Bots
FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

Bots presents a computer-controlled society through a series of algorithmically controlled humanoid avatars that appear on physical carpets using augmented reality (AR). Real-time performances synthesize human behavioral patterns into a formalized digital social study. Omnipresent, combined with our devices and incorporated into virtual environments, the work reminds us of our own digitalized world, in which we are surrounded by invisible bots.

Bio

Giulia Bowinkel (born 1983) and Friedemann Banz (born 1980) live in Berlin and have worked together under the name Banz & Bowinkel since 2009. In 2007 they graduated from the Art Academy with Albert Oehlen and started making art with computers . His work encompasses computer-generated imagery, animation, augmented reality, virtual realities and installations.

Lesson Nº 1 + The Ascension
Glenn Branca has always been a musician positioned halfway between the role of avant-garde composer and that of a rock musician. A pupil and disciple of the masters of American minimalism such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, he has always had to fight against prejudice and fierce criticism. His position was certainly uncomfortable, too academic for rock fans and too “politically incorrect” for academics. In fact, Branca was trying to unhinge all the limits imposed by the rigid schemes of the avant-garde, aware of the fact that those who want to be truly avant-garde should have no limits. John Cage was also able to criticize him, even calling him a fascist ( Luciano Berio also did so for all minimalists) for the excessive rigidity of his compositions, even though he recognized his innovative power. After having created his best known album, The Ascension (1981), a true monument of maximalism played with a classical rock formation (guitars, bass and drums), he tries to approach a different format, the Symphony, as always halfway between rock and academia. Branca will like the experiment and will re-propose it several times in the following decades, to date there are sixteen symphonies (not all recordings are available). Here is how young Branca’s ensemble appeared to the American composer John Adams in one of his first live performances of the First Symphony: “Branca’s event that I listened to at the Japan Center Theater in San Francisco in 1981 was one of his symphonies for guitar . The group didn’t look very different from thousands of other independent or alternative rock bands of the time: guys in jeans and worn t-shirts busy with cables while maintaining that typical distracted expression of rock musicians.

Yoro Park – Site of Reversible Destiny
“The couple first fully explored Reversible Destiny in what is regarded as their seminal gallery piece, “The Mechanism of Meaning,” an ever-evolving manifesto-cum-artwork begun in 1963, comprising 80 panels that they refined and added to over decades, many of them high-concept diagrams and puzzles with instructions and text (“A Mnemonic Device for Forgetting,” “Think One, Say Two”), made primarily of acrylic and mixed media on canvas. In an accompanying précis to the work, which was exhibited at the Guggenheim in 1997, they prescribed “no more irretrievable disappearances” and declared death “old-fashioned.” Critical opinion differs on how seriously the pair, whose work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and Paris’s Centre Pompidou, took the grandiose quest to end death. But if it was intended as metaphor, neither of them ever let on. Indeed, though Arakawa himself died at 73, in 2010, and Gins four years later, at the age of 72, defying death became the defining work of their lives.” Marie Doezema

Float
The Floats – or floating sculptures – that Robert Breer took up producing again at the end of the 1990s, emerged in 1965. The word “float” meaning something floating – a marker, fishing float or buoy – and which also describes those carnival vehicles whose pretend wheels give them the appearance of floating above the tarmac, enabled Robert Breer to apply this principle to works of a new genre. Primary shapes, neutral colours and, for the most recent, an industrial aspect, the Floats were then made with polystyrene, foam, painted plywood, and, more latterly, out of fibreglass. At first glance, these simple structures appear immobile. In fact, they are moving, imperceptibly, within the space they inhabit. Motorised and on mini-rollers – which raise them slightly above ground, giving them an air of weightlessness – they glide unbeknown to the visitor, following random paths that are interrupted by the slightest obstacle that they encounter.

基督教波尔坦斯基
בולטנסקי
クリスチャン·ボルタンスキー
Кристиан Болтански

Homage

R.I.P 1944-2021

Preoccupied with collective memory, mortality, and the passage of time, Christian Boltanski creates paintings, sculptures, films, and mixed-media installations that approach these themes in a range of styles, symbolic to direct. Boltanski often makes metaphorical use of found objects, as in No Man’s Land (2010), an enormous pile of discarded jackets set to the soundtrack of thousands of human heartbeats, suggesting the anonymity, randomness, and inevitability of death. In Monuments (1985), electrical bulbs cast a seemingly bittersweet light on pictures of child holocaust victims. Describing his interest in personal histories, Boltanski has said, “What drives me as an artist is that I think everyone is unique, yet everyone disappears so quickly. […] We hate to see the dead, yet we love them, we appreciate them.”

