highlike

Glenn Branca

Lesson Nº 1 + The Ascension
Glenn Branca has always been a musician positioned halfway between the role of avant-garde composer and that of a rock musician. A pupil and disciple of the masters of American minimalism such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, he has always had to fight against prejudice and fierce criticism. His position was certainly uncomfortable, too academic for rock fans and too “politically incorrect” for academics. In fact, Branca was trying to unhinge all the limits imposed by the rigid schemes of the avant-garde, aware of the fact that those who want to be truly avant-garde should have no limits. John Cage was also able to criticize him, even calling him a fascist ( Luciano Berio also did so for all minimalists) for the excessive rigidity of his compositions, even though he recognized his innovative power. After having created his best known album, The Ascension (1981), a true monument of maximalism played with a classical rock formation (guitars, bass and drums), he tries to approach a different format, the Symphony, as always halfway between rock and academia. Branca will like the experiment and will re-propose it several times in the following decades, to date there are sixteen symphonies (not all recordings are available). Here is how young Branca’s ensemble appeared to the American composer John Adams in one of his first live performances of the First Symphony: “Branca’s event that I listened to at the Japan Center Theater in San Francisco in 1981 was one of his symphonies for guitar . The group didn’t look very different from thousands of other independent or alternative rock bands of the time: guys in jeans and worn t-shirts busy with cables while maintaining that typical distracted expression of rock musicians.

 

Alexander Ekman and Mikael Karlsson

Eskapist
Palco : Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm

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…sem nunca sacrificar a beleza lírica e a contemplação profunda à incongruência inútil, Eskapist prova mais uma vez que o palco teatral é verdadeiramente mágico lugar, onde o mundo como o conhecemos muda de forma apenas para se dissolver nas fantasias mais poéticas que alguém poderia imaginar.

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Skapist

Stage : Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm

. …without ever sacrificing lyrical beauty and deep contemplation to pointless incongruity, Eskapist proves once again that the theatrical stage is a truly magical place, where the world as we know it changes shape only to dissolve into more poetic fantasies than anyone else. could imagine.

 

GUTO NÓBREGA

Breathing
File Festival
Breathing is a work of art based on a hybrid creature made of a living organism and an artificial system. The creature responds to its environment through movement, light and the noise of its mechanical parts. Breathing is the best way to interact with the creature.
This work is the result of an investigation of plants as sensitive agents for the creation of art. The intention was to explore new forms of artistic experience through the dialogue of natural and artificial processes. Breathing is a pre-requisite for life, and is the path that links the observer to the creature.Breathing is a small step towards new art forms in which subtle processes of organic and non-organic life may reveal invisible patterns that interconnect us.Breathing is a work of art driven by biological impulse. Its beauty is neither found isolated on the plant nor in the robotic system itself. It emerges at the very moment in which the observer approaches the creature and their energies are exchanged through the whole system. It is in that moment of joy and fascination, in which we find ourselves in a very strange dialogue, that a life metaphor is created.Breathing is the celebration of that moment.

SAŠA SPAČAL MIRJAN ŠVAGELJ ANIL PODGORNIK

50Myconnect

Myconnect “offers the experience of a symbiosis of connection between humans, nature and technology. The spectator becomes an actor by lying in a capsule, equipped with a helmet and body sensors measuring the variations in his rhythm This data is modulated and transmitted to a closed universe of mycelium culture (white mushroom) to produce alterations using electrical resistance. These variations in turn generate signals, sent back to the person in the form of vibration, sound and light. Each cycle can be different depending on whether the experience is stimulating or calming. This type of perceptual exchange enabled by technology reveals how much the human being is an integral part of the complex network that links him to his environment.

Hiroshi Ishiguro

Mindar
Революция машин уже пришла в религию – по крайней мере, в Японии. Буддийский храм в городе Киото решил изменить свои практики, чтобы стать ближе к людям, и установил там робота. Твоя роль? Объявляйте проповеди верующим. Робот Миндар ростом почти шесть футов имеет женский голос и был создан в честь буддийского божества милосердия Каннон. Руки, лицо и плечи корпуса робота покрыты силиконом (имитирующим человеческую кожу). Это все. Все остальное состоит из открытых металлических шестерен.

