The Forgettable Art Machine

FILE 2024 | Installations

International Electronic Language Festival

The Forgettable Art Machine is an artificial intelligence-driven video installation. When facing the panel, the public has their image captured, starting a cycle of analysis, creation and destruction. From this data, a composite emerges, slowly transforming the visitors’ image into a generative visualization. Once the cycle is complete, the composition is deleted, waiting for a new audience to be captured.

Bio

Matthias Oostrik works at the intersection of digital art, installation art, cinema and architecture. His works establish unpredictable relationships between people and their surroundings. Using digital technology, his installations allow visitors to reshape their environment and their relationships with each other. Oostrik collaborates with renowned professionals and, above all, with his audience, who often become an integral part of his work.

Credits

Co-production: Zester
IA Music: Than van Nispen

Quantum Photography

FILE 2024 | Quantico
International Electronic Language Festival
Gabriela Barreto Lemos – Quantum Photography – Brazil

Quantum photography technique that allows you to record images without light passing through the object.

Typically, a beam of light interacts with an object; In this same beam, the image of that object is formed, which is recorded on a camera, on paper or directly into the eye. This research used two quantumly entangled photon beams. An infrared photon was directed at a silicon wafer engraved with the image of a cat. The other photon, red, was sent on a different trajectory, did not pass through the silicon plate and was detected by an EMCCD (electron-multiplying charge-coupled device – a photographic camera with sensitivity to very low intensity light). The image of the cat engraving was recorded by the camera, which only detected the red light, which did not touch the engraving. It is the first time that an image has been captured in a beam of light that has not interacted with the object that produced the image.

The experiment, led by researcher Gabriela Barreto Lemos, was carried out at the Institut für Quantenoptik und Quanteninformation in Vienna, 2014.

The technique has potential for applications in indirect image capture, from medicine to quantum computing.

Bio

Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, whose research focus is on quantum optics, with an emphasis on quantum foundations, quantum images and quantum information. Additionally, she is involved in interdisciplinary creative projects and promoting inclusion and diversity in science.

Credits

Gabriela Barreto Lemos
Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology
Institut für Quantenoptik und Quanteninformation
Group of Anton Zeilinger

Portraits in Black and Silver
Portraits in Black and Silver is an interactive kinetic artwork that uses BREAKFAST’s custom-engineered Flip-Disc medium. This computer-controlled installation invites you to become a part of its history. As you engage with the piece, it will record a brief clip of your interaction and play it back at a later time, cycling through all of the portraits captured. Flip-Discs are small dime-size circles that can rotate 60 times per second using electromagnets, creating abstract images of black and silver portraits. The artwork challenges your perception of what art can be and pushes the boundaries of traditional mediums.

KTTV
This documentation video captures a few minutes of a continuous, generative collage. The source for the collage is one hour of edited signals captured from KTTV (198 – 204 MHz @ 34°13′29″N, 118°3′47″W) in August 2015.
The sound was created by Philip Rugo

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KTTV Cette vidéo de documentation capture quelques minutes d’un collage continu et génératif. La source du collage est une heure de signaux édités capturés par KTTV (198 – 204 MHz @ 34°13′29″N, 118°3′47″W) en août 2015.

Le son a été créé par Philip Rugo

Berenike Corcuera’s collection was inspired by kirilian photographs of her aura, first captured in Chinatown’s reowned Magic Jewelry. when she lived in New York in 2014. She began studying the electromagnetic field of the human body to understand how to translate the invisible. She began the practice of mandala and colour studies, to understand how metaphysical bodies could be interpreted into physical bodies and contemporary menswear clothing.

Gaitkeeper
“Just be yourself, and nobody else”. Our motions, as distinctive as our faces, will soon be captured and interned. Gaitkeeper is a biometric control suite designed to counter the challenge of ‘Locomotive Camouflage’. LoCam, which combines the physical control of dance with the unpredictability of performance art, is rapidly being adopted by civic insurgents. Gaitkeeper units, based on the off-the-shelf Kiva chassis, are now being deployed as standard counter measures.

Winterreise
Captured moments are central in Kicsiny’s installations. His characters are simultaneously frozen still and in motion. In some works this paradox becomes literal, as in the installation Winterreise that depicts two priests skiing in different directions using the same skis, which makes forward motion impossible. The figures seem lost, isolated and their journey endless. In their hands they hold Jacob’s staffs, navigational instruments used in the 17th century. The work alludes to the continuous search for one’s place in life.

