highlike

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu

Can’t Help Myself
Constructed of a Kuka industrial robot arm, ‘Can’t Help Myself’ is programmed to do one thing: contain a viscous, deep-red liquid within a fixed area. When the blood-like substance pools too much, this activates the robot’s sensors causing the arm to swivel, flex, and shovel the liquid back to the center leaving splashes and smudges in its wake.

kyttenjanae

Soft as Snow

Soft as Snow, auch bekannt als Oda Egjar Starheim und Øystein Monsen, Norwegens beste Anbieter von ungewöhnlichem, kristallinem Pop, sind mit einer brandneuen Veröffentlichung zurück. Die 4-Track-EP “Chrysalis” ist die zweite Originalveröffentlichung des Duos nach ihrem Debüt 2014 – die EP “Glass Body”, die auch als “Glass Body Remixed” veröffentlicht wurde, eine beeindruckende Sammlung überarbeiteter Versionen von Lucy, Gabe Gurnsey von Factory Floor, Maria Minerva und Brian DeGraw von Gang Gang Dance: „Chrysalis ist hart, direkt, frei, emotional. Es bringt uns zum Tanzen, Verbinden, Explodieren. “ – Weich wie Schnee Der Anfangstrack „I Adore“ zeichnet sich durch abrasive Synthesizer und schimmernde Beugungen aus, während sich „Fluid“ von glasiger Zurückhaltung zu einem Synth-Freak-Out entwickelt. “Mouth” ist eine bedrohliche Absichtserklärung, alle Stammes-Percussion und Ur-Yelps, die an die beunruhigende Produktion von Mica Levis Soundtrack für “Under The Skin” erinnert. Die EP geht mit dem energiegeladenen, skitternden “Her Blood Is Gold” zu Ende, wobei Odas seltsame, jenseitige Stimme alles zusammenhält.

REVITAL COHEN & TUUR VAN BALEN

The Immortal
A number of life-support machines are connected to each other, circulating liquids and air in attempt to mimic a biological structure.
The Immortal investigates human dependence on electronics, the desire to make machines replicate organisms and our perception of anatomy as reflected by biomedical engineering.
A web of tubes and electric cords are interwoven in closed circuits through a Heart-Lung Machine, Dialysis Machine, an Infant Incubator, a Mechanical Ventilator and an Intraoperative Cell Salvage Machine. The organ replacement machines operate in orchestrated loops, keeping each other alive through circulation of electrical impulses, oxygen and artificial blood.
Salted water acts as blood replacement: throughout the artificial circulatory system minerals are added and filtered out again, the blood gets oxygenated via contact with the oxygen cycle, and an ECG device monitors the system’s heartbeat. As the fluid pumps around the room in a meditative pulse, the sound of mechanical breath and slow humming of motors resonates in the body through a comforting yet disquieting soundscape.Life support machines are extraordinary devices; computers designed to activate our bodies when anatomy fails, hidden away in hospital wards. Although they are designed as the ultimate utilitarian appliances, they are extremely meaningful and carry a complex social, cultural and ethical subtext. While life prolonging technologies are invented as emergency measures to combat or delay death, my interest lies in considering these devices as a human enhancement strategy.This work is a continuation of my investigation of the patient as a cyborg, questioning the relationship between medicine and techno- fantasies about mechanical bodies, hyper abilities and posthumanism.

Josiah McElheny

Interactions of the Abstract Body
With ‘Interactions of the Abstract Body’ McElheny pushed these ideas further, creating a large and varied body of work that looks at how fashion and modernism have intersected and influenced each other, especially through the common language of the body. Crucially, McElheny animated this dynamic with the constant presence of a performer. By combining a continuous flesh-and-blood performance with static sculpture in the same gallery space, a first for White Cube, McElheny radically fractures the distinction between performance and exhibition.

VTOL

Until I die
This installation operates on unique batteries that generate electricity using my blood. The electric current produced by the batteries powers a small electronic algorithmic synth module. This module creates generative sound composition that plays via a small speaker. The blood used in the installation was stored up gradually over 18 months. The conservation included a number of manipulations to preserve the blood’s chemical composition, color, homogeneity and sterility to avoid bacterial contamination. The total amount of blood conserved was around 4.5 liters; it was then diluted to yield 7 liters, the amount required for the installation. The blood was diluted with distilled water and preservatives such as sodium citrate, antibiotics, antifungal agents, glucose, glycerol etc. The last portion of blood (200ml) was drawn from my arm during the performance presentation, shortly before the launch of the installation.

