upon them their status as a work of art. Though made of metal, they seem as supple and graceful as dancers and almost fragile, but with a regularity that is entirely robotic.

Future Body

A stiff cyborg, fixed with a glazed and expressionless stare, dips her fingers into an alien-like amniotic fluid. Gravity shifts as droplets reverse upwards, forming a pulsing headpiece that encases her smooth, almost porcelain skull. ‘Future Body’, a new film by Nirma Madhoo, uses CGI and animated 3D modelling to explore technological embodiment, enacting it in a character that transgresses expected gender roles in a newly mechanised system of digital-infused aesthetics.
Set in the clinical, segmented interiors of a simulated hyper-real space, Madhoo’s cyborg is found dressed for battle, in pieces forming exoskeletons, a spinal scorpion’s tail and mantis-like shoes, designed by Iris van Herpen. A collision between her human and technological self is physicalised as she undergoes mitosis, splitting into two and performing a combative dance with her duplicate.
Currently showing in Melbourne in an exhibition titled ‘Fashion Performance: Materiality, Meaning, Media’, alongside work from Hussein Chalayan, BOUDICCA and POSTmatter collaborator Bart Hess, it offers a glimpse into the collapse of gender, species and machine into one another, in turn reimagining the future for fashion design and communication.

Apertures

Baumgartner + Uriu suchten für ihre Apertures-Installation, die im vergangenen Frühjahr in der SCI-Arc Gallery in Los Angeles öffentlich ausgestellt wurde, nach Mutter Natur. Wenn Ihnen die Apertures von B + U bekannt vorkommen, erinnern Sie sich vielleicht an den Housing Tower „Animated Apertures“, der im FRAC Center in Orleans, Frankreich, ausgestellt wurde. Was auch immer die organische Form an Sie erinnert, die Muschelstruktur lässt die Besucher einen Blick auf die fortlaufende Erforschung der architektonischen Biomimik von B + U werfen und wie sie die Grenzen des ökologischen Designs herausfordert.

in transit
Two swift beams of light travel through a room creating infinite shadows on a series of floating white frames. This is In Transit X, a darkened, room-based installation that alludes to an endless void.The dizzying effects of In Transit X place the viewer into a monochromatic man-made space. The fifty-foot-wide animated light installation by artist Hc Gilje was originally made for the Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh in 2012, and recently went on display last month at Kulturkirken Jakob in Oslo. Using block-like frames and light as the mediums, Gilje creates dynamic visual dimensions that lend themselves to a mesmerizing noirish experience.