Internet of Everything: All Connections
‘Internet of Everything: All Connections’ is a piece of work that connects human, animals, plants, bacteria, environment, compound and equipment using the Internet. It consists of seven parts. One part affects the other by sequence. It doesn’t have a starting point or an ending point in this connection – because they are an interlocking loop structure. The weak bio-electricity of the human body is passed to the bacteria, Proteus. The bacteria starts to vibrate due to the electrical stimulation. Its motion is captured by the microscope and input to Max in real time. Data arising from the change in value in the bacteria movement controls the next part.

Inextinguishable fire
The title of the piece references Harun Farocki’s 1969 film of the same name, which approaches the impossible task of effectively depicting the horror of napalm on film. Cassils’s gesture of self-immolation speaks to both the desire for–and the impossibility of–knowing such horror, even while decisively aiming to approach it. Though the stunt is a simulation of violence, it still presents real danger. This possibly volatile situation–and the attempt to control it–is captured to create an image where danger, empathy for those experiencing violence, and the privilege of removal from such circumstance operate simultaneously in one transparent performance.

asphyxia
The performance is centered in an eloquent choreography that stresses the desire to be expressive without bounds. Motion data was captured using inexpensive sensors and that data paved the way through an extensive number of steps. Once all the scanned point cloud data were combined, they were used as the base for the creative development on the piece. A series of iterative studies on styles followed and several techniques and dynamic simulations were then applied using a number 3D tools for various results.

The Raft
The Raft depicts at life-sized scale a group of ordinary people casually standing together. Suddenly, they are struck by strong blasts of water that rush in, overtake them, and then, just as unexpectedly, recede. In the aftermath of the deluge, the victims huddle together, seek protection, and help those who have fallen. The viewer experiences this event in an immersive setting, standing in a darkened room and surrounded by the roaring sounds of the water. Meticulously captured in slow-motion, The Raft arouses a visceral experience of human calamity and shared humanity, provoking a consideration of the range of responses to crisis.

Reverse Blinking
Imagine that your head is captured inside a photo camera. It is completely dark. Only when the shutter opens en closes, you see the world in a flash. The shutter moves so fast that nothing has time to move. Everything where you point your gaze at, becomes like a photograph. A memory. Something that has been, but isn’t anymore. You see people as frozen figures, whole streets as untouched moments. Life as a sort of dia show. “Reverse Blinking” creates this experience. It is a completely closed helmet with two shutters in front of the eyes. They are controllable by the user. Reverse Blinking works on batteries and can be freely used in or outside the museum. It is best used where there is a lot of movement and people. “Reverse Blinking” is part of a series of art works, through which the artist tries to add video and photographical effects to our natural way of seeing.

CHBL Jammer Coat
The CHBL Jammer Coat is a piece of clothing that enables its user to disappear: Google cannot find you anymore. The piece is made of metallized fabrics, which are blocking radio waves and shielding the wearer against tracking devices. You are no longer reachable on your mobile phone and no information from your credit card can be captured. The Wave Circle pattern of the fabric gives an illusion of strange multiple body parts, which hides and frees the individual physicality.

克劳斯奥伯迈尔
the concept of … (here and now)

In front of a giant screen, two dancers interact with a cohort of cameras… Their movements are captured by infra-red sensors and projected onto the screen, whereby their bodies become the canvas on which new images take shape. The result is a shifting kaleidoscope of strange, living, quasi-mathematical visual worlds which sometimes seem to be emanating or even escaping from the dancers’ bodies. “Who decides which movement to make: the man or the machine?” Blurring the line between the real and the virtual, Klaus Obermaier loves to subsume his performers’ bodies and physicality in a disconcerting digital universe. With his latest creation, the choreographer/artist has taken a bold new step. He has constructed a system of projectors and infra-red sensor-cameras, trained upon the movements of two dancers. The performers thus find themselves thrown headlong into a living, moving graphical universe: their movements are projected onto the screen, but at the same time their bodies are illuminated by more projected images. This is a true artistic performance, pushing well beyond the frontiers of a standard dance recital, or even a contemporary dance show. A corporeal, temporal performance. A choreography which makes subtle use of its raw materials, deftly combining lights, video, perspectives and the real-time power of bodily movement.