Kohei Nawa

Biomatrix
“Biomatrix” is an installation of endles scycles of eruptive cell bubbles emerging on the surface of liquid silicone oil. This circulation of the colored liquid evokes the behaviour of magma or blood, and due to the high viscosity of silicon oil, illustrates the movement of the material at a speed deceptively slower than the viewer’s expectation. The electrically controlled pool becomes an interface that amplifies visual impact, and infinitely produces cell patterns. An orderly grid formation appears as a digital matrix, while closer observation reveals irregularities such as sporadic and simultaneous effervescence and plosive sounds breaking the surface tension.

Kate Cooper

In ‘We Need Sanctuary’ (2016) and ‘Symptom Machine’ (2017), Cooper offers the body up as a contested space for communication and representation. Using computer-generated imagery, situations and characters are brought together to think through politics of exploitative labour, and the somatic experience of image production and distribution. Both works present, scenes of a Computer-generated bodies; both female and non-human who loom at the very edges of the screen. Their hands touch; they move backwards on a conveyor belt; and blood drips from the girl’s mouth while the non-human sweeps the floor behind her.

Alex Da Corte

St. Vincent – New York

.

.

New York isn’t New York
Without you, love
So far in a few blocks
To be so low
And if I call you from First Avenue
Where you’re the only motherfucker in the city
Who can handle me

New love
Wasn’t true love
Back to you, love
So much for a home run
With some blue bloods
If I last-strawed you on 8th Avenue
Where you’re the only motherfucker in the city
Who can stand me

I have lost a hero
I have lost a friend
But for you, darling
I’d do it all again
I have lost a hero
I have lost a friend
But for you, darling
I’d do it all again

New York isn’t New York
Without you, love
Too few of our old crew
Left on Astor
So if I trade our ‘hood
For some Hollywood
Where you’re the only motherfucker in the city who would
Only motherfucker in the city who would
Only motherfucker in the city who’d forgive me

I have lost a hero
I have lost a friend
But for you, darling
I’d do it all again
I have lost a hero
I have lost a friend
But for you, darling
I’d do it all again

SPUTNIKO!

スプツニ子!
カラスボット☆ジェニー
Menstruation Machine

So what does Menstruation mean, biologically, culturally and historically, to humans? Who might choose to have it, and how might they have it? The Menstruation Machine — fitted with a blood dispensing mechanism and electrodes simulating the lower abdomen — simulates the pain and bleeding of a 5 day menstruation process. The machine was developed with research support from Professor Jan Brosens at the Department of Medicine, Imperial College London.

Christoph Sensen

Кристофа Сенсена
dead man float
CAVEman 3-D Virtual Patient Is a Holodeck For the Human Body

The virtual-reality rig at the University of Calgary visualizes aspirin’s journey through the body in 3-D. First stop: the stomach and intestines [red], where the drug is absorbed. Next up is the bloodstream [light green] and finally the kidneys [dark green], which flush by-products into the urine
In this image, three stereoscopic projectors mounted on the floor and one on the ceiling display a computer-animated body. Looking through the goggles, researchers can watch its bloodstream turn from white to red as aspirin travels through it. Sensen hopes to develop computer simulations that will model the progression of diseases like Alzheimer’s and diabetes and help scientists quite literally look for cures. Updated to reflect what’s happening inside a real patient, the technology could also help doctors diagnose and treat cancer. “You could stand inside your patient,” Sensen says, “and see how big the tumor is, how to treat it, and what the outcome will be.”

Tavares Strachan

塔瓦雷斯斯特拉坎
ТАВАРЕС СТРАЧАН
Invisible Astronaut

“This neon and glass sculpture represents the cardiovascular system of astronaut Sally Ride shortly after her return to earth. The human body adapts to periods of prolonged weightlessness. When gravity suddenly returns, the blood pools in the lower extremities, and blood pressure drops. This condition is known as orthostatic intolerance. Hanging upside down can cause blood to pool around the heart, a potentially lethal condition. The awkward position shown above helps blood reach the brain without causing pooling around the heart.”

IZIMA KAORU

伊岛薫
Landscape with a Corpse

The early 1990s saw Kaoru enter the phase for which he is most well-known. Combining beauty and glamour with bloodshed and revulsion, he began to photograph attractive models and actresses, all elegantly adorned, in sequential shots where their own deaths are portrayed […] Preferring to leave the circumstances of these grisly scenes to the viewers’ imaginations, Kaoru begins with wide-angle shots and narrows to close-ups. In doing so, he makes the woman herself the focus, rather than her death. In fact, he lets the actress or model determine the scene by eliciting her opinion on the perfect death.

