highlike

Maxim Zhestkov

Elements
Elements is an experimental art film by Maxim Zhestkov about nature, physics, art and love. More than 2 billion elements / particles governed by tensions and forces of nature were used to tell stories and show emotions through the motion of collective behavior.
The film is a trial to explore the idea that everything around us and inside us is made from simple elements / blocks which can be arranged in complex relationships and become compound structures. We could project this idea into emotions, behaviours, thought processes, relationships, life, planets and the 23.

john adams

Nixon in China
During his rise to power, Richard Nixon became known as a leading anti-communist. After he became president  in 1969, Nixon saw advantages in improving relations with China and the Soviet Union; he hoped that détente would put pressure on the North Vietnamese to end the Vietnam War, and he might be able to manipulate the two main communist powers to the benefit of the United States.”There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation.”Richard Nixon

.

opera full

 

Lotte Geeven

ECHO CHANT
In a universe from which no particle escapes, every voice eventually fades away. No matter how loud or often a call shouts or how urgent the message is. At least… in theory. But what about real life? As a roaring voice in full force rises from a protest over a square, it sets billions of atoms in motion above a crowd. “No justice, No Peace!” The message of vibrating particles charged with kinetic energy empowers the mass and shakes the established order on a verge of collapse. All according to the laws of nature. Dutch artist Lotte Geeven listened to these hotspots of change around the world after the streets and squares had been swept clean and silence had returned. Looking for an echo.

SCANLAB

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.

Marco Barotti

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.

Liam Young

Planet City

Planet City, by Los Angeles-based film director and architect Liam Young, explores the productive potential of extreme densification, where 10 billion people surrender the rest of the planet to a global wilderness. Although wildly provocative, Planet City eschews the techno-utopian fantasy of designing a new world order. This is not a neo-colonial masterplan to be imposed from a singular seat of power. It is a work of critical architecture – a speculative fiction grounded in statistical analysis, research and traditional knowledge.
It is a collaborative work of multiple voices and cultures supported by an international team of acclaimed environmental scientists, theorists and advisors. In Planet City we see that climate change is no longer a technological problem, but rather an ideological one, rooted in culture and politics.

Maxim Zhestkov

Supernova
Supernova is an experimental 4K art film directed and designed by Maxim Zhestkov and made in Zhestkov. Studio Everything around and inside us was conceived in a huge explosion of a star billions of years ago… and, probably, recycled from other matrices myriad times. In this eternal carousel of matter, particles gather, form complicated structures and then burst into all directions fusing atoms together and producing new elements and points of view, new colours and patterns of perception.

RAFAEL LOZANO HEMMER

Рафаэль Лозано-Хеммер
拉斐尔·洛萨诺 – 亨默
ラファエル·ロサノ=ヘメル
라파엘 로자노
רפאל לוזאנו, המר
Flatsun

A circular display that simulates the turbulence at the surface of the Sun using mathematical equations. The piece reacts to the presence of the public by varying the speed and type of animation displayed. If no one is in front of the piece the turbulence slows down and eventually turns off. As the built-in camera detects people more solar flares are generated and the fake Sun shows more perturbation and activity. At 140 cm diameter, Flatsun is exactly a billion times smaller than the real Sun. The piece consists of custom-made panels with 60,000 red and yellow LED lights, a computer with 8 processing cores, a camera with a pinhole lens and a mechanically engineered aluminium, steel and glass structure that pivots for maintenance. A single knob lets the collector set the brightness of the piece and turn it on and off.

The OCR

Specimen Box

The OCR began work on Specimen Box in 2014 at the request of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. Microsoft’s Cybercrime Center monitors communications coming from hundreds of millions of PCs around the world that have become infected by botnet malware. Employing data sonification together with advanced visualization techniques, Specimen Box provides a configurable multi-sensory presentation of botnet signal activity in real time. It also features a multitouch gesture-based interface for navigating, exploring, selecting, and examining the billions of signals that have previously been collected. Users can access the collected signals based on their activity levels, the geographic locations of their sources, or their daily activity patterns over time, using clustering to group sources with similar behavior.