Cloud Arbor
A 20-foot diameter sphere of fog forms inside a forest of stainless steel poles. High-pressure fog nozzles embedded in the 30-foot tall poles convert water into a cloud that appears and vanishes every few minutes. A collaboration with landscape architect Andi Cochran and the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum. Completed in 2012.

“6 Sided Plane in 5 Masses and 3 Scales with 2 Free Regions
The drawings also clarify the schema underlying the locations of the bored holes in the sculptures. Situated along lines linking vertices at the perimeter of the forms, they recall constellation maps or, as with 8 Sided Plane in 7 Masses and 2 Scales with Free Region (1975/2018), the plans of Romanesque cathedrals. Here, again, the relationship is inverted. The black shapes representing the solid stone columns in the plans echo the shafts of air bored through the steel. The term “Romanesque” appears frequently in Rabinowitch’s titles. Though absent here, the conglomeration of shapes visible in Romanesque church plans, like those of Cluny in France, bear an affinity with the additive sensibility evident in Rabinowitch’s structures. Donald Kuspit has focused attention on the artist’s interest in Northwest Coast traditions, especially the totem pole. Like the totem pole, Rabinowitch’s works manifest a “disrupted continuum,” a whole built out of distinct parts. For me, the presence of the drawings in this exhibition subtly undermined that assertion. The lines along which the bored holes are situated form a network that passes over all (or at least most) of the components in each work, in effect linking them. Though no longer visible in the steel versions, the connective links act as a reminder of this second related principle of organization. Some may see it as a complication, a discrepancy, or be disappointed by the realization, but I think it helps demystify these “new” early sculptures. At the same time, the proximity of the studies by no means diminished the deep-rooted and intriguing complexity of Rabinowitch’s sculptural work.”John Gayer

マイケル·クラーク·カンパニー
Come, been and gone

Ballet meets punk, and neither comes out the same. In its highly anticipated first visit to Chicago, the electrifying Michael Clark Company provocatively pays homage to the decadence and unbridled fun of 1970s club culture. British dance iconoclast Michael Clark sets his choreography in come, been and gone to the music of fellow rebel David Bowie, and collaborates with video artist and dance film pioneer Charles Atlas. Clark’s dancers don Bowie-style leather jackets and echo his unique body language, building up to a detonation of jumps and kicks. “Come, been and gone” pulls off a remarkable feat—matching the cool, alien beauty of the singular singer, who makes a cameo appearance here thanks to 1977 film footage of his track “Heroes.”

Point Cloud Old Growth
Forest on Location
In the video work Forest on Location, we see the avatar of the Iranian opera singer Shahram Yazdani walking through a forest. One moment, the forest wraps around him protectively, the next moment the trees crumble away into loose pieces of bark, or melt into a static green mass. At the same time, the forest as a whole floats around in darkness, uprooted. It is a forest without a location, except on our screen. The young man’s avatar appears to be wandering around there aimlessly. It is a wonderland that he exits from towards the end of the video, when his body slips straight through the green wall. This finally breaks the spell of the illusory forest, and everything is revealed to be no more than staged decor. But the forest does exist as a real forest, somewhere. This virtual green world is a digital back-up of Bia?owie?a Forest: the last remaining stretch of primeval low land forest that once covered much of Central Europe. Inspired by what the historian Simon Schama wrote about Bia?owie?a in Landscape and Memory (1995), Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács journeyed to Poland to capture the forest suffused by old-Germanic nostalgia and mythical atmosphere.

Oresteia Opera

Scored for soloists, mixed chorus, children’s chorus and chamber ensemble, Iannis Xenakis’ music for Oresteia has been cited as “ruggedly dissonant” since its 1987 première in Sicily. A wooden-planked stage is empty save three platforms, one each for the chamber players and percussion, another for a drummer on a separate perch. On a high screen to start, a loop video shows an almost-naked woman stretched out face down in a bathtub who is being hosed down uninterruptedly with water. No forewarning, and the clip changes to a thick forest, a small girl being physically abused by an adult man. While the same video images reappear at the end of the opera, but it’s nebulous soft-edged shapes –mood landscapes as it were – that are the usual backdrop for the 90-minute piece.

