Around The Milky Way

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival

Valentin Rye – Around The Milky Way

In the distant future, several species inhabit the Milky Way. This scenario inspired the video, aiming to portray various forms of life and evoke a plausible atmosphere. Using images he created, the artist experimented with Stable Video Diffusion, a new video generation method. The objective was to expand the limits of this neural network and improve its output, resulting in the conception of this video.

Bio

Valentin Rye is a self-taught machine whisperer based in Copenhagen, deeply passionate about art, composition and the possibilities of technology. He has been involved in AI and neural network image manipulation since starting DeepDream in 2015. While his IT work lacks creativity, he indulges in digital arts during his free time, exploring graphics, web design, video, animation and experimentation with images.

24Western Flag
Trails of smoke form an ever-changing black flag in this video footage created by Irish artist John Gerrard to highlight the threat posed by increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere.

Salle de pluie
Utilisant la technologie numérique, « Rain Room » est une averse soigneusement chorégraphiée, une œuvre monumentale qui encourage les gens à devenir des interprètes sur une scène inattendue, tout en créant une atmosphère intime de contemplation. Les visiteurs peuvent littéralement marcher sous la pluie, comme s’ils étaient entourés d’un champ magnétique invisible, et ne jamais se mouiller.

Aliquis (extrait)
Aliquid est une vidéo à canal unique où le signal électronique est manipulé numériquement pour se matérialiser en chair synthétique. Atterrissant lentement sur une architecture de verre, cette substance indéfinie est déchirée par des arêtes vives et finit par se désintégrer en particules qui se répandent dans l’atmosphère.

DigiScape – Forest
Lors de la réalisation de ce projet, je passe le plus de temps à gérer des visuels raisonnables et des idées innovantes pour l’image. Je veux prendre soin de chaque détail tel que l’atmosphère, la dynamique des fleurs et des plantes, le changement progressif du soleil et de l’ombre et l’effet du portail lumineux de transition de scène. Cela m’a coûté près d’un demi-mois pour l’éclairage, le réglage des couleurs et la composition. Ce qui se passe normalement, c’est que la partie la plus difficile d’un projet n’est pas de CONSTRUIRE l’environnement mais d’IDÉRER le concept innovant. En raison des progrès technologiques, le seuil technique deviendra de plus en plus bas. Nous devrions nous concentrer davantage sur l’idéation des concepts.

Stalking the Trace
Stalking the Trace est une installation VR multi-spectateurs qui se déroule dans une série d’enceintes, renforcées par l’audio, l’éclairage et les projections pour créer une atmosphère immersive sensorielle dans la galerie. Rossin utilise le mouvement du spectateur à travers l’espace comme méthode pour interroger le désir humain de contrôle et d’agence, et la notion de temps avec le sujet humain en son centre.
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Stalking the Trace is a multi viewer VR installation, takes place within a series of enclosures, heightened by audio, lighting and projections to create a sensory immersive atmosphere within the gallery. Rossin utilises the movement of the viewer through the space as a method to interrogate the human desire for control and agency, and the notion of time with the human subject at its centre.
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Stalking the Trace – это многопользовательская VR-инсталляция, действие которой происходит в серии ограждений, усиленных звуком, освещением и проекциями для создания чувственной иммерсивной атмосферы в галерее. Россин использует движение зрителя в пространстве как метод исследования человеческого стремления к контролю и свободе действий, а также понятия времени с человеческим субъектом в его центре.

Drapeau occidental
Des traînées de fumée forment un drapeau noir en constante évolution dans cette séquence vidéo créée par l’artiste irlandais John Gerrard pour mettre en évidence la menace posée par l’augmentation des niveaux de dioxyde de carbone dans l’atmosphère terrestre.

waterlicht

Dubbed “the northern light of the Netherlands” by Studio Roosegaarde, the Waterlicht installation is designed to create the impression of a “virtual flood”.The waving lines of light spread across 1.6 hectares bear a resemblance to the northern lights – the natural phenomenon created when charged particles enter the Earth’s atmosphere – when viewed from underneath.

atro enlevo

Entouré d’une atmosphère dense obtenue par la manipulation de voix de chansons anciennes et utilisant divers fragments de compositions industrielles, élaborés selon les paramètres réglables utilisés dans des logiciels spécifiques manipulés par un contrôleur MIDI, l’œuvre «Atro Enlevo» conduit l’auditeur dans l’obscurité et sortilège mystérieux.

