highlike

Frederik Heyman

CEREMONIAL FORMALITY
Frederik Heyman’s work is a balancing act incorporating multiple media – including video, installations and photogaphy – often in a digitally altered environment. In his work, Heyman explores memory and duration, using photogrammetry and 3D scanning to depict and represent the passage of time. The hallmarks of Heyman’s work are mechanical and technological: wires, wheels, scrolling LED marquees, metal frames, clamps, industrial lights, screens and cameras. Bodies–as opposed to humans–are subject to unusual dynamics with these technological trappings. In Ceremonial Formality (2020) a contortionist is encased in a metal cage while a spectator, hooked up to wires, looks on.

ALISA ANDRASEK

Cloud Osaka
Envisioned as a high-resolution urban interchange, Cloud Osaka embodies Biothing’s approach to complex design synthesis across multiple orders of scale. Due to its central position in the city, a high convergence of users and one of Asia’s densest transportation nodes found in the adjacent JR Osaka Station, the key driver for the project was to understand 2.5 million people traversing the site every day. This is nearly 10 times the number of daily passengers at the busiest airports in the world. Such an extreme volume of pedestrian traffic, compounded by other forms of traffic in the area, warranted choosing computational physics simulation ordinarily used to simulate systems like river flows; indeed, a key driver for the project became the concept of a “river of people”.

Patricia Olynyk

Oculus
Oculus is a large-scale, collaborative light sculpture that depicts a colossal abstracted drosophila eye, replete with compound faceted surfaces. It both recalls the circular opening at the apex of a cupola and alludes to a surveillance device or drone hovering in mid-air. Oculus is inspired in part by a series of scanning electron micrographs produced in a transgenic lab while researching human and non-human sensoria. The work evokes affective encounters with scale such as viewing miniature particles through the lens of a microscope or wandering through monumental physical environments. As each viewer’s reflection plays across the sculpture’s undulating surface, the apprehension of the self affects both individual and collective behavior in unexpected ways. This affective dynamic plays on the precariousness of our coexistence with other lifeforms in the world, one that is always contingent upon viewers’ bodies and the variability of the environment around them. The act of gazing at Oculus also puts into play the reciprocal condition of both seeing and being seen.

sarah oppenheimer

N-01

The artist creates an unprecedented visuospatial system that transforms the historical museum and its viewers alike.Visitors are kindly invited to touch and move the black metal and glass elements of the artwork.The built environment is inhabited through an array of inputs and outputs. Our bodies set in motion invisible chains of cause and effect. Enter a room: lights turn on. Turn a handle:a door opens. This relay is modulated through system controllers, devices programmed to respond to moving bodies and aural commands. Buried within walls, floors and ceilings, building networks are a black box.

JOHN MCCRACKEN

ДЖОН МАК-КРАКЕН
约翰·麦克拉肯
ジョン·マクラッケン
STAR, INFINITE, DIMENSION, AND ELECTRON

John McCracken’s work embodies a threshold of physical matter and infinite mind/space. In his own words, this ‘character,’ of his work has been indefinable and difficult to write about as an integral whole. Typically referred to as one of the leading West Coast counterparts to the Minimalist regime of Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, Sol Lewitt and Robert Bladen, McCracken’s work extends the architecture of Minimalism, complicates the surface of simulated or real machine production, and reflects a mysticism of transcendence.

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

Jesper Just

CORPORÉALITÉS
Corporealités is a large-scale work exploring the autonomy of ballet through the immersive elements of sculpture and video. At the heart of a piece is Just’s film, displayed across a series of LED-panels strewn about the space, where close up shots of dancers from the American Ballet Theatre show their bodies affixed to electrotherapy patches. As the muscles displayed on the panels contract, notes of Fauré’s Op. 50 seem to play in tandem, providing an ominously invisible link between the film and physical space.