SAY SUPERSTRINGS

Ouchhh will take inspiration from the notes that exist in the universe while micro-strings vibrate (Subatomic Particles) in real time and define the melodies created by the notes as “Matter” and symphonies of these melodies as “Universe”. With dastrio, Ouchhh will take 11 dimensions in abstract directions in super grade gravity theory and move them beyond space in real time. The dimensions captured intuitively in living space will constantly change and turn into reality.

dastrio:
Bernhard Metz – Violin
Manuel Von Der Nahmer – Violoncello
Suyang Kim – Piano

Maurice Benayoun and Tobias Klein
Brain Factory Prototype 2
Brain Factory is an installation that allows the audience to give a shape to human abstractions through Brain-Computer Interaction (BCI), and then to convert the resulting form into a physical object. The work examines the human specificity through abstract constructs such as LOVE, FREEDOM, and DESIRE. The project articulates the relationship between thought and matter, concept and object, humans and machine. Brain Factory uses Electroencephalography (EEG) data captured by BCI. As a brain activity is unique, we developed a novel calibration process of the individual data readings and associated emotional responses within a framework of binary outcomes. This is key for a real-time feedback – a biofeedback – between the virtual generative processes and the brain’s associated response.

Flypast Sunset
“In this series of animated artworks, which are essentially slowed down versions of the series Time in Motion, I invite you to experience the passage of moments across a landscape. Perhaps understanding that even though all moments are transient, all moments are equally worthy of our respect because they are parts of a larger whole. Each Time Loop is made manually. I captured every moment across a sunset or sunrise using a digital camera, and manually stitched these moments into Time Paintings. Finally, different sequential time paintings were put together to create a sense of motion  almost imperceptible in some of the works, in the manner of clouds drifting across a sky.” Fong Qi Wei

FALA
File Festival
It is an autonomous and interactive talking machine, designed to establish automatic communication and synchronization between humans and machines, and between machines and machines. At installation, a microphone interfaces with a “chorus” of forty cell phones. All devices are in a listening state to capture voices and other sounds The autonomous talking machine analyzes the information and establishes equivalence with its memory. If so, the machine generates an audiovisual result with a semantic meaning similar to the sound captured, that is, it speaks and displays on the screens a word identical or similar to the word heard. Speakers and visualization of words on the screens of cell phones allow a “dialogue”, and for humans, to listen and see the machine conversation.

NEON – Fantastical Architecture, Art and Design

FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT
South Georgia Heritage Trust launched an open call for a site-specific commission to be located on Grytviken the former whaling station of sub-Antarctic Island of South Georgia. The project was required to celebrate the whale through a reinterpretation of the former Flensing Plan (a large timber deck used to process the captured whales) and offer a message of hope for future generations by demonstrating how humankind can move from exploitation to conservation. Our proposal imagines that the deck of the Flensing plan has been cut like a piece of flesh from the ground and bent upwards to form an arc. The timber deck is replaced with concrete pavers which are coloured based on the activities which took place in the sites past and present (whale processing and whale watching). The coloured pavers are positioned to create a gradient which provides the visitor with a visual representation of the way the site has changed over time.

BELIEF SYSTEMS
Facial micro expressions last less than a second and are almost impossible to control. They are hard wired to the emotional activity in the brain which can be easily captured using specially developed technological devices. Free will is now in question as the science exposes decision-making as an emotional process rather than a rational one. This ability to read emotions technologically result in a society obsessed with their emotional reactions. Emotions, convictions and beliefs which usually remain hidden, now become a public matter. “Belief systems” is a video scenario about a society that responds to the challenges of modern neuroscience by embracing these technological possibilities to read, evaluate and alter peoples behaviours and emotions.

A Surge of Power
Within 24 hours Marc Quinn’s statue A Surge of Power (Jen Reid) 2020 has been erected in secret on a Bristol plinth and as quickly removed by the council. Life-sized, cast in black resin, it showed the campaigner Jen Reid standing, one fist raised, in a pose in which a photographer had captured her a few weeks earlier when she had stood on the empty plinth after Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters tore down a bronze monument to the 17th-century slaver Edward Colston.

top shot helmet
The Top Shot Helmet alters one’s spatial perception. Wearers see themselves from above and must guide their movements and orient themselves from this perspective. The device consists of a round helmet, above which floats a helium balloon attached to the helmet with strings. The balloon carries a small video camera operated by radio signal, which points downward with a wide-angle lens. The view captured by the camera is projected onto a pair of video glasses in the helmet. Wearers of the helmet can only see the image produced by these glasses and must use this to make their way through a given space. By moving the head, the person wearing the helmet can turn and tilt the balloon and camera. A handle on the helmet makes it possible to adjust the height of the balloon and thereby adjust one’s field of vision.