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work atro enlevo

Atmosphäre
Für Atmosphere simulierten mit Argon und Neon gefüllte Glasröhren die Farbe des Himmels von Arizona. Diese als Säule angeordneten Röhren veränderten die Schatten der Besucher und warfen sie in Säulenform. Der Raum wurde entworfen, um auf die Handlungen seiner Bewohner zu reagieren und sie zu ermutigen, die Luft zu untersuchen, damit zu spielen und sie zu untersuchen.

Atmosphere
For Atmosphere, glass tubes filled with argon and neon simulated the color of the Arizona sky. Arranged as a column, these tubes altered the shadows of visitors, casting them in pillar-form. The space was designed to respond to the actions of its inhabitants, encouraging them to investigate, play with and probe the air.
video

Nomad
Inspired by the concept of digital nomads of 21st-century and based on various pieces and algorithms from TUNDRA’s previous highly acclaimed audio-visual installations premiered across the globe from USA to China, NOMAD brings the polar atmosphere of different TUNDRA site-specific installations into a randomly changing sequence of visual themes and patterns triggered by live-performed sound.

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.

Resonance
Resonance is an interactive audio-visual experience that encourages people to engage in a dialogue with water, whilst creating an intimate atmosphere of contemplation. The installation comes fully to life when people interact with it. We used sound and color to immerse the museum visitors and invite them to explore the role that technology and human intervention might play in harmonizing our environment.

Terraforming
The video work “terraforming” focusses on the transformation of a natural environment through energy input. The underpinning idea is that of three phase system change. This begins with the stage of equilibrium where a system is in a certain balance and not changing at all. In the next stage an evolving system enters a state of motion and change where it moves away from equilibrium. The third and final stage is the phase of transformation in which the original system becomes something else. The key element in this transformation process is the sun. This process is called terraforming, whereby a hostile environment, i.e. a planet that is too cold, too hot, or has an unbreathable atmosphere, can be altered to make it suitable for human life. Such a process is not merely a futuristic scenario but represents exactly what is happening on Earth at this moment as the process of atmospheric change brought about by increasing CO2 emissions heats up our planet and speeds up the process of climate change.
video

Forms II
Mount Audio

Forms is a collaborative film series devised by London based, creative sound studio Mount Audio. The ongoing project sees Mount team up with leading visual artists each month to create unique audiovisual works.Forms II showcases the vibrant motion work of LA based designer Bryant Nichols. The artists’s warped figures bend and contort, twisting around one another to form abstract human structures.Inspired by Bryant’s alternate reality, Mount have created an entirely synthesised soundtrack layering rich, modulating textures to create an unsettling atmosphere. The effect is hypnotic yet disorientating.

OCULUS
OCULUS: A Spatial Experience Based on the Interaction of Architecture and Media Arts
An audio-visual performance based on a selection of HAS Architects works interpreted by NOHlab and Buşra Tunç
A selection of HAS Architects’ projects is presented in a performance that blends digital technology with spatial design, forming a synthesis between the past and the present within the magical atmosphere of the historical Single- Dome Hall of the Imperial Arsenal.
Taking the Single-Dome Hall as the focal point, the exhibition uses contemporary interpretations to alternate between old and new, whole and fragment, real and virtual, balanced and unbalanced states. Notions of time and space become blurred and the exhibition surrounds the visitors, offering them an unusual spatial experience.

