Interwoven Existence

The artwork draws inspiration from the concept that individual human beings are interconnected rather than isolated. It is a visual representation of collective strength and diversity. The artwork is divided into sections of various sizes and colors, each symbolizing the diverse origins of people around the world.
As viewers approach the artwork, it becomes interactive, reflecting their image across the piece. Upon stepping away, a recording of their interaction is placed into one of the sections, symbolizing the randomness of a given person’s birthplace and socioeconomic position. Subsequently, recorded video clips of previous viewers are displayed in adjacent sections, integrating new viewers into the existing community of participants.

БОХЬЮН ЮН
윤보현
To Reverse Yourself

FILE FESTIVAL

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

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.

Delusional Crime and Punishment

Who created life? I think this is the question everyone has been asking themselves since childhood? At least I have many doubts, the subjective feeling of the existence of consciousness allows us to face the world from that source. Why do humans eat like this for energy? Why not get energy in other ways? Why do you need energy to exercise? Why is this so joyful and so painful? What is the need for pain, pleasure, fear, excitement, etc.?Upon careful analysis, it appears that the source of many desires comes from the design of our physical structure. If God designed human beings, why was he designed that way and why was he designed as a biological mechanism for sin and hell? Why do human beings have desires because of such a physical structure and even they don’t understand self-control, they have sins, and they have to go to another hell of punishment system to atone for their sins? Who created this series of systems?

EONTA
“Eonta (beings) is so entitled as a homage to the ancient Greek philosopher and poet Parmenides. The original printed form of the title word is Cypriot orthography of Creto-mycaenean origin, lost for over 24 centuries and only recently deciphered. Eonta, written in Berlin during 1963-64, was first performed at the Domaine Musical concerts in Paris, conducted by Pierre Boulez, in December 1964. It makes use of stochastic music (based on the theory of probabilities) and symbolic music (based on logistics). Some of the instrumental parts, notably the piano solo at the opening, were calculated on an IBM 7090 computer at the Place Vendôme, Paris.”
(Iannis Xenakis)

The Egg
Ten thousand years ago, there were 1 million people living on the planet, fifty years ago there were 3 billion of us and, by the end of this century, we are estimated to reach a population of 10 billion people! We have modified almost every part of our planet and, as we continue to grow, our need for vital resources increases exponentially. We human beings are the main force behind every global problem we face. The work is a kinetic sound sculpture resembling an egg. The cycle of life, reflected in the shape of the sculpture with neither beginning nor end, symbolizes fertility and reproduction – and thus questions the impact of overpopulation. Driven by real-time data generated by the Worldometer, the sculpture constantly changes its shape.

Vertical Migration
Unsettling our perceptions of scale and otherness, Vertical Migration is an intimate encounter with a life form that bears no resemblance to human beings, though we share a planet, an ecosystem, and a future. Because of sea-level rise, humans will also be migrating vertically in the coming centuries, to higher elevations and raised buildings. The siphonophore’s story is our story. Though we can never experience its journey through the pitch-black ocean depths, we can shift our perspective to recognize that we’re connected, that our actions affect each other, and that we share a common fate.

Crown Fountain
Designed by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, the Crown Fountain in Millennium Park is a major addition to the city’s world-renowned public art collection. The fountain consists of two 50-foot glass block towers at each end of a shallow reflecting pool. The towers project video images from a broad social spectrum of Chicago citizens, a reference to the traditional use of gargoyles in fountains, where faces of mythological beings were sculpted with open mouths to allow water, a symbol of life, to flow out.

Synthetic Seduction

Foreigner

Stine Deja and Marie Munk

The title of the exhibition was inspired by Sherry Turkle’s theory of how technology seduces us, making emotions “easy” by offering human relationships without the complexity of being together ‘face to face’. But if machines can become attentive and emotional, what is left to distinguish us as human beings? We are facing a paradigm shift in how we understand ourselves physiologically, as data and algorithms, and are being forced to question the role of our biological body. As the relationship between artificial and human intelligence becomes increasingly intermingled in our everyday lives, Synthetic Seduction provides immersive and timely insight into the limits of human empathy and intimacy. We are glad at SixtyEight Art Institute to host such a space for thought. We hope it will start conversations and maybe even encourage some intimacy among our visiting audiences in the coming weeks.

Pasionaria

Pasionaria represents the consequences of our current way of life, as conceived by choreographer Marcos Morau. A future where human beings would have lost their vitality through individualism and transhumanism. The gloomy universe of the spectacle thus seems sanitized of all affect, all passion, and consequently, humanity. All that remains is the labor force that is tirelessly busy vacuuming or handling packages of products. Ringing phones, doors or other objects constantly capture the attention of the protagonists who have become puppets. Manipulated by outside forces, instead of being driven by their deep desires, the humans of this dystopia merge into simple working robots.

