Shell of

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Marc Vilanova – Cascade – Spain

Waterfalls are a continuous source of infrasonic frequency found in nature. Although inaudible to humans, they play a crucial role in ecosystems, especially for migratory birds who use them as a compass. However, many waterfalls have lost their frequencies due to climate change. The work creates an immersive experience in which the audience interacts with the visualization of sound waves, experiencing the vibration of sound through illuminated strings.

Bio

Marc Vilanova is a sound and visual artist who works at the intersection of art, science and nature. Vilanova’s artistic production has always been led by a spirit of innovation fueled by an interest in new media. His practice combines sound/light installations, performance, and sculpture.

Credits

This work was partially carried out within the scope of the EMAP program at gnration, with the support of the Creative Europe Culture Programme, the Avatar Center in Quebec City and the Ramon Llull Institute.

Photo:
Eloise Coomber

The Cage of Time

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Interactive installation that presents a kinetic instrument object and virtual reality glasses, functioning as a device that animates the illusion of the passage of time in virtual space. In the fabric of existence, time weaves a cage around our ephemeral moments, limiting our perceptions of the past, present and future. By embracing this paradox, we may discover that the cage of time becomes the crucible where the alchemy of experience transforms our understanding of existence.

Bio

Anna Vasof is a multi-award-winning artist who focuses on filmmaking, short videos, and time-based sculptures. VRinMotion is an artistic research project based at St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences in Austria that investigates how features of stop-motion animation and motion capture can be combined with virtual reality to enrich current artistic discourse.

Credits

VRinMotion Team: Franziska Bruckner, Christoph Schmid, Clemens Gürtler, Matthias Husinsky, Christian Munk, Julian Salhofer, Stefan Nebel, Vrääth Öhner.
Concept by: Anna Vasof.

Ethereal Fleeting
A series of clouds is generated by a machine-like sculpture. They appear, float over the surrounding environment and then dissolve into thin air again. The delocalization of this instant of natural beauty evokes a surreal experience. The installation forms a juxtaposition of a metallic structure and synthetic imitations of clouds. This supposed contrast between human technology and nature is explored in a space of unseen possibilities for symbiosis.

Blooming Zoetrope Sculptures
“Mientras el arte es a menudo un vehículo para la fantasía, mi trabajo es una invitación a profundizar más en nuestro mundo y descubrir cómo de asombroso puede ser”. El diseñador, artista e inventor estadounidense, conocedor de que “el cambio es la única constante en la naturaleza”, adora los patrones, las rotaciones y los giros de precisión matemática.”

NYMPHAE
Manna Sculpture
The sculptures MANNA MACHINE are photobioreactors in which algae (Chlorella vulgaris) grow. The tubes and hoses form a drawing in space and are used for photosynthesis, similar to the leaves of a plant. The resulting biomass is filtered, dried and processed into pigment.

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.

EXO-BIOTE
The Exo-biote project aims to invent a typology of possible forms and movements by diverting “soft robotics” technologies. The installation features moving sculpture-objects. These hybrid objects swell with air and seem to be alive, to breathe. These components are part of a whole, they belong to the same body, one whose humours and pulsing organs we can observe. A spasmodic choreography leads the viewer on an inner journey, into the meanders of one of those absurd reasoning processes that logicians calls “apagogies” by proposing hypothetical prostheses for the consumer market. It is as if the objects presented here were commodities, objects ready to use, mass-produced surrogate organs.

Untitled: (A Search for Ghosts in the Meat Machine)
What does it mean to be human? At first glance a simple question, the idea of being human is an unstable construct, continuously recrafted. Recent technological innovations allow us to redesign ourselves profoundly— from networked prosthetics and artificial intelligence, to the genetic code of life itself. Can our behaviors be reduced to algorithms? Can our bodies be upgraded with nonorganic integrations? Can sentience itself by manufactured in a lab? This set of nine sculptures examines personhood from anatomical, psychological, genetic, biochemical, behavioral, algorithmic, personal narrative and memory. In many ways, this installation is an emotional confrontation with being quantifiable.

regenerative reliquary
Leveraging the intelligence of human stem cells, she created “Regenerative Reliquary”, a bioprinted scaffold in the shape of a human hand design 3D printed in a biodegradable pegda hydrogel that disintegrates over time. The sculpture is installed in a bioreactor, with the intention that human Mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs from an adult donor) seeded onto that design will eventually grow into tissue and mineralize into bone along that scaffold.

Eyes
Eyes is an interactive art installation and a series of biometric data artworks with my previous artwork Digiti Sonus. It’s an interactive biometric data art that transforms human’s Iris data into musical sound and 3D animated image. The idea is to allow the audience to explore their own identities through unique visual and sound generated by their iris patterns based on iris recognition and image processing techniques. As a part of the installation, selected distinctive iris images are printed in 3D sculptures, and it replays the sound generated from the iris data and projects 3D converted image images. The audience members can compare their iris-based sonic results with others, and question the “problem of disembodied identities’ in the digital era through the existence of audiovisual representations of individuals.