AVATAR X Lab
The project is a partnership between ANA Holdings Inc. and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA); a part of AVATAR X, a collaborative program for the advancement of space exploration and development. ANA and JAXA are both experts at launching vehicles into the atmosphere, the feeling of suspension or ‘being in the air’ is natural for both entities. The AVATAR X Lab Building is designed as a suspended building floating above a moon-like crater. The multi-story structure floats eighteen meters above the crater bottom, and is accessible by a bridge. When astronauts board a spacecraft they cross a bridge; when we board a plane we walk across a jet bridge between the terminal and airplane. This is our last contact with familiar ground before taking off for someplace new. The suspended building embodies this crossing of thresholds: after passing over the bridge you are transported to a new place, the AVATAR X Lab Building, where technological innovation will change how we see the world.

Algae Window
Algae window is an arrangement of glass spheres mounted in a wall. Directly behind the wall and the spheres is a window; vivid, miniature, inverted views of the scene outside the gallery thus appear in and inhabit each sphere. The composition of the work closely resembles the structure of one type of the single-celled algae known as diatoms, which remove large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere.

Moving atmospheres
Moving Atmospheres, the tenth Garage Atrium Commission curated by Iaroslav Volovod, is a partially mirrored sphere suspended in the air, propelling us towards an Aerocene epoch. We call towards this new era with Aerocene. For more than a decade we have been imagining a world free from the carbon, extractivism, capitalism and patriarchy that fuels some forms of life, a new way of being with the atmosphere and emissions-free travel, free from solar panels, lithium, helium, hydrogen and fossil fuels. This new era stands in stark contrast to the lingering eco-traumas of the Anthropocene, the current geological age in which some human capitalistic activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

THE LONG NOW
A soap bubble usually remains stable for only a few moments – it is a perfectly formed sphere with an iridescent surface that reflects its surroundings. As one of the classical vanitas symbols the soap bubble traditionally stands for the transience of the moment and the fragility of life. THE LONG NOW approaches the soap bubble from a contemporary perspective – with reference to its chemical and physical properties as well as recent scientific and technological developments. THE LONG NOW is aimed at extending the lifespan of a soap bubble, or even to preserve it forever. Using an improved formula, a machine generates a bubble, sends it to a chamber with a controlled atmosphere and keeps it there in suspension for as long as possible. The project is presented in the form of an experimental set-up in which the newly created soap bubble oscillates permanently between fragility and stability.

Atmospheric Forest
Atmospheric Forest is a large scale VR point-cloud installation that visualizes and sonifies the relations between the forest and climate. It reveals the interaction patterns between the pine-tree emissions in Pfynwald, an ancient Swiss Alpine forest, and weather conditions in this valley, effected by drought. The trees do not only produce oxygen, but they are living bodies who breath too. I.e., they emit part of carbon dioxide, sometimes even up to 20 perc. from what they have consumed. When trees die, they release all the carbon they have collected during their lives back into the atmosphere. Atmospheric Forest explores the effects of drought on local forest ecosystems, and how such stress situations influence production of resin and volatile emissions (such as usual pine-tree scent).

Beyond Cassini
“BEYOND CASSINI” uses this narrative to celebrate the accomplishments of one of the most successful and beloved Satellites in space exploration history. As Cassini begins its final flight into Saturn’s upper atmosphere with a mission of disintegration, visuals flash back through time giving viewers highlights of this dying satellite’s life.

OCULUS
Oculus was a site-specific installation designed for Istanbul Design Biennale in 2016, and exhibited in Tophane-i Amire. A selection of HAS Architects’ projects is presented in a performance that blends digital technology with spatial design, forming a synthesis between the past and the present within the magical atmosphere of the historical Single-Dome Hall of the Imperial Arsenal. Taking the Single-Dome Hall as the focal point, the exhibition uses contemporary interpretations to alternate between old and new, whole and fragment, real and virtual, balanced and unbalanced states. Notions of time and space become blurred and the exhibition surrounds the visitors, offering them an unusual spatial experience.

