The NOVA BIENAL RIO is an autonomous and independent event that transcends the scope of a conventional international exhibition; it is a call to innovation and imagination. Under the theme “New Aesthetic and Supercreativity,” we invite you on a journey through the world of art driven by technology. Hosted by the city of Rio de Janeiro, it takes place at both the iconic Museu do Amanhã and Praça Mauá, reshaping the interaction of the public with art. As you enter the NOVA BIENAL, you will be invited to explore unique aesthetic expressions, looking towards the future through digital and technological lenses. Access NOVA.

Tribe City
Hundreds of beings and dreamlike and dystopian elements inhabit the digital and autonomous works that are part of this project. “It’s a portrait of the masses,” summarise the artists, whose fascination with group dynamics, technological phenomena and the ego are expressed in Tribe with an eclectic selection of individuals who bring to life deeply recognisable social attitudes. Collective behaviour and manipulation are recurring themes in SMACK’s work, which often uses popular visual references and light-hearted aesthetics to present us with an uncomfortable reflection of who we are.

FRAMERATE
Created from thousands of daily 3D time-lapse scans of British landscapes, the work observes change on a scale impossible to see with the lens of traditional cameras. This is not just an artwork. The data collected and presented by FRAMERATE is ground-breaking scientific research, containing empirical, measurable facts. We glimpse a future perpetually documented by the eyes of a billion autonomous vehicles and personal devices, creating high fidelity spatial records of the earth.

Pangaea

Named after the prehistoric supercontinent of Pangaea, the artist explains, “this large-scale artwork is a collection of autonomous ‘islands’ that assemble into a singular, 3-story composition.”The art installation is made from a series of layered aluminum ribbons that interact with a field of points located throughout this exterior wall, creating a collection of interconnected nodes, hubs, and conduits.

In the robot skies
In the Robot Skies is the world’s first narrative shot entirely through autonomous drones. In collaboration with the Embedded and Artificially intelligent Vision Lab in Belgium the film has evolved in the context of their experiments with specially developed camera drones each programmed with their own cinematic rules and behaviours. The film explores the drone as a cultural object, not just as a new instrument of visual story telling but also as the catalyst for a new collection of urban sub cultures. In the way the New York subway car of the 80’s gave birth to a youth culture of wild style graffiti and hip hop the age of ubiquitous drones as smart city infrastructure will create a new network of surveillance activists and drone hackers. From the eyes of the drones we see two teenagers each held by police order within the digital confines of their own council estate tower block in London. A network of drones survey the council estates, as a roving flock off cctv cameras and our two characters are kept apart by this autonomous aerial infrastructure.

Loop 60 Hz: Transmissions from the Drone Orchestra
A flock of autonomous DJI copters are programmed as aerial dancers and are mounted with specially engineered wireless speakers to broadcast the instruments of the band. Other copters are dressed in elaborate costumes to disguise their form and reflect light across the audience below. Against a score of original compositions and selected tracks from Cale’s seminal career this collaboration with Young imagines the possibilities of the drones as emerging cultural objects. If these technologies are no longer unseen objects overhead, or propelled along classified flight paths but brought into close and intimate relations with us then how might we see them differently. When their transmission fades, when the drones lose their signal and without their protocols for terror and surveillance, do they drop from the sky, do they fall in love or do the drones drift endlessly, forever on loop.

T4T LAB
RADICAL RAUMPLAN
The real but withdrawn qualities of the raumplan of the Muller House can be understood as the unknown excess of the object. This is the space of the architectural project that exists beyond the limits of human cognition. Although this space is finite, it is vast and abundant. Any attempt to enter into this space must be somehow framed. As a metaphor, or a vehicle to frame the unknown excess, we take in part the idea of viewing, which is epistemologically important to the raumplan. Using this framework, our project attempts to go beyond our cognitive limitations and enter into the unknown space of the architectural project. From here, we can extract new spatial phenomena that can be notated into the known layer, to be understood by the architectural audience. For us, this means using a series of metaphors to frame our exploration of the unknown and attempt to extract new phenomena that engage the raumplan independent of its relationship to a human subject. This allows us to operate in a jective framework, allowing for an understanding of the object autonomously.