Remnants

Remnants is an installation, comprised of two individual sculptures, Anatomy and Lacuna, which explores this evolving symbiosis between the mechanical and the biological become. Anatomy and Lacuna are constructed of aluminium, both containing areas of uncertain space. Anatomy contains a plane of black viscous matter and Lacuna, a black void, creating a tension between the two sculptures. The work draws on diagrammatic anatomical and architectural models, distorting scale and hijacking visual languages, creating an undetermined terrain where the purpose of our made objects is undefined.

Psychoprosa

The exhibition PSYCHOPROSA focuses on mucus as a biochemical substance and sculptural material. The production of mucus takes place as a real process within the exhibition spaces, transforming the Frankfurter Kunstverein into an interconnecting ensemble of greenhouse, laboratory, walk-in refrigerator, cinema, and factory. Through tubes connected to one another, equipment and objects produce and transform their interior substances, refrigerators open and close automatically and transparent threads of mucus drip from expansive glass sculptures.

In close collaboration with biochemists, Thomas Feuerstein has developed the synthetic molecule Psilamin, derived from algae and fungi. In its production, large quantities of viscous biofilm are generated. If one were to take Psilamin, one would begin to feel psychotropic effects. Perception would liquefy, and objects in the room would appear soft and shapeless. Simultaneously, the flowing nature of the sculptural matter, which escapes solid form, externalizes an inner psychic process. At the end of the biochemical production process, which visitors can track in the different exhibition spaces, there is the expan-sive sculpture Accademia dei Secreti over whose glass containers vast amounts of mucus pour.

HOW TO GROW AND STILL STAY THE SAME SHAPE
If Comte’s sculptures are rooted in the naturalness of biomorphic forms, her mural interventions transform surfaces into optical sequences and infinite graphic signs with a digital age aesthetic. The monochromatic vocabulary that invests all her work brings her visually close to the abstraction of Sol LeWitt, Bridget Riley and even John Armleder, an artist with whom she studied. On the occasion of her exhibition at Castello di Rivoli, Comte has carried out a gigantic mural intervention consisting of eleven individual wall paintings specially designed for the galleries on the third floor of the historic residence. Also inspired by some eighteenth-century decorative motifs present on the ceilings and walls of the main museum building, the work develops repeated modules through space.

АЙРИС ВАН ЭРПЕН
イリス ヴァン ヘルペン
Syntopia
For Syntopia, Van Herpen collaborates with the artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta of Studio Drift, whose biomimic art works translate natural processes by breathing life into delicate immersive sculptures through movement[…] The vivacious glass bird flows in symbiosis with the models while they move over the runway, their delicate interaction emphasizes the fragility of new worlds living and soaring together.

Ada
File Festival
Similar to Tinguely’s “Méta-Matics”, “ADA” is an artwork with a soul. It acts itself. At Tinguely’s it is sufficient to be an unawarely struggling mechanical being. He took it wryly: the machine produces nothing but its industrial self-destruction. Whereas “ADA”, by Karina Smigla-Bobinski, is a post-industrial “creature“, visitor-animated, creatively acting artist-sculpture, self-forming artwork, resembling a molecular hybrid, such as a one from nanobiotechnology. It develops the same rotating silicon-carbon-hybrids, midget tools, miniature machines able to generate simple structures. “ADA” is much larger, esthetically much more complex, an interactive art-making machine.

H.O.R.T.U.S. XL Astaxanthin.g in-human garden
H.O.R.T.U.S. XL Astaxanthin.g is a large scale, high-resolution 3D printed bio-sculpture receptive to both human and non-human life. The project is conceived by Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto (ecoLogicStudio) and developed in collaboration with the Synthetic Landscape Lab at the University of Innsbruck.

Kiesler’s longest-running project was Endless House, a single-family dwelling whose biomorphic form and lack of corners strongly contrasted with the hard geometric edges that defined most modern architecture of the time. He sought to design a structure responsive to the occupants’ functional and spiritual requirements. He developed his ideas for the house over several decades, creating numerous sketches and models. Although plans were made to build a to-scale model in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden in 1958, they did not materialize, and the project remains unrealized. Nonetheless, Kiesler’s Endless House concept was highly influential and stands as a strong expression of his bold statement: “Form does not follow function. Function follows vision. Vision follows reality.”

video

The Sun never sets
His work is defined in sculptures, installations, drawings and music, but most of the time it‘s a symbiosis of these elements. His artistic practice is based on the creation of compositions with a specific acoustic and physical interaction, where form and sound coexist. The playful, unpredictable aspects of this interaction has his main interest. The specific qualities of music like tone, dynamics, rhythm, timbre and its swiftly immateriality create the poetic counterpart of the physical and visual.