The Present Condition

The landscapes of ‘The Present Condition’ derive from a journey of more than 15,000 km by land by the artist between the two geographical extremes of South America. The video is suffused with a surreal atmosphere, where real and imaginary spaces intersect. Concepts such as human intimacy, desire, work, the savage capitalism that builds cathedrals in the desert, the perverse bureaucracy and the construction of the border wall are just some of the elements that are mixed in a striking and suggestive mosaic of images.

file sp 2019 videoart

الفوضى الرقص المسرح
תיאטרון מחול אנרכיה
アナーキーダンスシアター
무정부 댄스 극장
Seventh Sense
Seventh Sense is the collaborative project between Anarchy Dance Theatre and Ultra Combos focusing on building up a new viewer centered performance venue. In this space all movements including the dancers’ and audience’s can be detected and interact with each other through visual effect. The audience is not merely watching the show but actively participating in it. Seventh Sense combines new media and dance to present a wonderful space atmosphere. The elements of interaction, theater and dance are rubbed in to a successful balance. by Sakai Naoki.
Photographer: Shou-cheng LIN

随机国际
rain room
Using digital technology, “Rain Room” is a carefully choreographed downpour—a monumental work that encourages people to become performers on an unexpected stage, while creating an intimate atmosphere of contemplation. Visitors can literally walk through rain, as though surrounded by an invisible magnetic field, and never get wet.

Shenzhen Bay Culture Park
“I want to create a surreal atmosphere, so that the people who visit, relax or exercise here have the possibility of engaging in a dialogue with the past and the future. Time and space are dissolved and placed against each other, manifesting a sense of weightlessness, and unrestrained imagination,” Ma Yansong

COSMOS
Cosmos is a collection of Vangelis’ early-’70s space music. It is pure and graceful with no frills. Vangelis has an aggressive style on the synth, and these compositions are pure Berlin-school electronica, with cosmic and dynamic atmospheres. This will appeal to fans of Ron Boots, Klaus Schulze, Edgar Froese, and Ian Boddy.

Antistructure
L’artiste visuel canadien s’approprie le réel en lui donnant des aspects grandiose et grotesque. Dans sa récente série «Antistructure», Alex Lysakowski basé à Mississauga, au Canada, nous propose de découvrir des bâtiments industriels, des automobiles, mais aussi des monuments devenus invraisemblables grâce à la magie de la retouche photo. «Je crée des images avec des interactions structurelles surréalistes et étranges au sein de paysages banals. J’évite ainsi un espace de transition entre la réalité et la fiction, tout en conservant le réalisme dans l’atmosphère de l’image», indique-t-il.

coagulate
Mihai Grecu’s video work Coagulate is a visually immersive journey into a world of water which behaves against the laws of nature. This choreography of fluids explores absence, presence and aquatic distortions. In this world, man breathes water and fish breath air. Water seems impervious to gravity. Rather than narrative, Coagulate is based on sensation and atmosphere.

CLOUDBUSTER PROJECT
German artist Christoph Keller’s Cloudbuster Project was installed yesterday on a roof of the Blackett Laboratory, as part of the Royal College of Art’s Again For Tomorrow exhibition. The installation re-enacts an invention of psychologist Wilhelm Reich that he claimed could influence the atmosphere and make clouds burst into rain.

루드 반 엠펠
РУУД ВАН ЭМПЕЛЬ
Créateur d’atmosphères fraîches et verdoyantes, Ruud Van Empel marie avec subtilité les sujets de ses photographies avec les espaces dans lesquels il les plonge. Nées d’un véritable processus créatif alliant collage, prise de vue et retouche photographique, les œuvres de cet artiste hollandais incitent le spectateur à s’abandonner et à contempler les traces d’un voyage improbable dans les pays les plus lointains.

Water Cathedral
Supported by a minimal external steel framework, the inverted cones are suspended from a wire grid to capture rainwater within a plastic bag. Dripping at different pulses and speeds, water drops exit the textile covering to generate a cool atmosphere for visitors beneath the canopy. Stalagmites formed with concrete blocks double as benches, strategically placing individuals below the streams of water.