Skin Sucka

A project conceived with Clive van Heerden, Jack Mama (Philips Design Probes) and Bart Hess, Skinsucka explores a vision of our nano technology future whereby bio technology and robotics come together to question our attitudes of a synthetic future. Skinsucka reveals a future where microbal robots live in our shared spaces and autonomously they will undertake menial tasks such as cleaning our homes by eating the dirt. ‘Skinsuckas’ clean the skin, removing the vestiges of make up and providing the remedies to combat the excesses of the night before They swarm over the body extruding metabolized household dirt, dressing the body in a daily ritual of real time, customized manufacture – yesterday’s discarded clothing ready for recycling.” Clive and Jack’s work has consistently brought very diverse skills together in new innovation processes. In the late 1990’s they took designers and other creative skills into Philips Research labs in the Redhill, London and New York and created a specialist studio in London to develop the skills, materials and technologies for a host of Wearable Electronic business propositions in the areas of electronic apparel, conductive textiles, physical gaming, medical monitoring and entertainment.

Where the City Can’t See
Directed by speculative architect Liam Young and written by fiction author Tim Maughan, ‘Where the City Can’t See’ is the world’s first narrative fiction film shot entirely with laser scanners, designed in collaboration with Alexey Marfin. The computer vision systems of driverless cars google maps, urban management systems and CCTV surveillance are now fundamentally reshaping urban experience and the cultures of our city. Set in the Chinese owned and controlled Detroit Economic Zone (DEZ) and shot using the same scanning technologies used in autonomous vehicles, we see this near future city through the eyes of the robots that manage it. Exploring the subcultures that emerge from these new technologies the film follows a group of young car factory workers across a single night, as they drift through the smart city point clouds in a driverless taxi, searching for a place they know exists but that the map doesn’t show.

Conversations with Bina 48
Artist Stephanie Dinkins and Bina48, one of the worlds most advanced social robots, test this question through a series of ongoing videotaped conversations. This art project explores the possibility of a longterm relationship between a person and an autonomous robot that is based on emotional interaction and potentially reveals important aspects of human-robot interaction and the human condition. The relationship is being built with Bina48 (Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture, 48 exaflops per second) an intelligent computer built by Terasem Movement Foundation that is said to be capable of independent thought and emotion.

Grid
Grid 4×4 is an autonomous apparatus that creates an endless series of geometric forms. The vertices of the form are located on discs, each of them rotatable by a motor. A computer software plays tenderly with the rotation of the discs and generates an endless amount of geometric and chaotic patterns.

Project Orb[i]s
Orbis is a proposal for a Prototypical System, which is highly adaptive in nature, and creates an urban infrastructure that responds and caters to the changing needs and conditions within the city, by augmenting the everyday experiences and activities. Orb(i)s is a behavioral assembly that establishes the possibilities of a dynamic environment not limited to a building plan; rather, it is autonomous, adaptable, dynamic and self-assembling based on real-time data culminating in a constantly reconfiguring ecology. The sensing abilities of the system make it self-aware and encourage any decision-making, while its self-assembling quality arises from a unit-to-unit communication that leads to a higher order of organizations and structures.

S.A.M. The Symbiotic Autonomous Machine
As machines gain more autonomy and importance in human life, they are still given no agency in our society. Could a legalization of their status create a shift towards a more collaborative relationship with humans? S.A.M. 1, 2 & 3 are a Symbiotic Autonomous Machines challenging those ideas. It employs water kefir grains or kombucha to produce a beverage, acting as small scale automated food production systems.

Avatars
For this installation, So Kanno + yang02 composed all kinds of differently sized objects, including a telephone, a traffic cone, a plaster figure, a car, and a plant. Cameras, microphones, monitors and microcomputers are embedded in everyday objects arranged in the exhibition space, and connected to the Internet. Visitors can experience the work by logging in to / “riding“ each object via a web browser. Those objects exist as substitutes of – yet together with – real human beings (the visitors) in the same real environment that is subject to physical laws, rather than operating in a virtual space. Against the backdrop of the age of IoT, where all kinds of things are connected through networks, and artificial intelligence is about to mature, this work observes the new relationships that emerge when inorganic, non-autonomous objects transform into persons that act and perceive the world according to their own intentions.

CellF
“CellF is the world’s first neural synthesiser. Its “brain” is made of biological neural networks that grow in a Petri dish and controls in real time it’s “body” that is made of an array of analogue modular synthesizers that work in synergy with it and play with human musicians. It is a completely autonomous instrument that consists of a neural network that is bio-engineered from my own cells that control a custom-built synthesizer. There is no programming or computers involved, only biological matter and analogue circuits; a ‘wet-analogue’ instrument.”Guy Ben-Ary

the solar tree

“Solar tree”presents a modular architecture consisting of prefabricated “cells” made of steel and wood.
The cells can also house “solar leaves” to contribute even more to the energy needs and make the structure more and more autonomous.The architects’ aim is not only to create something innovative and sustainable, but also to integrate the new project with nature and the surrounding landscape.

