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.

Hardwired
FILE FESTIVAL
“Hardwired” consists of around 18,000 LED-lights that symbolize the transfer of knowledge. Individual luminous pixels connect and then disappear. In a process of constant transformation, new patterns, interrelations and complexities emerge.
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Linie II
One second of white rope is traveling through time and space. The white rope is moving at a constant pace along the contours of an imaginary shape, traversing the whole space in several directions and angles. For following that second in the vast space, it requires the viewer to look up while moving his whole head. While passing through long distances as a straight line, it appears to be slow and content. Other passages require quick shifts of direction and the perception changes to fast and sudden movements.

La trahison des tapis
The title is a reference to the famous work by René Magritte “The Treachery of Images”. Even though the video installation alludes to it, the viewer is immediately aware that this is not a real carpet. What you see is an animation, a digital carpet, its contemporary variant. However, the patterns of the replica show that it could have been made in the west of Iran. The movements, which appear surreal, are reminiscent of a state of intoxication. Whether this was triggered by drugs, or only arose from the lively imagination of a tired child, is left to the speculation of the viewer. The work reflects the importance of traditional arts and crafts in the modern digital world. It is the first of a series of digital carpets.
The animation has a realistic resolution of 4k, is 03:55 minutes, and runs in an infinite loop on a 65-inch display.

À la folie/To Insanity

Gregor and Grete don’t understand one another anymore. Their common language, which used to be based on love, has disappeared. She accuses him of becoming a sickening crustacean, while he says she’s degenerated into some kind of mollusc. Through a failing memory and ever-changing versions of the same story, the viewer and characters become embroiled in a false history.

Monument to the Unknown Artist
At first glance, Monument to the Unknown Artist appears to be a simple bronze statue, dressed in a neck scarf and loose fitting suit. However, the six meter monument seeks inspiration from passers-by, inviting them to strike poses which he copies, continually changing his form in a light-hearted and mischievous way. The unique sculpture offers an alternative and accessible creative experience for the public allowing them to create a dialogue with the work of art.

Imagination Dead Imagine
An androgynous head is projected as if contained within a minimalist cube. Sounds of the head slowly breathing fill the space. The head is serene, waiting. Suddenly a substance pours over it from all sides, drenching it in what appears to be a bodily fluid. The spectator wants to turn away but can not, the gaze is compelled through the invocation of the scopic drive. Horror at the repulsive nature of the substance (the abject) is replaced by fascination with the beauty of what might be considered a contemporary sublime.

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.”

“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

Chronos XXI
Chronos the god of time, permanently destroys and recreates. He who symbolises evanescence and return, was the thematic point of departure for the creation of the kinetic media installation Chronos XXI. The piece is a ‘finger exercise on antiquity’ by our Creative Director Joachim Sauter and was created during his residency at Villa Massimo in Rome. A pendulum continuously swings in front of a monitor. This motion controls the slow synthesis and destruction of depictions of Chronos on the monitor. Chronos appears in various interpretations by painters of the late Renaissance, Baroque and Classicism – as a man who disrobes Veritas, as a performer of volatile music, or docking Cupid’s wings, or as children and crop eating, a scythe and an hour glass carrying, beardy and winged old man.
video

Mirage Gstaad
“Mirage Gstaad by Doug Aitken uses the frequency of light to reflect the sublime Alpine landscape as part of a continually changing encounter in which land and sky, subject and object, inside and outside are in constant flux. Standing in contrast to the surrounding chalet’s the ranch-style structure suggests a latter-day architectural version of Manifest Destiny, the westward migration that began in Europe and finally settled in California. With every available surface clad in mirror it both absorbs and reflects the landscape around in such ways that the exterior will seemingly disappear just as the interior draws the viewer into a never-ending kaleidoscope of light and reflection.

Waldian
Waldian is a standalone, wall hanging sound and light fixture capable of playing a near infinite amount of melodic permutations over a predetermined musical scale, complemented by emerging light patterns from twelve separate LEDs spread across the sculpture. In technical terms, Waldian contains two oscillators, an envelope generator and a voltage controlled amplifier, all controlled by impulses from a network of logic gates akin to those of early computers. These impulses are essentially the nerves in the electronic ecosystem, deciding over pitch and amplitude changes as well as creating bursts of light to highlight the entrances of each note. Finally, there is a tube overdrive stage that creates harmonic and subharmonics based on how far away the two oscillators are from each other in frequency. Most parameters are customizable, such as the aforementioned pitch, amplitude and overdrive, but the responsiveness and envelope of the light bursts can also be adjusted, directly affecting the appearance of the light patterns.