La jeune photographe étudiante polonaise Laura Makabresku aime les atmosphères des contes romantiques et elle se plait à se mettre en scène dans des situations melo-dramatiques. “I like to take photos of my own. I imagine fairy tales themes where there are lots of animals, and naked, long haired girls. I like to take portraits but they need to express sadness, contemplation, anxiety.”

ВИЛЛИ ВЕРДЖНЕРА
意大利雕塑家
ciuria de foies
These lifelike sculptures are typically carved from solid linden wood then painted with acrylic paint. Their subtle but strange gestures coupled with unexpected objects give the sculptures a quietly surreal atmosphere. Verginer’s peculiar style of painting his work adds to each piece’s enigmatic quality. Rather than realistically paint each individual detail, Verginer applies large swaths of color to his sculptures. The pieces nearly seem to be dipped in pools of pigment. These large fields of color work in contrasting against the realism of each sculpture.

Continuum
A reflecting panel that dominates an entire space, situated right in the middle of it. Two projectors that, at the opposite sides of the panel, offer a constant flow of images that meet each other and merge together, giving life to a real “virtual window” capable of connecting the souls of two different spaces. Everything among smoky suspensions, proceeding through cones of light: a dreamlike atmosphere to demonstrate that dualities can coexist.

Зе, Сара
サラ・セー

Notepad
“These works investigate movement, disintegration, and disorientation. Here I wanted to enter a two-dimensional frame and find a location that is entropic, fragmenting, spinning, and adrift. These drawings frame a fragment of a larger system that could potentially expand beyond the frame. They start from an exploration of atmosphere, fleeting situations, and environments with a specific kind of weather.”

Micro-atmospheres
David Moreno è un artista con sede a Barcellona il cui lavoro mira a trasferire disegni in due dimensioni in oggetti tridimensionali nello spazio. Per farlo, per primo cosa realizza un disegno su carta che successivamente trasforma in una scultura tramite tondini in acciaio che vengono intersecati più volte, creando una serie di micro-ambienti.

Animal Works
In his interdisciplinary work, encompassing video, performance, dance, theatre, painting, photography, installation, and even puppetry, Markus Schinwald creates mysterious and unsettling atmospheres that hint at their Viennese production context, through references to austere Biedermeier style or to psychoanalysis. His seminal studies in fashion left him with a wide interest in clothing and, furthermore, in the human body’s potential and limitations in both physical and psychological senses.

The creative atmosphere unleashes a multitude of possibilities for fresh and exciting product. Surprise is our greatest inspiration. The playful character of hand processes lead us to innovative and unexpected results. Prototypes and models born from the activities serve as a beginning for new ceramic objects.more…

Photographies éthérées
Cerro Espada

Alexandre Deschaumes is a self taught french photographer. These photographs take place in the French Alps, Austria, Iceland and Patagonia.
“When I am in nature, the environment makes me feel humble about all that surrounds me, opening a new abstract door of inspiration, making me very grateful about these fantastic benefits. And the most important aspect that i like about the abstract photography quest is that when I am in nature, I feel home and I feel alive.” From one of his last interviews,”What are some tips you could give to people that really like your work?”
“I would advise them to listen to their inner feeling, to take their camera and go somewhere remote, like a deep forest during a foggy day and keep watching everywhere to seek details, because beauty is everywhere.To feel the atmosphere of the surroundings, vision is always the most important. In composition, you should avoid everything that disturbs and focus on simple shapes, because elegance comes with simplicity.”
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Atmosphères