朱利安·奥利弗
줄리안 올리버
ג’וליאן אוליבר
ジュリアン・オリバー
Джулиан Оливер
Levelhead
FILE FESTIVAL
LevelHead is a spatial memory game. The game takes its inspiration from the “Philosphical Toys” of 18th/19th century Europe and the memory systems (“memory loci”) of the ancient Greeks. levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears that each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors. In one of these rooms is a character. By tilting the cube, the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the exit. Some doors lead nowhere and will send the character back to the room they started in, a trick designed to challenge the player’s spatial memory. Which doors belong to which rooms? There are three cubes (levels) in all, each of them connected by a single door. Players have as a goal to move the character from room to room, cube to cube, in an attempt to find the final exit door of all three cubes. If this door is found, the character will appear to leave the cube, walk across the table surface and vanish. Then the game starts over.

discrete figures 2019

Human performers meet computer-generated bodies, calculated visualisations of movement meet flitting drones! Artificial intelligence and self-learning machines make this previously unseen palette of movement designs appear, designs that far transcend the boundaries of human articulateness, allowing for a deep glimpse into the abstract world of data processing. The Rhizomatiks Research team, led by Japanese artist, programmer, interaction designer and DJ Daito Manabe, gathers collective power with a number of experts, among them the five ELEVENPLAY dancers of choreographer MIKIKO as well as from coding artist Kyle McDonald. The result is a breathtaking, implemented beautifully, in short: visually stunning.

جيمس توريل
詹姆斯·特瑞尔
ג’יימס טורל
ジェームズ·タレル
설치작품 제임스 터렐
ДЖЕЙМСА ТАРРЕЛЛА
Gard Blue
James Turrell’s pivotal 1968 work Gard Blue represents a transformative period in his career, marking the crucial juncture when Turrell shifted the viewer’s attention to perception and the phenomenon of light rather than an object. Appearing in a large, box-like room constructed within the Central Court, Gard Blue is a projection of light. The clarity of Gard Blue’s presence is held by a single, arresting color.

Bleu Red Yellow
Born in 1956 in Folkstone (England), lives and works in Brussels. Photography, video, sculptures, installations. Ann Veronica Janssens stepped into the public area with her installations, which find their roots in minimalist art. She constructs rooms and sculptures with simple building materials, above all making allowance for all aspects of the light, thus appearing as ephemeral. Clear, geometric forms are a dominant feature of her sculptural work.

We shall see Him as He is
”Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is”. the First Epistle of St John, Chapter 3 verse 2
Tavener converted to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1977.[13] Orthodox theology and liturgical traditions became a major influence on his work. He was particularly drawn to its mysticism, studying and setting to music the writings of Church Fathers and completing a setting of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the principal eucharistic liturgy of the Orthodox Church: this was Tavener’s first directly Orthodox-inspired music

water me
The English Tahliah Debrett Barnett, born on January 16, 1988 and a descendant of Jamaicans and Spaniards, began to gain space in the music scene at the age of 17 as a dancer, appearing in music videos by artists such as Jessie J, Ed Sheeran and Kylie Minogue. Using the stage name of Twigs, in 2012 she released ‘EP1’ on the Bandcamp website, an EP with four tracks.
Due to the existence of another artist with the name Twigs, she changed it to FKA twigs. FKA is an abbreviation for the English expression “Formerly Known As”, which in free translation is “formerly known as”.
In August 2013, Twigs released the video for her first single, “Water Me”, on YouTube.[27] The video was directed by Jesse Kanda.

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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.

The Comedown Human Powered Rollercoaster
The Comedown is reminiscent of the late ’90s Human Powered Rollercoaster that made an appearance at the 1995 Toronto Cycle Messenger World Championships (edited, org text had wrong date), though at a smaller scale. Where the earlier HPR was large enough for two-up racing (video, images) The Comedown is single-file affair.

Your Body Of Work
Transparent sheets of coloured plastic – in either cyan, magenta, or yellow – are suspended from the ceiling to form a maze. Additional colours appear where these hues visually overlap, forming spontaneous compositions that continually change in response to viewers’ movement through the space. ‘Seu corpo da obra’ was inspired by the work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980).

Off-White fw 2019
the new runway
Virgil Abloh’s Fall/Winter 2019 collection featured a number of graphic pieces, including new Off-White™ logos, as well as oversized denim, graffiti-style prints and Gore-Tex pieces. The show — which featured appearances from Offset and Playboi Carti — began with a muted color palette, before a series of eye-catching looks in bright, orange, yellow and green.