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.

Jonattas Poltronieri, Luis Mello, Pedro Venetucci & Rofli Sanches
Phantom Limb

Just like the original box, the installation is a rectangular unit where the user inserts his arm and is urged to move it in different ways. The similarity with the original object disappears as, instead of having a mirror to provide the image that motivates the interaction, there is a screen that mediates the user’s view and the place where his arm actually is. The displayed image of the user’s arm can be reversed, distorted and coloured, among several modifications to simulate in a rich way the strangeness of not having control over a member, and to question whether what is seen is an accurate portrayal of the real body. Although deep and subjective, the topic addressed in this experience is easy and accessible in its interaction, offering various sensory feedbacks to the user. Through it, it is proposed that we experience and reflect upon the disconnection between thought and body, intention and action, sensation and reality.

FILE SAO PAULO 2015

Halo
99 robotic mirrors continuously move throughout the day to follow the sun like sunflowers. These mirrors, arrayed across two 5 meter tall towers and one 15 meter long track, each emit a beam of sunlight into a cloud of water mist. The beams are computationally aligned so that together they draw a bright circle in the air. Dependent entirely on the presence of the sun for its completion, the work explores the possibilities and limitations of technology to capture what is out of reach, to harness nature and bring the sun down to earth. Collaborating with the natural fluctuations in the climate, Halo appears only for moments when the wind, sun, water, and technology coincide, creating a form which exists between the material and immaterial.

It Wasn’t Us

A painting by Katharina Grosse can appear anywhere. Her large-scale works are multi-dimensional pictorial worlds in which splendid color sweeps across walls, ceilings, objects, and even entire buildings and landscapes. For the exhibition “It Wasn’t Us” the artist has transformed the Historic Hall of Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin as well as the outdoor space behind the building, into an expansive painting which radically destabilises the existing order of the museum architecture.

airmorphologies

Joshua Tree Residence

Whitaker has envisioned an “exoskeleton” made of shipping containers painted bright white. The containers appear like a starburst, with cuboid forms pushing out in all directions.The home is intended to offer a connection to the sun-baked landscape, while concurrently providing a sense of protection and privacy. Square windows frame views of the blue sky and rugged terrain. In some areas, faceted ceilings give the effect of being inside a crystalline form.

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.

Appearing like ghostly cages which seem to float above the body, Seiran Tsuno’s designs are delicately abstract, distorting and disrupting the human-form. Emphasising the shoulders, chest, and thighs, there is a subtlety to her pieces: they don’t scream and shout but instead sit quietly in their uniqueness […] Creating a base is the first step, which Tsuno then draws on using the 3D pens. As it becomes airborne, the strands of melted plastic ink solidify, before Tsuno removes the base. The result is a piece that has the delicacy of fine jewellery, only in garment form.

Disappearance

In this work the movement of a large video monitor mounted on an industrial fork-lift truck creates a virtual representation of a larger than life size ballerina. As the forklift moves the monitor up and down the ballerina is presented from head to toe, and as the forklift truck rotates the ballerina also appears to turn. In this way the monitor functions as a window that gradually reveals the virtual presence of the ballerina who is dancing in the same axis as the rotating forklift truck. Also visible inside the motor compartment of the forklift truck is a small rotating ballerina figurine in front of which a video camera moves up and down. This mechanism is electronically synchronised with the movement of the forklift itself and provides the closed circuit source for the video image of the ballerina that is seen on the monitor screen. Disappearance evokes and celebrates the memory of the ballerina on a music box (a first generation robot) and generates her virtual reconstruction to the extent that the machinery of reproduction itself now incarnates her pirouettes.
video

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. “

Waterfall
video art
FILE FESTIVAL
Waterfall presents the viewer with a single static shot of a majestic waterfall. Over the course of the piece a number of diminutive figures walk slowly into the shot on the gravel bar at the bottom of the falls. They have come to pay their respects to the waterfall, we might call them pilgrims – we might call them tourists. Their slow-motion performances appear to be a mixture of the comedic and the devout.