Craco

Tobias Stretch channels the beauty and melancholia of Hauschka’s single “Craco” in his uncanny video filmed in Philadelphia’s answer to Brooklyn’s High Line, Reading Viaduct Park. With music videos for Radiohead, Crystal Fighters and Christopher Bono to his name, the Philly-based animator is known for his distinct aesthetic and method, pairing landscape photography with life-size stop-motion puppets. “I thought right from the beginning when I saw Tobias’s work that it has a mixture of analog and handmade elements and a surreal atmosphere. In my music you have similar elements,” says Hauschka himself, aka the German pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann, who headline’s London’s Union Chapel tonight as part of his European tour. Although best known as a 21st-Century protagonist of the prepared piano practice championed by John Cage, Bertelmann “left all the preparations at home” in order to work with a pure sound on this track. Named after the Italian ghost town, “Craco” is taken from his entropy-laced album Abandoned City and played to Stretch’s own fascination with urban decay. “The music was there beforehand, but I had a bowl of music and a bowl of names and I tried to pair them up. I think the music sounded not only like an abandoned place but also like a nostalgic place and that’s why I thought it was a great match.”

Babel
Le premier synonyme de trouble qui apparaît dans le dictionnaire est babel, avec une lettre minuscule
Du Zhenjun transforme le monde en une nouvelle tour de Babel, mais ne pensez-vous pas que cette Terre l’est déjà? N’y a-t-il pas déjà trop de désordre, d’injustice et d’incompréhension?
Le premier synonyme de trouble qui apparaît dans le dictionnaire est babel, avec une lettre minuscule. Toutes les conséquences de la confusion voulues par Dieu ne sont pas non plus ici, comme pour justifier cet adjectif. Nous incarnons la fierté et la suprématie sur le monde, la même qu’Il voulait que nous habitions.
Dans les images proposées par Du Zhenjun on observe une composition standard: au centre il y a toujours une interprétation de la Tour, des formes variées, des structures variées, des visions variées. Puis une atmosphère grise plane tout autour, l’atmosphère de la réalité. Une masse de choses, de personnes et de bâtiments. Ce sont des parties de photographies, ou plutôt de reportages journalistiques, de guerre et plus encore.
On n’identifie pas l’origine de la source lumineuse, elle est dans l’air: tout est éclairé, comme dans les estampes composites de la fin du XIXe siècle, ancêtres du photomontage.

Babel

The first synonym for disorder that appears in the dictionary is babel, with a lowercase letter
Du Zhenjun transforms the world into a new tower of Babel, but don’t you think this Earth already is? Isn’t there already too much disorder, injustice and misunderstanding?
The first synonym for disorder that appears in the dictionary is babel, with a lowercase letter. Nor are all the consequences of the confusion wanted by God here, as if to justify this adjective. We embody pride and supremacy over the world, the same one that He wanted us to inhabit.
In the images proposed by Du Zhenjun we observe a standard composition: in the center there is always an interpretation of the Tower, various shapes, various structures, various visions. Then a gray atmosphere hovers all around, the atmosphere of reality. A mass of things, people and buildings. They are parts of photographs, or rather of journalistic reports, of war and more.
We do not identify the origin of the light source, it is in the air: everything is illuminated, as in the composite prints of the late nineteenth century, ancestors of photomontage.

The Dark Side Of The Moog 8

Pete Namlook (aka Peter Kuhlmann) and Klaus Schulze developed and nurtured The Dark Side of the Moog series. The Dark Side of the Moog 5 also features Bill Laswell. (He has collaborated on four of the CDs.) One of the coolest things on this disc is a 14-second intro by Robert Moog himself. Namlook, Schulze, and Laswell used “Adam’s Psychedelic Brunch” as their base track title, a play on Pink Floyd’s “Adam’s Psychedelic Breakfast” from Atom Heart Mother. And, as listeners expect, this CD features the sequences, atmospheres, and ambience associated with this trio. The soundscape elements flow seamlessly within the intricate sound design. Namlook, Schulze, and Laswell are always at the top of their game. This Berlin school offering will appeal to fans of Ron Boots, Edgar Froese, Ian Boddy, and Paul Ellis.