FALA
File Festival
It is an autonomous and interactive talking machine, designed to establish automatic communication and synchronization between humans and machines, and between machines and machines. At installation, a microphone interfaces with a “chorus” of forty cell phones. All devices are in a listening state to capture voices and other sounds The autonomous talking machine analyzes the information and establishes equivalence with its memory. If so, the machine generates an audiovisual result with a semantic meaning similar to the sound captured, that is, it speaks and displays on the screens a word identical or similar to the word heard. Speakers and visualization of words on the screens of cell phones allow a “dialogue”, and for humans, to listen and see the machine conversation.

Marsha
Marsha is a AI SpaceFactory’s NASA-award-winning design and prototype for a 3D printed Mars habitat. The prototype was printed nearly autonomously in 2019 within a 30-hour construction window. “Our 3D print technology uses a recyclable biopolymer composite which outperformed concrete in NASA’s strength, durability, and crush testing. ASTM lab tested and certified to be two to three times stronger than concrete in compression, our space-grade material is also five times more durable than concrete in freeze-thaw conditions.” Ai-Spacefactory

The Augmented Hand Series
The “Augmented Hand Series” (by Golan Levin, Chris Sugrue, and Kyle McDonald) is a real-time interactive software system that presents playful, dreamlike, and uncanny transformations of its visitors’ hands. It consists of a box into which the visitor inserts their hand, and a screen which displays their ‘reimagined’ hand—for example, with an extra finger, or with fingers that move autonomously. Critically, the project’s transformations operate within the logical space of the hand itself, which is to say: the artwork performs “hand-aware” visualizations that alter the deep structure of how the hand appears.

Prehysterical Machine

The Prehysterical Machine has a spherical body and eight arms made of aluminum tubing. It has a sensing system, a motor system and a control system that functions as an autonomous nervous system (entirely reactive). The machine is suspended from the ceiling and its arms are actuated by pneumatic valves and cylinders. Pyroelectric sensors allow the robot to detect the presence of viewers in the nearby environment. It reacts to the viewers according to the amount of stimuli it receives. The perceived emergent behaviors of this machine engender a multiplicity of interpretations based on single dynamic pattern of events.The aim of this project is to induce empathy of the viewer towards a “character” which is nothing more than an articulated metal structure. The strength of the simulacra is emphasized by perverting the perception of the creature, which is neither animal nor human, carried through the inevitable instinct of anthropomorphism and projection of our internal sensations, a reflex triggered by any phenomenon that challenges our senses.
FILE FESTIVAL

Hosotan

Hijikata conceived of Ankoku Butoh from its origins as an outlaw form of dance-art, and as constituting the negation of all existing forms of Japanese dance. Inspired by the criminality of the French novelist Jean Genet, Hijikata wrote manifestoes of his emergent dance form with such as titles as ‘To Prison’. His dance would be one of corporeal extremity and transmutation, driven by an obsession with death, and imbued with an implicit repudiation of contemporary society and media power. Many of his early works were inspired by figures of European literature such as the Marquis de Sade and the Comte de Lautréamont, as well as by the French Surrealist movement, which had exerted an immense influence on Japanese art and literature, and had led to the creation of an autonomous and influential Japanese variant of Surrealism, whose most prominent figure was the poet Shuzo Takiguchi, who perceived Ankoku Butoh as a distinctively ‘Surrealist’ dance-art form.

15 Minutes of Biometric Fame
The design of the installation 15 Minutes of Biometric Fame is inspired by the camera dollies employed in the television and cinema industries. A camera crane moves autonomously over a large circular track. In a rather intimidating manner, it points the camera at visitors in the exhibition space and scans each visitor’s facial features, comparing them to those of a vast array of preselected persons in a database.

“My work is composed of corollary structures. These objects are accessories adjoining the body. When they are considered in an autonomous way, they become the metonomy of an entire body. These objects want to redefine the perception of the body and form it up again in new constructions, with the ambition to aim at ideal and fantasy shapes.”

taraxacum
Alberto Tadiello’s works explore the possible forms of autonomous function associated with different objects and mechanisms as they undergo a parossistic conceptualization of their own functional logic. This logic is altered and tampered in order to start reflecting upon those deeper and psychological aspects which connect people to things and technologies.