Computer Visions 2
After more decades of trying to construct an apparatus that can think, we may be finally witnessing the fruits of those efforts: machines that know. That is to say, not only machines that can measure and look up information, but ones that seem to have a qualitative understanding of the world. A neural network trained on faces does not only know what a human face looks like, it has a sense of what a face is. Although the algorithms that produce such para-neuronal formations are relatively simple, we do not fully understand how they work. A variety of research labs have also been successfully training such nets on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of living brains, enabling them to effectively extract images, concepts, thoughts from a person’s mind. This is where the inflection likely happens, as a double one: a technology whose workings are not well understood, qualitatively analyzing an equally unclear natural formation with a degree of success. Andreas N. Fischer’s work Computer Visions II seems to be waiting just beyond this cusp, where two kinds of knowing beings meet in a psychotherapeutic session of sorts[…]

Biologizing the Machine
In Biologizing the Machine (tentacular trouble), the artist uses a stretched leather-like kelp to create hanging incandescent sculptures that conjure up images of organisms such as human organs and insect eggs through chrysalis-like pods within which animatronic insects flutter about. The use of this material calls attention to the ecological history and exciting potential uses of algae, a powerful and shapeshifting entity comprising the largest biomass on the planet. The ground beneath evokes a swamp (not too dissimilar from the watery underbelly of Venice) from which these organisms and other primordial beings may have come.

Liminal Beings
Liminal Beings explores the concept of automaton and the different anthropomorphic forms and functions embedded within its ontology. Automata, since ancient times, have been standing on the verge of two states, developing machinic and human characteristics simultaneously – in reality, and in the collective consciousness. They are trained to execute and learn respective actions and procedures, thus creating an uncanny, awkward state, trapped in limbo between diverse conditions of existence.

بوب ويلسون
鲍伯·威尔逊
בוב וילסון
ロバート·ウィルソン
밥 윌슨
Боб Уилсон
VOOM PORTRAITS
ISABELLA ROSSELLINI

…Robert Wilson does not portray only famous personalities, such as Isabella Rossellini, Brad Pitt, or Caroline von Monaco, but also unknown people and animals who have until now escaped artistic representation, such as a street dancer or a frog. In precisely these stagings, Wilson’s complex visual and sound languages reach their climax, namely, a celebration of empathy: anonymous people become divas, neutral beings achieve cult status. Wilson’s video portraits thus have a cognitive function. Within the history of portrait painting and photographic portraits, especially staged photography, his staged portraits present not only a pinnacle of accomplishment, but also, first and foremost, a climax that is groundbreaking.

ROBOTICS
Robotics is the art and commerce of robots, their design, manufacture, application, and practical use. Robots will soon be everywhere, in our home and at work. They will change the way we live. This will raise many philosophical, social, and political questions that will have to be answered. In science fiction, robots become so intelligent that they decide to take over the world because humans are deemed inferior. In real life, however, they might not choose to do that. Robots might follow rules such as Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, that will prevent them from doing so. When the Singularity happens, robots will be indistinguishable from human beings and some people may become Cyborgs: half man and half machine.

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.

FILE SAO PAULO 2017
OVERVIEW

Astronauts who were able to observe planet Earth from outer space for the first time, all experienced a strong emotional reaction later called the overview effect. A euphoric feeling of oneness with the planet and all living beings as a collective biotope where ‘my molecules are yours’ and vice versa and individuality seems an illusion.
The Overview-installation consists of a motorized video screen that can slowly pan, tilt and lift. The screen is 3m x 4m wide and has LED light on the backside. An abstracted globe is projected on the front.

airmorphologies

Infranet
Infranet is a generative artwork realized through a population of artificial lifeforms with evolutionary neural networks, thriving upon open geospatial data of the infrastructure of the city as their sustenance and canvas. Born curious, these agents form spatial networks through which associations spread in complex contagions. In this city as organism, the data grounds an unbounded, decentralized, open-ended, and unsupervised system. Non-human beings flourish in this environment by learning, discovering, communicating, self-governing, and evolving. The invitation is to witness, through immersive visualization and sonficiation of this complex adaptive system, how a new morphologic landscape emerges as a possible but speculative city.