ROBERT WILSON, WILLIAM BURROUGHS AND TOM WAITS

The Black Rider
The Black Rider is in twelve parts and a prologue. I had the idea that there would be indoor and outdoor scenes, man-made and natural environments, and that the scenes would alternate. I made a prologue to introduce the company. It begins with a black box standing up. The devil and the entire company come out of the box until they all stand in a line in front of the stage, as in a circus where all artists are introduced at the beginning. Then the devil sings a song: “Come on along with the Black Rider, we’ll have a gay old time. Take off your skin and dance around in your bones. I’ll drink your blood like wine. Come on along with the Black Rider, we’ll have a gay old time…” Anyways, the audience gets a certain idea what the piece is going to be like. Then the characters disappear and the black box gets bigger and bigger, until the whole stage is engulfed in this black spot. The first scene takes place in the interior of a room, with an old family portrait on the back wall – played by an actor.

Laura Splan

Gloves
Laura Splan’s work examines the material manifestations of our cultural ambivalence towards the human body. Her conceptually based projects employ a range of traditional and new media techniques. She often uses found objects and appropriated sources to explore socially constructed perceptions of order and disorder. Much of her work is inspired by experimentation with materials and processes including blood, cosmetic facial peel and digital fabrication.

MARIA MARTINS

“O impossivel”

They touch. They bite. They get warm. They penetrate. They are made. They get rid of. They stick their tongues in. They put the body in. They get body. They split up. They exist.
They want to be one. It is impossible (“O impossivel”). Which means that a single body, as you would like, is impossible. It can not. For a moment yes, for a moment they can. But no, they can’t. Impossible. They cannot be one. Despite the bites. Their bodies are different. They were born and will die self-absorbed, in themselves. Between them there is an abyss, a discontinuity. But they want to be continuous, they want their bodies to be one body. Since they cannot, they celebrate the sacrifice of the meat. “Essentially,” says Georges Bataille, “the field of eroticism is the field of violence, the field of rape.” Isn’t it violent, perhaps, to want to break the discontinuity of the other closed in on itself? Isn’t it violent to force the discontinuity of the other to be a continuous whole with him? O impossível by the Brazilian Maria Martins (1894/1973) shows the excesses of sex (take note: excess, sex). Or impossível is the moment in which the organs swell with blood and gush sexuality. The moment when animality makes us gloriously human.

Nalini Malani

In Search of Vanished Blood

Malani’s work is influenced by her experiences as a refugee of the Partition of India. She places inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes under pressure. Her point of view is unwaveringly urban and internationalist, and unsparing in its condemnation of a cynical nationalism that exploits the beliefs of the masses. Hers is an art of excess, going beyond the boundaries of legitimized narrative, exceeding the conventional and initiating dialogue. Characteristics of her work have been the gradual movement towards new media, international collaboration and expanding dimensions of the pictorial surface into the surrounding space as ephemeral wall drawing, installation, shadow play, multi projection works and theatre.

BIOVISIONS

THE INNER LIFE OFF CELL
Harvard University selected XVIVO to develop an animation that would take their cellular biology students on a journey through the microscopic world of a cell, illustrating mechanisms that allow a white blood cell to sense its surroundings and respond to an external stimulus. This award winning piece was the first topic in a series of animations XVIVO is creating for Harvard’s educational website BioVisions at Harvard.

STELARC

drawing with robot arm
“With gene mapping, gender reassignment, prosthetic limbs and neural implants, what a body is and how a body operates becomes problematic. We generate Fractal Flesh and Phantom Flesh, extended operational systems and virtual task environments. Meat and metal mesh into unexpected and alternate anatomical architectures that perform remotely beyond the boundaries of the skin and beyond the local space it inhabits. The monstrous is no longer the alien other. We inhabit an age of Circulating Flesh. Organs are extracted from one body and inserted into other bodies. Limbs that are amputated from a dead body can be reattached and reanimated on a living body. A face from a donor stitched to the skull of the recipient becomes a Third Face. A skin cell from an impotent male can be recoded into a sperm cell. And more interestingly a skin cell from a female body might be recoded into a sperm cell. Turbine hearts circulate blood without pulsing. In the near future you might rest you head on your loved one’s chest. They are warm to the touch, they are breathing, they are certainly alive. But they will have no heartbeat. A cadaver can be preserved forever through plastination whilst simultaneously a comatose body can be sustained indefinitely on a life-support system. Dead bodies need not decompose, near-dead bodies need not die. Most people will no longer die biological deaths. They will die when their life-support systems are switched off. The dead, the near-dead, the not-yet-born and the partially living exist simultaneously. And cryongenically preserved bodies await reanimation at some imagined future. We live in an age of the Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera. Liminal spaces proliferate. Engineering organs, stem-cell growing them or by bio-printing will result in an abundence of organs. An excess of organs. Of organs awaiting bodies. Of Organs Without Bodies.” STELARC