MENSKE

Even the standing room only tickets have sold out, and the raging mass of disappointed kids looks like they may start a riot: the atmosphere before Ultima Vez’s performance is akin to a rock concert. Choreographer superstar Wim Vandekeybus’s company has toured the world with their trademark vocabulary of acrobatic, extreme, often violent movement, soaked in multimedia and energetic music. Menske (meaning approximately ‘little human’), their latest work, has all the typical flaws and qualities of classic Vandekeybus. On the conservative end of political intervention, Menske is an explosive concoction of brash statements about the state of the world today, a sequence of rapidly revolving scenes of conflicting logic: intimist, blockbuster, desperate, hysterical. The broad impression is not so much of a sociological portrait, but of a very personal anguish being exorcised right in front of us, as if Vandekeybus is constantly switching format in search of eloquence. Visually, it is stunning, filmic: a slum society falling apart through guerrilla warfare, in which girls handily assume the role of living, moving weapons. A woman descends into madness in an oneiric hospital, led by a costumed and masked group sharpening knives in rhythmic unison. A traumatised figure wanders the city ruins dictating a lamenting letter to invisible ‘Pablo.’ Men hoist a woman on a pole her whole body flapping like a flag. “It’s too much!” intrudes a stage hand, “Too much smoke, too much noise, too much everything!” And the scene responsively changes to a quiet soliloquy. At which point, however, does pure mimesis become complicit with the physical and psychological violence it strives to condemn? Unable to find its way out of visual shock, Menske never resolves into anything more than a loud admission of powerlessness.

Domestic catastrophe Nº3: La Planete Laboratoire
in collaboration with Dr. Jean-Marc Chomaz, Ladhyx, École Polytechnique

An aquarium containing a domestic globe, a motor to turn the globe and electronic valve or drip feed which releases a fluoresceine tracing dye onto the sphere. As the sphere turns, the green dye wraps itself around the sphere, enveloping it in what appears to be a thin gas or atmosphere that surrounds the planet Earth. The difference between emissions and atmosphere, the ‘man-influenced’ and the ‘natural’ climate cannot be easily defined.

The Blur Building (an architecture of atmosphere)
The Blur Building is a media pavilion for Swiss EXPO 2002 at the base of Lake Neuchatel in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland.From piles in the water, a tensegrity system of rectilinear struts and diagonal rods cantilevers out over the lake. Ramps and walkways weave through the tensegrity system, some of them providing a counterweight for the structure. The form is based on the work of Buckminster Fuller.The pavilion is made of filtered lake water shot as a fine mist through 13,000 fog nozzles creating an artificial cloud that measures 300 feet wide by 200 feet deep by 65 feet high. A built-in weather station controls fog output in response to shifting climatic conditions such as temperature, humidity, wind direction, and wind speed.The public can approach Blur via a ramped bridge. The 400 foot long ramp deposits visitors at the center of the fog mass onto a large open-air platform where movement is unregulated. Visual and acoustical references are erased along the journey toward the fog leaving only an optical “white-out” and the “white-noise” of pulsing water nozzles. Prior to entering the cloud, each visitor responds to a questionnaire/character profile and receives a “braincoat” (smart raincoat). The coat is used as protection from the wet environment and storage of the personality data for communication with the cloud’s computer network. Using tracking and location technologies, each visitor’s position can be identified and their character profiles compared to any other visitor.In the Glass Box, a space surrounded by glass on six sides, visitors experience a “sense of physical suspension only heightened by an occasional opening in the fog.” As visitors pass one another, their coats compare profiles and change color indicating the degree of attraction or repulsion, much like an involuntary blush – red for affinity, green for antipathy. The system allows interaction among 400 visitors at any time.Visitors can climb another level to the Angel Bar at the summit. The final ascent resembles the sensation of flight as one pierces through the cloud layer to the open sky. Here, visitors relax, take in the view, and choose from a large selection of commercial waters, municipal waters from world capitals, and glacial waters. At night, the fog will function as a dynamic and thick video screen.