Inverso Mundus
The title of the work, Inverso – both an Italian “reverse, the opposite” and the Old Italian “poetry,” and Mundus – the Latin “world,” hints at a reinterpretation of reality, a poetic vision. In our interpretation, the absurdist scenes from the medieval carnival appear as episodes of contemporary life in a multichannel video installation. Characters act out scenes of absurd social utopias and exchange masks, morphing from beggars to rich men, from policemen to thieves. Metrosexual street-cleaners are showering the city with refuse. Female inquisitors torture men on IKEA-style structures. Children and seniors are fighting in a kickboxing match. Inverso Mundus is a world where chimeras are pets and the Apocalypse is entertainment.

Мэтт Кеньон
مات كينيون
매트 케년
マット・ケニヨン
Supermajor
In Supermajor, a rack of vintage oil cans sits innocuously on the gallery floor. A punctured can, located somewhere mid-stack, has sprung a leak. The oil flows out in a steady trickle, cascading onto the pedestal below; a golden-brown pool forms at its base. Upon closer inspection, however, the oil is not originating from the can. Instead, its stream is reversed. Drop-by-drop the oil flows upwards, defying gravity. At times, droplets even appear to hover in mid-air. Returning to its source, the upward ascent of oil continues uninterrupted as if neither the can’s reserves of the nor the puddle’s can ever be depleted.
FILE FESTIVAL

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.

4&5
Tao Ye likes to designate his dances by number rather than name. After 4 comes 5, his latest to appear in the US: the 27-year-old choreographer behind Beijing’s six-member Tao Dance Theater is just getting started. And yet he is already a worldwide festival favourite and distinctive to boot, in spite of – or perhaps because of – his deliberately limited means. From 2012, 4 restricted itself to four dancers moving in unison and in a tight cohort within the square of the stage. The dancers’ faces were blacked out, their gaze down, their spines never succumbing to the easy beauty of uprightness, and their voluminous costumes, full of folds and creases, were identical.

Du corps et du cœur
Born in South Africa, Koto Bolofo and his family fled to Britain when he was still a child after his father, a history teacher, was discovered to have writings by Karl Marx among his classroom materials. After living as political refugees for nearly 25 years, Bolofo and his father returned to South Africa, an experience documented in his short film The Land Is White, the Seed Is Black. His keen eye for lively, dynamic images has won him accolades for his fashion photography—Bolofo editorials have appeared in Vogue, GQ and Interview, to name a few; his advertising clients include Burberry,

Bettina pavilion
The Bettina is a limited-edition architectural pavilion designed for REVOLUTION that debuted at Design Miami in 2015. It is simple in silhouette yet also a complex three-dimensional form. Recalling the iconic style and pyramidal form of the classic white tent, the contemporary pavilion is simultaneously geometrically taut and sensually draped across the structural frame. Each profile peak is extruded diagonally making a roof of two ridges that appear different from every angle.

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.

Conservation of Intimacy

Made of pine, latex, music wire, copper, nylon line, paper, pens and video surveillance. It measured 20′ x 35′ x 26′ at Southern Exposdure.
A couple rocking on the bench sends air pulses to another room causing balls to move and pens to transcribe their motions onto paper. The paper is moved by a third person on a stationary bike. The couple on the bench can watch the balls on a video monitor before them where the balls appear to bounce into the air. The motion is delayed and languid as though under water. Action is best when the couple is moving slowly together. As visitors work together to animate the mechanisms, they create a theatre for themselves and each other. By encouraging participation, and touch the pieces coax visitors to engage their bodies as well as their minds. The way that pieces move and feel and sound as you rock them, pedal, crank and press against them applies the kinesthetic comprehension’s of childhood to the tasks of philosophy. Bernie Lubell’s interactive installations have evolved from his studies in both psychology and engineering. As participants play with his whimsical wood machines, they become actors in a theater of their own imagining.

كيت غيلمور
קייט גילמור
케이트 길모어
Кейт Гилмор
Sudden as a Massacre

Gilmore create a site-specific installation, video, and performance-based project. In a private performance for the camera, a quintet of women tear apart an enormous cube comprising more than5,050 pounds of wet clay. As the block disappears, the space will be covered in the evidence of action.

Dina Khuseyn, Patrick K.-H., Oleg Makarov

A multivarious result of visual representation of 3 non-identical structures (dance performance, sound art and animation) points at interactivity as the main possible axis of reference. Necessity of this axis derives from specific interpretations that can only appear by juxtaposing of several systems. It opposes to traditional “parallelism” of media, employed in theater that only imitates causality, but having it already done before performance is starting.
In Cinestetika, each element of each media works as separate PROCESS, but also serves a SIGNAL to other medias. This essential core makes Cinestetika rather an instrument to make a term “live performance” filled with its perfect sense.

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.