Electric retina
The Electric Retina is a “neuromedia” sculpture which combines retinal research with interactive media art and metaphorical associations in order to explore the complexity of visual perception. Based on her residency in Neurobiology at the Institute of Zoology, University of Zurich, Scott gained a deeper insight into the genetic control of visual system development and function by analysis of zebra fish mutants, which are used as the main phenotypes for human eye disease research.

The New Sculpture
Jonathan Monk was born in Leicester in 1969. Monk received a BFA from Leicester Polytechnic in 1988 and an MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 1991. In his work, Monk adopts the esthetics and practices of 1960s Conceptualism, but infuses the tradition with humor, levity, and autobiographical elements.

ЛИАНА ЛАНГА
Her work is concerned with notions of animacy, which she investigates through sculpture, photography and video works. Many of Lang’s works examine museum objects and the biographies they attempt to narrate, modes of display and the verisimilitude of art objects, particularly figurative sculptures and political monuments.

PROMETHEUS DELIVERED

The marble sculpture PROMETHEUS DELIVERED – a replica of Prometheus Bound by Nicolas Sébastien Adam (1762) – is slowly decomposed by chemolithoautotrophic bacteria. The acidic process water from the bioreactor KAZBEK penetrates the body of the sculpture via tubes and runs off the surface of the stone. The limestone turns into gypsum while the sculpture slowly dissolves. The biomass of the bacteria is the energy source for human liver cells from which the organic sculpture OCTOPLASMA grows. Inorganic stone turns into organic meat. PROMETHEUS DELIVERED is a play on words, referring to birth in the sense of “delivery”, and to the central importance of the liver in myth.

チェ·ウラム
Cakra Lamp
CHOE U-RAM’s work engages a fanciful dialog of aesthetics and machinery and explores themes of biological transformation, flight, and movement. In his recent work, large-scale metal and plastic automata materialize with such a delicacy and weightlessness that it seems to take on the shape and silhouette of an organic life form. Motors, heat and light sensitive materials add to the intricacy of Choe’s kinetic sculptures.

Matieres Sensibles
file festival 

Matières sensibles est une série de sculptures réalisées à partir de feuilles de placage de bois très fines et délicates. Ces feuilles de bois possèdent des zones tactiles sonores distinctes qui suivent les veines naturelles du bois. Nos recherches nous ont permis de développer un processus artistique et technique invisible et délicat. Ce travail minutieux nous donne ainsi la possibilité de composer une partition sonore sensible qui se révèle au contact des différents dessins du bois. Nous avons inventé ce procédé de Bio hacking que nous nommons “marqueterie interactive”.Nos sculptures de bois produisent des sons lorsque que les spectateurs les frôlent. Elles frémissent, ronronnent, crissent… émettent des timbres sonores variés. Nous utilisons ici les sons pour stimuler un comportement gestuel et haptique.Ces sculptures de bois proposent une relation intime et sensorielle entre le bois et le corps du spectateur en révélant une mémoire sonore au contact physique de la matière.Depuis plusieurs années, nous inventons des oeuvres interactives qui mettent en scène les éléments naturels et les corps des spectateurs. Dans cette œuvre, nous utilisons le bois comme une surface interactive sensible. En interprétant cette sensorialité nous rappelons que notre environnement est fait non pas de choses inertes, mais vivantes, réactives. L’énergie électrostatique du corps humain est l’élément déclencheur de cette œuvre. Les zones interactives suivent exactement les veines du bois.
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جنيفر روبل
제니퍼 루벨
ジェニファールベル
Portrait of the Artist

Jennifer Rubell, the American artist and niece of Studio 54 co-founder Steve Rubell, brings a maternal touch to this year’s Frieze Art Fair with her autobiographical piece Portrait of the Artist. The pristine white nude, cast from steel-reinforced fibreglass, reclines like an odalisque at the Stephen Friedman Gallery stand. The sculpture is a replica of Rubell’s own eight-months-pregnant body, except it is eight metres high: the large belly, which is carved out to leave an egg-shaped void, can accommodate a fully grown adult. Spectators are able to clamber into the artwork and curl up inside as if they are the artist’s unborn child.Rubell’s intention was to create a monumental gesture of unconditional motherly love. There is a feminist statement here, too: Rubell has appropriated a style and scale historically reserved for male leaders to show, she says, “an emotion that is intensely personal and un-heroic”. The artist adds that watching members of the Frieze audience enter in the sculpture’s womb is “tremendously satisfying” – in her eyes the enlarged form was “incomplete until the first viewer entered”. Amid the hustle of Frieze’s mini-city there is something undeniably appealing about the opportunity to put your feet up in the foetal position in the name of art. Not to mention the comfort factor.

extase (ecstacy)

L’Extase est un travail ou sculpture et performance sont en symbiose. Encrés en une surface de proportion divine, chaque point de soutient constitue l’empreinte d’une zone érogène de l’artiste. Douze cannes ici sont dédiées à une muse masculine. Se référant à Ste Thérèse du Bernin, Luce de Tetis ainsi soutenue est portée en posture extatique.