Jennifer Steinkamp

EON
“I considered the first life forms on Earth and how we came to be as a way to refer to the Natural Sciences. I looked at fossil records of the first multi cellular organisms of the Ediacaran Period, 555 million years ago for inspiration. I was struck by the theory of symbiosis in evolution; our DNA ancestors are the resultant fusion of single cellular organisms and bacteria. The millions of bacteria in our bodies are our foremothers. EON is a speculative fiction, a depiction of early life forms underwater. The Universe was formed 13.7 billion years ago. The Earth is 4.543 billion years old. Cyanobacteria or blue-green algae were the first microbes to create oxygen on Earth via photosynthesis 3.5 billion years ago. First humans 200,000-300,000 years ago.” Jennifer Steinkamp

Tod Machover

Death and the Powers

Science fiction and poignant family drama combine in one of the most stunning, cutting-edge operas of the 21st century, with a libretto by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, coming to the stage of the Winspear Opera House in a production directed by Diane Paulus, designed by Alex McDowell (Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report) and conducted by Nicole Paiement (TDO’s The Lighthouse).This visually spectacular robot pageant by MIT Media Lab’s Tod Machover tells the story of a terminally ill billionaire, sung by Robert Orth, who downloads his consciousness into “the System” and proceeds to use all his powers to persuade his loved ones to join him there. Without bodies, without the possibility of touch, sex, suffering, and death — are we still genuinely human?Explore these existential questions and much more in a piece Variety described as “playful, lyrical and…mesmerizing.” Also starring Joélle Harvey as Miranda, Patricia Risley as Evvy, and Hal Cazalet in his Dallas Opera debut as Nicholas.

MARIA HSU

TranStructures
TranStructures Big cities are unceasingly in motion: growth, decay, changes. São Paulo is the source of my look and thoughts on metropolis. Recompose, redo continuously, from the probable to the improbable, allow us to try infinite possibilities that can lead us from sublime to disaster. Billions of hyperexpressions are induced always at random. The mechanisms that regulate the normal, the pre-established, rupture allowing the appearance of the possible others.

CARLOS NO

Pillar
Portuguese artist carlos nogueira‘s series of sculptural works ‘villa bidão’ (braggart city) draw attention to societal issues such as poverty and deprivation, particularly the lives of billions of people without access to housing or drinking water. The improvised dwellings made from makeshift and recycled materials lack a stable framework and basic sanitation, recall the idea of a shanty town as a place unsuitable for habitation. through their metaphorical undertones — huge barrels evocative of a heavy burden and worn materials personifying neglect, the objects present subjects of scarcity and exclusion through visual artworks.

CERN

Globe of Science and Innovation
History of the universe
Did you know that the matter in your body is billions of years old?

According to most astrophysicists, all the matter found in the universe today — including the matter in people, plants, animals, the earth, stars, and galaxies — was created at the very first moment of time, thought to be about 13 billion years ago.
The universe began, scientists believe, with every speck of its energy jammed into a very tiny point. This extremely dense point exploded with unimaginable force, creating matter and propelling it outward to make the billions of galaxies of our vast universe. Astrophysicists dubbed this titanic explosion the Big Bang.
The Big Bang was like no explosion you might witness on earth today. For instance, a hydrogen bomb explosion, whose center registers approximately 100 million degrees Celsius, moves through the air at about 300 meters per second. In contrast, cosmologists believe the Big Bang flung energy in all directions at the speed of light (300,000,000 meters per second, a million times faster than the H-bomb) and estimate that the temperature of the entire universe was 1000 trillion degrees Celsius at just a tiny fraction of a second after the explosion. Even the cores of the hottest stars in today’s universe are much cooler than that.
There’s another important quality of the Big Bang that makes it unique. While an explosion of a man-made bomb expands through air, the Big Bang did not expand through anything. That’s because there was no space to expand through at the beginning of time. Rather, physicists believe the Big Bang created and stretched space itself, expanding the universe.

JONTY HURWITZ

Anamorphic sculpture

London-based artist Jonty Hurwitz creates ‘Anamorphic Sculptures’ which only reveal themselves once facing a reflective cylinder. Hurwitz took an engineering degree in Johannesburg where he discovered the fine line between art and science. He has lived in England for many years, working in the online industry though he quietly levitated into the world of art inspired by a need to make ‘something real’. Hurwitz discovered that he could use science as an artistic paintbrush. Each of his sculptures is a study on the physics of how we perceive space and is the stroke of over 1 billion calculations and algorithms.
.

Ralph Baer

Magnavox Odyssey
Even if you’re a devoted fan of video games, there’s a decent chance you’re not familiar with the name Ralph H. Baer. This should be considered gamer high treason considering Baer’s importance in creating the concept of home video games and the vast, varied entertainment ecosystem now built upon them. Despite being the one to push the dominoes toward an industry that currently makes billions of dollars annually, the bulk of the gaming community has largely forgotten about him.Now a 91-year-old widower, the German-born Baer is the inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, the world’s first video game console. The Odyssey is predated in the games-on-screens space only by experiments like Willy Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two and the coin-op dud Computer Space. But Baer also has a long and distinguished record as an engineer and inventor. The list of patents and gadgets in his name encompasses surgical-cutting equipment, “muscle-toning pulse generators,” submarine-tracking radar systems, video simulations for trainee pilots, talking books and talking doormats, iconic ‘80s toys like SIMON and Laser Command, and even launch displays and a lunar-resistant camera grip for the Saturn V and Apollo 11 space programs.