Self Luminous 2 – Unbalance
Self-luminous 2 is an experimental handmade instrument shown as performance. It is a series-project which I have been working on since 2013 and finally developed into shape in 2014. I am looking for intimate and personal instrument that reflects on the relation of digital sound and light message. In computer language, light on is 1 and light off is 0. If more than 2 lamps, it could be code or readable possibility by the meanings. When I press the button or turn the knob, the message will be sent to Pure Data, and the sound will be triggered in live by Pure Data.
The Data of sound such as frequency and volume, are analysed and sent out to the second Arduino to control the light. The light, in thus case, is an intuitive element for human beings. From this point, it is really close to sound which disturbs our biological body directly. The lights are visualised and they can be transferred the into messages. The message might be readable by coincidence with the link to the code. The light is bright enough to let audience to have persistence of vision in mind. During the performance, the sound will be reproduced by code and part of it is impromptu.
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Chromadynamica
Pantone’s work deals with dynamism, transformation, digital revolution, and themes related to the present times. Felipe Pantone evokes a spirit in his work that feels like a collision between an analog past and a digitized future, where human beings and machines will inevitably glitch alongside one another in a prism of neon gradients, geometric shapes, optical patterns, and jagged grids. Based in Spain, Pantone is a byproduct of the technological age when kids unlocked life’s mysteries through the Internet. As a result of this prolonged screen time, he explores how the displacement of the light spectrum impacts color and repetition.

FLORA 2

The animation in FLORA is generated by overlapping sine waves that travel through a string of lines. This wave principle often appears in nature when energy is transmitted through a medium like water, air or simply a rope. It can also be observed in the locomotion of animals and human-beings, in which kinetic energy is transmitted successively through joints.
The FLORA algorithm of is based on the discovery that a simple system of rotating lines can create endless variations of abstract shapes – ranging from curved harmonious lines to edgy and chaotic patterns. The resulting aesthetics combine computational accuracy with an organic playfulness, and tend to trigger diverse associations in the mind of the viewer.

FILE FESTIVAL
gif

android apparatus
Hillary Predko: Design + Textiles + Fabrication
Lindy Wilkins: Design + Code / electronics
Vanita Butrsingkorn: Performer @ Design Exchange, photos
Coco Freddie: Model @ Electro Threads
Miranda Tempest: Performer @ Android TO
My initial artwork didn’t feel like wearables as we conceptualize them now, but slowly my work morphed into artistic concoctions of cybernetic beings. I have an undergrad in computation arts, and a masters in digital media, so that definitely laid the groundwork for my explorations in this field.

BOMBYX MORI
Bombyx Mori alludes to the silk caterpillar, which has become entirely dependent on human beings for survival. Here, the natural body and the artificial process are inextricably linked: a poignant metaphor for this sculptural interpretation of one of the pioneers of modern dance and performance art.more…

ТОНИ МАТЕЛЛИ
Tony Matelli is one of several artists who have become known for reinterpreting the tradition of hyperrealism in American sculpture. During recent years he has moved away from his earlier depictions of humans and animals towards examining signs of human presence. Using an often hyperrealistic idiom, Matelli describes the more disquieting sides of human beings and human society. His sculptures straddle the boundary between uneasiness and humour: in a number of the works he turns innocence into absurdity, such as when animals or humans are maltreated by various weapons and devices. He was born 1971 in Chicago, IL and lives and works in New York, New York.

MIST
The Prayer
MIST envisions a world in which mass extinction has accelerated to a point of no return; where non-human beings have become spiritual, capable of self-transcendence and mystical experience, because they have no other choice. It is as if promethean punishment (the trauma of reason) were visited on them for humanity’s crimes in the pursuit of planetary mastery.”

fluoroscopy
Miao Xiaochun creates and builds virtual worlds for twenty years, unlimited in size, perspective and imagination. Populated by strange cybernetic beings, stripped of every habit, character or expression, these universes superimpose the images of the great classics of Western art with futuristic, highly urbanized and technologically technologized settings.

Empyrean: In ancient cosmologies, the Empyrean Heaven, or simply the Empyrean, was the place in the highest heaven, which was supposed to be occupied by the element of fire (or aether in Aristotle’s natural philosophy). The word derives from the Medieval Latin empyreus, an adaptation of the Ancient Greek empyros (ἔμπυρος), meaning “in or on the fire (pyr)”

Empyreum  (The Divine Comedy, Gustave Doré )

The Empyrean was thus used as a name for the firmament, and in Christian literature for the dwelling-place of God, the blessed, celestial beings so divine they are made of pure light, and the source of light and creation. Notably, at the very end of Dante’s Paradiso, Dante visits God in the Empyrean.

ТОНИ МАТЕЛЛИ
arrangement
Using an often hyperrealistic idiom, Matelli describes the more disquieting sides of human beings and human society. His sculptures straddle the boundary between uneasiness and humour: in a number of the works he turns innocence into absurdity, such as when animals or humans are maltreated by various weapons and devices. He was born 1971 in Chicago, IL and lives and works in New York, New York.

Off-II
“In this project I have downloaded pictures of ‘friends’ that I only know through the Internet, and given them a new context. The persons are only visible through a digital representation, while the surroundings are as analog as possible. The sceneries are photographed places that invited to interaction – places that missed the company of human beings. The milieu adds a new meaning to the way the digital personas act, and gives their simplified characteristics meaning and personality again, by adding a setting to their digital components.”