الكسندر ماكوين
亚历山大·麦昆
알렉산더 맥퀸
אלכסנדר מקווין
アレキサンダーマックイーン
Александра Маккуина
Android Couture
Presented on the cusp of the new millennium, Alexander McQueen’s Autumn/Winter 1999 collection for famed French fashion house Givenchy captured the new fascination with personalized digital technology in popular culture. At the culmination of the show, two models appeared outfitted in molded Perspex bodices studded with flashing LED lights and glowing leggings patterned like computer chips. The creation of a digital aesthetic and its intimate application to the body—an android-like amalgamation of the physical and digital—anticipated the “wearables” trend and the formation of the digital self. Known for his exquisite tailoring, meticulous detailing, and ambitious collections, McQueen also represented one of the remaining visionaries of haute couture extravagance.

Losing dots
via highlike submit
Cristina loves experimenting with light, colours, space, and female figures to create poetic photographs. At the first glance, the images seems to be rather static, but they embody a rich story behind every singular detail. The muses, which are mysterious young ladies, are captured by the artist in a minimal environment.

Mortifications
Hart’s work is symbolist and poetic, not really narrative, but vaguely so, and is mesmerizing, hypnotic and formalist. Bodies or natural forms like flowers always appear in it. Hart calls her work, “post photography,” and has created a body of theoretic writings and exhibitions based on this concept. The things in her worlds are generated from computer models instead of captured with a camera.

Tantalus Quest
file festival
Game designer Fabiano Onça conceived the game, in which people must fill geometric shapes with their own silhouettes (as captured by webcams hanging from the ceiling): Software was built with OpenFrameworks, which is to C++ what Processing is to Java. A prototype was built with Flash (AS3), but it was slow — reading pixel values (BitmapData.getPixel) can be processor-heavy. Thanks to OpenFrameworks, porting the AS3 code to C++ was quite easy. The application is very simple: the images captured by the cameras are brightened, blurred and thresholded, resulting in black blobs. The amount of blob pixels inside the geometric shape count as positive points and the pixels outside the geometric shape count as negative points.

Studio Drift
Ghost Chair
The GHOST collection by Studio DRIFT is a futuristic concept of a chair, a 3D image captured within the boundaries of its outer shell. The chairs are handmade by specialists from Europe using the best materials. A unique 3D technique is used to form unusual subsurface drawings inside the solid Plexiglass chairs. The image of the inner ghost is created by a reflection of light on tiny air bubbles.

Embrace in Progress
Embrace in Progress explores conflicted feelings of shared intimacy. It is inspired by personal and cultural experiences where human contact is not commonly practiced in social interaction. The daunting and unfamiliar proximity of being captured in someone’s arms distorts one’s sense of time. The project was inspired by slit-scan photography and uses depth sensors to capture a series of intimate embraces. These 3D printed pieces recreate the act of embracing and are represented in a static form by the flow of movement twisted because of time.

سيندي شيرمان
辛迪·舍曼
סינדי שרמן
シンディ·シャーマン
신디 셔먼
СИНДИ ШЕРМАН
history portraits
Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. With an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props, Sherman has deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to aging socialite.
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Broken Flower
Liquid Nitrogen
Throughout his career, Shireman has maintained a connection with flowers in decay; in other still lifes, he has cataloged the wilting of tulips and mums. This series, unlike those previous, is brutal and instantaneous. Where his other flowers underwent a slow, gradual death, these broken flowers are quickly frozen and violently ruptured. The process captured here is not a natural one but one that necessitates the use of a manmade element.

إريك جوهانسون
에릭 요한슨
אריק ג’והנסון
エリックヨハンソン
Arms break, vases don’t
Erik Johannson is a self-taught photograher who learned how to retouch photos to make impossible and extraordinary images. Growing up with a grandmother who painted and a penchant for escaping into the other worlds of video games, he naturally blended the two into a technique using computers to generate images that couldn’t be captured by a camera.