KEI SHIRATORI, TAKESHI MUKAI AND YOUNGHYO BAK

ARART
File Festival

“Arart” is an application that breathes life into objects. It links reality with the expressions delivered through mobile devices adding new stories and values to the real environment.
How will the impressions of the environment that surround us and the various objects that envelop our bodies change through “Arart”?
We propose “Arart” as a new platform of expression that can maintain a strong link with reality.

Vitor Freire

Projeto IJO
FILE SAO PAULO 2015 FILE LED SHOW
“IJO” means dance in Yoruba. The project was born inside a series of actions with the objective of reframing the place of dance and a re-appropriation of the public spaces. Adapted to FILE FESTIVAL, the project unfolds its initial ambition, painting the walls and buildings of the city with dancing. By positioning themselves in front of “IJO”, the participants will have a visual representation of their bodies exhibited in real time on the FIESP building. Dance to tell who you are.

Lionel Hun and Pixel n’Pepper

Black and White
Dedicated to the design and distribution of live shows combining the arts in all its forms, Compagnie Hybride offers a fusion of aesthetics. It is positioned at the crossroads of creativity where the bodies and new technology meet. Land on which confronts, body language and visual arts, in order to promote a work interdisciplinary research, choreography and artistic innovation. Through its creations, productions, performances, films, exhibitions, installations, educational workshops and event services, Compagnie Hybride, carried primarily by a desire to exchange, sharing, research and development, has a mandate to create and disseminate its designs in the artistic and cultural networks nationally and internationally.

MICHAEL NAJJAR

史上第一位進入太空的藝術家
Bionic Angel

The work series “bionic angel takes as its starting point the future transformation and technological control of human evolution. Rapid development in the field of so-called “g-r-i-n techno-logies” (genetics, robotics, information and nano-techno- logies) are changing our bodies, minds, memories, and identities, but also impact on our progeny. These technologies all converge with the aim of enhancing human performance. Prenatal genetic determination enables children to be built to plan.

Tokujin Yoshioka

吉冈德仁
吉岡徳仁
transparent mannequins

Considered ‘grid bodies’, or the ‘transparent body installation’ yoshioka has specially conceived these figures to highlight issey miyake’s garments. in room A, one finds the 1970s collections of miyake dressing figures composed out of 365 laser cut cardboard parts, arranged as a grid structure to create a futuristic human body. they are adorned by pieces that investigate miyake’s constant innovation in fabric-making, and his deep respect for tradition.

Charles Atlas Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener

Tesseract
Tesseract is a collaboration between Charles Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener. It is an evening-length presentation in 2 parts separated by an intermission: a 3D dance film featuring 7 dancers and a live proscenium performance with 6 dancers. The film offers speculative worlds and alternate possibilities in bold visual environments. The performance includes live-video capture with multiple cameras, mixed by Atlas and projected into the stage space. Images obscure and reveal moving bodies behind a translucent scrim, magnified and refracted by Atlas. Through collective action we forge a link between human ritual conjuring and new technological magic. Between the past and the future.

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.

BERNIE LUBELL

Conservation of Intimacy

Made of pine, latex, music wire, copper, nylon line, paper, pens and video surveillance. It measured 20′ x 35′ x 26′ at Southern Exposdure.
A couple rocking on the bench sends air pulses to another room causing balls to move and pens to transcribe their motions onto paper. The paper is moved by a third person on a stationary bike. The couple on the bench can watch the balls on a video monitor before them where the balls appear to bounce into the air. The motion is delayed and languid as though under water. Action is best when the couple is moving slowly together.As visitors work together to animate the mechanisms, they create a theatre for themselves and each other. By encouraging participation, and touch the pieces coax visitors to engage their bodies as well as their minds. The way that pieces move and feel and sound as you rock them, pedal, crank and press against them applies the kinesthetic comprehension’s of childhood to the tasks of philosophy.Bernie Lubell’s interactive installations have evolved from his studies in both psychology and engineering. As participants play with his whimsical wood machines, they become actors in a theater of their own imagining.