ТОНИ МАТЕЛЛИ
Arrangement
Using an often hyperrealistic idiom, Matelli describes the more disquieting sides of human beings and human society. His sculptures straddle the boundary between uneasiness and humour: in a number of the works he turns innocence into absurdity, such as when animals or humans are maltreated by various weapons and devices.

Hurricane Series
Rananim
A state of vulnerability seems to shroud human beings in Sylvie Zijlmans’ Hurricane series. Each work is titled after an actual hurricane: the 2006 tropical storm Vince that hit the Spanish coast in September 2005, Hurricane Emily or Hurricane Bret, Rananim or the 2005 devastating Katrina that hit New Orleans so severely.

Five Movements for Temporal Beings

Botanicula
FILE FESTIVAL
FILE GAMES

“Botanicula” is a point-and-click game in which five small tree beings, who are friends, try to save the last seed of the tree that is their home and is infested by malignant parasites.

ILANIO REUBIN AND ELENA SLIVNYAK
SUPREME BEINGS FASHION SHOW

The Supreme Beings Fashion Show will reveal the avant-garde concepts of two local fashion designers, Ilanio Reubin of Ilanio and Elena Slivnyak of IIMUAHII, at the spacious SOMArts Cultural Center on Thursday, March 1st. The two runway shows will showcase 8 imaginative looks from each designer, as well as two short improvisational performances by Butoh (contemporary Japanese) dancers which we find very fitting for the two creatives.Though different in aesthetic, both designers hail from similar backgrounds and aim for analogous goals. Ilanio (San Francisco Art Institute) and Elena (Academy of Art) both found the retail and fashion corporate worlds too constrictive and mass-produced, and thus ventured into their own imaginative ones.
Ilanio works to create “visually stunning fashion concepts that explicitly disregard wearability, saleability, and practicality; that embrace advanced definitions of sexuality and gender; and that defy the commercially-mandated boundary between the fashion and art worlds.” For Elena of IIMUAHIII, her avant-garde aesthetic is manifested in an intricately-crafted sportswear line.Although we’re dreaming of being in Paris (but really, when are we not?), we’re excited to watch Ilanio and IIMUAHII strut and represent San Francisco’s undeniable talent in their nontraditional fashion show and hope to see you all there as well!

video

As We May Feel
file festival

“As We May Feel” A parody of the 1945 text “As We May Think”, by Vannevar Bush What enduring benefits did science and technology bring to human beings? First of all, science and technology have extended the humans’ control on their material environment, helping them to perfect their food, their clothes, their dwelling, and gave them more security, allowing to live above the level of mere subsistence. Later on, they have permitted a wider knowledge of the biological processes that occur within our bodies, allowing the control of a more healthy and lasting life, always promising an enhancement of mental health. Finally, they contribute to the effectiveness of our communication. We have therefore a reason to live beyond survival — abundant health and efficient communication. And how do we deal with our existential feelings and conflicts? We don’t have time for our feelings, we can no longer ruminate them. We bury them in secret wishes without bigger consequences. Should we care more for our feelings? Negligence has been our way of cleaning our lives of sentimental values. When we cannot sweep them, we zip them and eventually access them to solve conflicts and/or to organize our thoughts. This project offers the access, through a click, to a central that points to a series of paths toward “As we may feel”. The content of this simulation of a phone center has as its aim to create an encyclopedia of existential feelings and conflicts that represent human life in contemporary society. Welcome to our call center!

Augmented Shadow
File Festival

Augmented Shadow is a design experiment producing an artificial shadow effect through the use of tangible objects, blocks, on a displayable tabletop interface. Its goal is to offer a new type of user-experience. The project plays on the fact that shadows present distorted silhouettes depending on the light. Augmented Shadows take the distortion effect into the realm of fantasy. Shadows display below the objects according to the physics of the real world. However, the shadows themselves transform the objects into houses, occupied by shadow creatures. By moving the blocks around the table the user sets off series of reactions within this new fantasy ecosystem. In this installation, the shadows exist both in a real and a virtual environment simultaneously. It thus brings augmented reality to the tabletop by way of a tangible interface. The shadow is an interface metaphor connecting the virtual world and users. Second, the unexpected user experience results from manipulating the users’ visual perceptions, expectations, and imagination to inspire re-perception and new understanding. Therefore, users can play with the shadows lying on the boundary between the real, virtual, and fantasy. Augmented Shadow utilizes this unique interface metaphor for interactive storytelling. Maximizing the magical amusement of AR, it is embedding an ecosystem where imaginary objects and organic beings co-exist while each of them influences on each other’s life-cycle, even though it is not in use by users. Light and shadow play critical roles in this world’s functions causing chain reactions between virtual people, trees, birds, and houses. A set of tangible blocks allows users to participate in the ecosystem. Users can influence on the system by playing with the blocks or observe the changes of the shadows as if kids were playing with an ant farm.