KERNBOHRUNGEN
Rather than introducing autonomous artworks into a space, German artist Karin Sander often utilizes, reimagines and decisively transforms quotidian things that are already there, including basic elements like walls, wallpaper, floors, windows and, for this exhibition, wastepaper baskets.

Balancing Towers

“Inge Mahn’s sculptures are not created in isolation, but evolve within their specific spatial and situational contexts. They are autonomous only in part, since they react to preexisting architectonic and social structures, assume a stance that corresponds to them, advance objections, stir up our ideas about objects, spaces and rules. This body of work is an ongoing violation of the rules, it provides the impetus for a process of rethinking, reinterpretation, rebuilding. Outwardly this is manifested in the constant white of the works: here everything is being continually reshaped, remodeled, transformed.”

The Autonomous Human Drone Taxi

We keep hearing how technology will eventually solve the problem of vehicular traffic for good. Self-driving cars will only get us halfway to that future — they’re still cars, clogging up our roads, speeding down our freeways. The personal mobility future that I’m waiting for includes autonomous drone taxis that can sail high over the city, delivering me safely to my destination.

Autonomous Times

The Table
The Table is an autonomous robot with an automatic mechanized system able to react to unexpected movement or obstacles and to carry out one or more tasks by executing a program in a given environment. As is the case with most “prototypical” robotic works, or single editions, the basic physical components can be pre-manufactured then modified or custom built to meet specific needs. In the case of The Table, the control system and its algorithms were entirely conceived by Max Dean and Raffallo D’Andrea. All the components, including the wheels and motors, were also custom manufactured, giving the installation a unique character. The singular characteristic of this work lies in the robotic nature of the table and it’s capacity to operate in an environment specifically designed for it. For example, the shade of red painted on the floor is directly linked to the effective functioning of the camera and the control software. Also, the space lights used in the room produce a light that prevents the creation of shadows, which the software could mistakenly interpret as a physical presence.

emerging colorspace
Julian Adenauer and Michael Haas
Emerging Colorspace was a robotic drawing installation, realized by the Berlin based duo of artists, designers and inventors Julian Adenauer and Michael Haas, aka Sonice Development, as part of the Red Never Follows exhibition the Saatchi Gallery in London last summer. A new version of the studio’s Vertwalker, a machine with the ability to move on vertical surfaces, walking on buildings, and crawling on interior walls. The machine autonomously applied paint to the wall using a marker, referencing the vertical streets in Minority Report, the flying cars in Bladerunner and 5th Element, or Spiderman, the Silver Surfer and the Green Goblin – just to name a few sources of inspiration that expressed the supernatural. Thousands of lines drawn with different colors gradually formed an increasingly dense colorspace that emerged during the more than 200 exhibition hours, while the wandering behavior of the machine followed simple algorithmic rules with random elements. The result was a web that constantly changed, and never looked the same, exploring new territories and the future in a way ordinary mortals can’t.

Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program

françois xavier saint-georges
Assembled from chinese brushes and medical equipment, the low-tech automata creates ‘endless line’ ink paintings. Created by canadian designer François Xavier Saint Georges, ‘contraption’ is an autonomous painting machine, capable of creating a ‘never-ending line’ of paint. The low-tech device is composed of medical equipment like syringes and tubing, chinese brushes, and paper with an electric motor, that together continuously run a roll of paper along the wall, to be ‘painted’ upon by ink pumped into the set of brushes. Random variations in the ink’s consistency and viscosity at a given moment produce different effects on the paper, and different colours can be fed into the unit or layered on top of previous ‘paintings’. We will show you more projects from this guy, so if you like it you will see more about him. Enjoy it!

Quasi-Objects

ll works are printed using pigment-based inks on Hahnemühle archival paper, variable dimensions, edition of 3+1 ap.
“Quasi-Objects” is an art project consisting of 3d generated videos and prints, a practice of “organic re-design” – started in 2003 and still in progress – that aims to stimulate thought and dialogue on the progressive relativisation of natural forms of life as a result of techno-biological evolution.“Quasi-Objects” regards data actualization, the production of biologically non-functional organisms and ecosystems as transient output of an operative practice: aesthetics of process.
“Life is a real and autonomous process independent from any specific material manifestation.”

Леонел Моура
AIR (Art Insect Robots)
AIR (Art Insect Robots) is an installation with 50 small robots confined inside large glass drops. Feed by photovoltaic cells these robots get agitated from time to time hitting the glass. The collective “performance” produces an artificial and autonomous music.