Evelyn Bencicova

ecce homo

The expressive capacity of the human body is infinite. A naked body, beyond any sexual connotation, is pure art. Conceptual photographs about the idea of the body is what Evelyn Bencicova brings us in her series Ecce Homo (Latin term that means “here is the man” and which is cited in terms of violence or war), in which we see a lot of bodies pile up and form strange sculptural forms. At no time do we see any faces, which helps to depersonify each of the participating actors. The result is somewhat disturbing: we do not know why those bodies are there, or what they are trying to do. It is a mix between choreography, aesthetics and a theatrical performance. Of great artistic sensitivity, there is something in these figures that evokes the feeling of a human collective. Feelings to the surface.

Kevin Beasley

Strange Fruit
Using both sculpture and musical performance in his practice, Kevin Beasley explores the physical materiality and cultural connotations of both objects and sound. His sculptures typically incorporate everyday items like clothing, housewares, or sporting goods, bound together using tar, foam, resin, or other materials. Often they also contain embedded audio equipment that warps and amplifies the ambient tones of their surroundings. For Storylines, Beasley has created two new works specifically for the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building. Within this vast and open sonic environment, Strange Fruit (Pair 1) and Strange Fruit (Pair 2) (both 2015) offer an experience of intimacy, absorbing and reflecting the sound of the crowd at the scale of a personal conversation. Each work embodies this spirit of dialogue in its two-part structure—at its core are two athletic shoes, one merged with microphones, the other with speakers. Suspending these objects in space, Beasley compounds their technological interchange with additional layers of meaning, bringing to mind the urban phenomenon of shoes hanging from overhead wires or poles (itself an open-ended form of communication). At the same time the works’ titles refer to history of lynchings in the American South memorialized by Bronx schoolteacher Abel Meerepol in the 1937 protest song “Strange Fruit.” In these contexts, the hanging forms of Beasley’s sculptures resonate not only with his body, which molded them by hand, or with the bodies moving through the museum, but also with those inscribed in the problematic history of race and class in the United States.

Paula Perissinotto

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!

OLGA NORONHA

Incarcerated Bodies

オルガの作品は単なる装飾品ではなく、頑丈な力学と繊細な解剖学の融合を祝う芸術作品です。 常に挑戦し、双方向性の関係を探求しているオルガは、「る」と「見られる」の関係を示しています。 良いか悪いかにかかわらず、彼女の仕事に無関心にならないように人々に願って、オルガは彼らが驚きにつながるかもしれないという疑いを歓迎します。 彼女の作品は、型にはまらない魅力、絶妙な、そして境界を押し広げる一貫した組み合わせであり、他のジュエリーデザイナーの間で彼女の個性を区別することを不可能にする組み合わせです。

ÉTIENNE-LOUIS BOULLÉE

Cénotaphe à Newton

Boullée promoted the idea of making architecture expressive of its purpose, a doctrine that his detractors termed architecture parlante (“talking architecture”), which was an essential element in Beaux-Arts architectural training in the later 19th century. His style was most notably exemplified in his proposal for a cenotaph (a funerary monument celebrating a figure interred elsewhere) for the English scientist Isaac Newton, who 50 years after his death became a symbol of Enlightenment ideas. The building itself was a 150 m (500 ft) tall sphere, taller than the Great Pyramids of Giza, encompassed by two large barriers circled by hundreds of cypress trees. The massive and spheric shape of the building was inspired by Boullée’s own study called “theory of bodies” where he claims that the most beautiful and perfect natural body is the sphere, which is the most prominent element of the Newton Memorial. Though the structure was never built, Boullée had many ink and wash drawings engraved and circulated widely in the professional circles in 1784. The small sarcophagus for Newton is placed at the lower pole of the sphere. The design of the memorial is intended to create the effect of day and night. The night effect occurs when the sarcophagus is illuminated by the sunlight coming through the holes in the vaulting, giving the illusion of stars in the night sky. The day effect is an armillary sphere hanging in the center that gives off a mysterious glow. Thus, the use of light in the building’s design causes the building’s interior to change its appearance.