조용한 앙상블
Quintetto
Quintetto is an installation based on the study of casual movement of objects or living creatures used as input for the production of sounds. The basic concept is to reveal what we call “invisible concerts” of everyday life. The vertical movements of the 5 fishes in the aquarius is captured by a videocamera, that translates (through a computer software) their movements in digital sound signals. We’ll have 5 different musical instruments creating a totally unexpected live concert.

f5x5x5
f5x5x5 is a kinetic light sculpture conceived of and realized by the belgian design studio lab[au]. the project was most recently installed in the basilique de saint denis in paris for nuit blanche 2009. the design consists of fixed and kinetic aluminum frames that can move randomly or be programmed for use as a low resolution display. the piece is designed as a framework, taking inspiration from software development
frameworks. in the case of the project, the framework is a five by five module which is repeated five times
to create the final form. one side of the work is white, while the other is black. the 125 pixel screen works on binary language and can transform captured data from the physical environment into kinetic actions.

videomaton
File Festival

The initial idea was to engage audiences with the classical paintings. The installation tries to transform the classical portraits into memorable and playful experiences. In short, by looking into a mirror a face of participant is captured by the system. Next, the captured face travels into one of the classical portraits. Hence, the viewer is invited into the gallery in order to recognize him or herself in one of the paintings. In other words, the art piece replaces the original painted faces by the faces of the audience. To be more specific, the authors have created an original face-morphing that integrates itself into the well-know portraits, like Meninas by Goya. To put in a nutshell, the common experience of modern art is replaced by a novel, playful and enjoyable encounter. The installation creates a framework of expression where audience spontaneously and freely interact in front of a mirror knowing that they are recorded. The results are experience by all audience in the gallery. The project was produced in 2011 as a commission of interactive art project for the new City Council of Madrid curated by Chema Conesa. “Videomaton” was presented in the opening of new City Council of Madrid located in the Cibeles square. The installation was exhibited for a year in the institution. The aim of the exhibit was displaying the famous art pieces of Madrid museums in a novel way.

THE VOID
via highlike submit
Audiovisual installation “Void” is an attempt to visualize the idea of emptiness.
Emptiness here is regarded not as an absence of everything, but as an initial state when anything can appear. To see how dark room turns into the Big Bang epicenter a visitor should become “empty”. Every move and sound, captured by sensitive equipment, stops the 360 degrees audiovisual flow around.
“Void” is a social experiment, to see how long today people can stay totally calm.

“Baraka is a documentary that starts from an old word with meanings in several languages. It can be translated as a blessing, breath or essence of life, from where the process of world evolution is triggered. The film reveals how much humanity is interconnected, despite the differences in religion, culture and language of the peoples. A true visual poem without narration or caption, only images and sounds carefully captured and articulated through an expressive montage, which makes each take add the next other meaning, whose theme is… After all, what is Baraka about? I believe that each viewer of the film sees a different theme. It can be about the strength of planet Earth. It may be about the multiple diversities that unite us. It can be a lot. Baraka is a visual reproduction of the human connection with the Earth ”

feel Me tactile interactive bed
File Festival
“feelMe” is a work that for the first time remotely transmits the tactile sensation. Our work provokes the exploration of the sense of touch while promoting the interaction between two people mediated by a machine. The work is constituted of two surfaces, or “beds”: the first one (tactile transmission unit), in which one of the participants, layed down, imprints marks to its surface by pressing it with the weight and movement of the different parts of his/her body; these impressions will be captured and transmitted to the other participant, who lies in the second “bed” (tactile reception unit) and receives them simultaneously in the same positions and in proportional intensities, however, in negative, that is, when the surface in the first bed sinks, it rises in the second one, promoting a touch. The first body touches the second one, and the “beds” may be a few meters or thousands of kilometers apart from each other. Between the bodies, dozens of occult sensors, microcontrollers, engines (lineal actors), computers and a program that orchestrates that tactile communication. We allow the participant to experiment the possibilities of encounter between bodies through the digital world, with a different approach from the one provided by virtual reality. We want to explore the tactile perception separately in its “corporal way”, and only in future works to propose the expansion/extension of multimedia perception with the inclusion of tactile perception.