الكسندر ماكوين
亚历山大·麦昆
알렉산더 맥퀸
אלכסנדר מקווין
アレキサンダーマックイーン
Александра Маккуина
Android Couture
Presented on the cusp of the new millennium, Alexander McQueen’s Autumn/Winter 1999 collection for famed French fashion house Givenchy captured the new fascination with personalized digital technology in popular culture. At the culmination of the show, two models appeared outfitted in molded Perspex bodices studded with flashing LED lights and glowing leggings patterned like computer chips. The creation of a digital aesthetic and its intimate application to the body—an android-like amalgamation of the physical and digital—anticipated the “wearables” trend and the formation of the digital self. Known for his exquisite tailoring, meticulous detailing, and ambitious collections, McQueen also represented one of the remaining visionaries of haute couture extravagance.

In 1939, the technique came to be known, in the Soviet Union, under the name “Kirlian effect”, in honor of Semyon Davidovich Kirlian, rediscoverer of the same. The method consists of photographing an object with a photographic plate, submitted to high-voltage and high-frequency electric fields, but with low current intensity. The result is the appearance of an aura, or rather, a “luminous halo” around objects, whatever it may be, regardless of whether it is organic or inorganic.

digitalized
“Tron, a cult film from 1982, takes place in two parallel universes: the real and the virtual. Through a laser that converts real people into pixels, the world of Tron appears like a strange foreign world without sun, where androids live surrounded by 3D landscapes. The film has a strong retro character given by the era of production, which coexists with a high-tech nature. Both aspects are the basis of my collection. It consists in androgyn, straight silhouettes out of wool, leather, cotton and lack. Through different techniques I have created cube patterns on the surface of some of the materials. Giving the designs a technical yet minimalist character.”

Anne Ferrer is a sculptor based in Paris, France who makes inflatable, kinetic objects that are either worn on the body or appear free-standing. Since completing her MFA at Yale University in 1988, Ferrer has worked as a painter who places colors in space, playing with versatile and hybrid forms that are inspired by the human, animal, and floral worlds. Air serves as a solution that resolves space and transport issues making each piece seem as if they literally breathe.

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.

フィリップ·ラメット
Филиппа Рамета
Born in 1961, Philippe Ramette is a French conceptual artist who plays with the viewer’s mind. Ramette creates gravity-defying photographs that appear to be digitally manipulated, using cleverly designed weight-bearing structures (or lead weights for the underwater shots), but in fact they are real world settings that were carefully arrangement, in order to achieve these impressive scenes. In Ramette’s surreal photography, surrealism literally invades reality.

تيーカー
팀ر
蒂姆·沃克
טים ווקר
ティム·ウォーカー
팀 워커 워커م ووك
Timothy “Tim” Walker (born in England, 1970) is a British fashion photographer. Tim Walker’s photographs have appeared in Vogue, month by month, for over a decade. Extravagant staging and romantic motifs characterise his style. After concentrating on the photographic still for 15 years, Tim Walker has begun directing short films.

Untitled
Untitled is the most complex of Lee Bul’s series of monsters. It comprises a white central body composed of multiple parts that simultaneously evoke the physical and the technological or cybernetic. Exploding outwards into space from its core are other parts of the form, including an octopus-like head, that appear frozen in space as fragments of the one entity.more…

Paranoid Panopticum

The viewer activates the «Paranoid Panopticum» by entering its small corridor between two «walls». Recorded through the mirrored wall by a video camera, the viewer’s image is projected onto the opposite wall, where it becomes part of a story freely adapted by Alfred Kreijemborg in his play titled «An Echo Play» (1923), based on the Greek myth of Narcissus. Instead of returning the affections of the nymph Echo, the protagonist falls in love with his own reflection. Like with the image of Narcissus on the water, the viewer’s own reflection appears now – and the viewer observes only himself. The Panopticum, the terminus of a circulatory prison complex, is controlled from a watchtower not visible for the prison inmates. Having consciousness controlled here causes in effect the self-control among the prisoners. The paradox in this experience – control and society’s surrendering to its own mechanisms – forms the basis of Maat’s installation. Whether as the observer or observed, the viewer is consistently extradited to the panoptic omnipresence of his own all-pervading reflection.

Contemporary Art Centre in Cordoba
BUILDING FAÇADE WITH AN INTEGRATED LIGHT AND MEDIA INSTALLATION

To transform the façade into a light and media display without fundamentally changing its solid appearance as envisioned by Nieto Sobejano turned out to be the biggest challenge in the project. The façade is accordingly designed to deliver a tactile and solid appearance in the daytime while it turns at night into a unique and dynamic communication wall that reacts very specifically to the architecture. The 100-meter façade consists of 1,319 hexagonal, recessed and pre-fabricated “bowls” on different scales. Each of the bowls serves as a reflector for an integrated artificial light source. The intensity of each lamp can be controlled individually, forming a huge irregular low-resolution grey scale display. The thorough immersion of the “pixel-bowls” – like negative impressions – in the volume of the façade turns the architectural scheme itself into a digital information carrier. During the day, the façade shows a three-dimensional landscape with no sign of being a media facade. Additionally, this tectonically modulated surface topography is characterized by a playful composition of light and shadow that constantly changes with the movement of the sun.

倉俣 史朗
glass chair

Shiro Kuramata’s approach to designing objects reflects the atmosphere of innovation in postwar Japan. By 1970, Kuramata had introduced alternative materials such as acrylic and glass into his furniture, which played on traditional ideas of materiality and form.Transparency, the appearance of weightlessness, and a Minimalist vocabulary quickly became his signature aesthetic. In 1976, Kuramata designed Glass Chair. Its reductivist and planar form reflects his interest in geometry as well as the effect of light as it transforms and illuminates the glass. Kuramata, like many of his Japanese contemporaries, looked to Western culture for inspiration. In particular, the sculptures of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin influenced Kuramata’s furniture designs of the 1970s, such as Glass Chair.

珍妮•霍尔泽
ג’ני הולצר
ジェニー·ホルツァー
제니 홀저
Дженни Хольцер
PROTECT PROTECT centers on Holzer’s work since the 1990s and is the artist’s most comprehensive exhibition in the United States in more than fifteen years. Using language as her medium, Jenny Holzer has created a critically important body of work over the past three decades. Her texts have appeared in nontraditional media such as posters and electronic signs, billboards and T-shirts, and most recently as dematerialized, luminous projections on surfaces as different as crashing ocean waves and the Louvre’s large glass pyramid. Perhaps surprising for those who have followed the work of this artist for many years, her chosen texts recently have been rendered in oil paintings and in dazzling, large-scale electronic sculptures.

Electric Dress
«‹Electric Dress› is a powerful conflation of the tradition of the Japanese komono with modern industrial technology. Prior to her conception of this work, Tanaka had appeared in a larger than-life paper dress that was peeled away layer by layer, not unlike the peeling away of Murakami’s paintings; she was ultimately disrobed to a leotard fitted with blinking lights. Tanaka began to envision ‹Electric Dress› in 1954, when she outlined in a small notebook a remarkably prophetic connection between electrical wiring and the physiological systems that make up the human body. (…) After fabricating the actual sculpture, she costumed herself in it in the tradition of the Japanese marriage ceremony. Hundreds of light bulbs painted in primary colors lit up along the circulatory and nerve pathways of her body.»
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Cénotaphe à Newton

Boullée promoted the idea of making architecture expressive of its purpose, a doctrine that his detractors termed architecture parlante (“talking architecture”), which was an essential element in Beaux-Arts architectural training in the later 19th century. His style was most notably exemplified in his proposal for a cenotaph (a funerary monument celebrating a figure interred elsewhere) for the English scientist Isaac Newton, who 50 years after his death became a symbol of Enlightenment ideas. The building itself was a 150 m (500 ft) tall sphere, taller than the Great Pyramids of Giza, encompassed by two large barriers circled by hundreds of cypress trees. The massive and spheric shape of the building was inspired by Boullée’s own study called “theory of bodies” where he claims that the most beautiful and perfect natural body is the sphere, which is the most prominent element of the Newton Memorial. Though the structure was never built, Boullée had many ink and wash drawings engraved and circulated widely in the professional circles in 1784. The small sarcophagus for Newton is placed at the lower pole of the sphere. The design of the memorial is intended to create the effect of day and night. The night effect occurs when the sarcophagus is illuminated by the sunlight coming through the holes in the vaulting, giving the illusion of stars in the night sky. The day effect is an armillary sphere hanging in the center that gives off a mysterious glow. Thus, the use of light in the building’s design causes the building’s interior to change its appearance.