 

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Mindar

A revolução da máquina já entrou na religião – pelo menos no Japão. Um templo budista na cidade de Kyoto decidiu mudar suas práticas para se aproximar das pessoas e instalou ali um robô. Qual é o seu papel? Anuncie sermões aos crentes. Com quase um metro e oitenta de altura, o robô Mindar tem uma voz feminina e foi criado em homenagem à divindade budista da misericórdia Kannon. Os braços, rosto e ombros do corpo do robô são cobertos com silicone (imitando a pele humana). É tudo. Todo o resto consiste em engrenagens de metal expostas.

 

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Mindar

The machine revolution has already entered religion – at least in Japan. A Buddhist temple in the city of Kyoto decided to change its practices in order to become closer to people, and installed a robot there. What is your role? Announce sermons to believers. Almost six feet tall, the robot Mindar has a female voice and was created in honor of the Buddhist deity of mercy Kannon. The arms, face and shoulders of the robot body are covered with silicone (imitating human skin). It’s all. Everything else consists of exposed metal gears.

SUNG ROK CHOI

Great Chain of Being
FILE FESTIVAL
The great chain of being, an ancient philosophical concept, attempted to explain the structures and relationships of the world as a form of hierarchy or set of strata. This philosophical idea is here expressed in the form of the entities that constitute the contemporary world. The philosophers of the past believed that the structure of the world had at its top a god, and that beneath there were angels, animals, plants, and elements. But this conception of the world, as a result of the changes in civilization and culture, resulted in the elements that constitute the world undergoing a transition and sustaining an unforeseen hierarchy. The works of art depict the contemporary structure in the form of robots, machines, people, animals, and virtual or digital entities. Within virtual systems, these entities undergo a process of creation, arrangement, use, disposal and recycling, through which they emerge and disappear. The work depicts the stories emerging from these processes, against the background of a systemically designed landscape akin to a factory.
video

JeeYoung Lee

La Vie En Rose II
“There is a saying that life is a thorny path. The title of the work, La Vie En Rose, reveals the situation paradoxically. Life doesn’t always go as planned. Going forward in life can be a struggle comparable to walking through impenetrable brambles in a dark forest. Here, both big and small difficulties we face on our journey are evoked by the thorns growing out of the walls. These elements also recall the my childhood memories in the countryside, picking up berries and getting pricked by their thorns while the character in the work represents our own selves, as we must overcome these obstacles.
In this second version of La Vie en Rose, I wanted to express a change in the mind of the main character.” JeeYoung Lee

TERMINALBEACH

The Heart Chamber Orchestra
File Festival – Hipersonica 

In the TERMINALBEACH Heart Chamber Orchestra (made up of artists Erich Berger and Peter Vatava), twelve musicians played pieces from the heartbeat, recorded by an electrocardiogram from data sent by sensors placed on their bodies. As the live score created in real time from the physical and emotional states of the musicians, their beats further influenced the resulting musical composition. In this way, the biological feedback loop becomes a self-generating, organic and evolving system, which creates a musical score and a show that adopts the form of open or network art, in which chance and interdependence, thus how emotional changes and computational reasoning create a biological and psychological dynamic at the same time.

MATTHIJS MUNNIK

Microscopic Opera

Les micro-organismes peuvent-ils aussi être des artistes? Comment notre relation à ces créatures change-t-elle, après qu’elles sont vues dans un contexte artistique et théâtral? À la recherche d’un micro-organisme qui aurait les qualités d’un interprète, j’ai été présenté à C. elegans; un petit ver, de moins d’un millimètre de longueur, qui se déplaçait aussi élégant que son nom l’indique et la première créature à avoir séquencé tout son génome. J’ai été intrigué lorsqu’un chercheur m’a dit que, pour distinguer les vers au microscope, il utilisait différentes mutations qui modifiaient la façon dont ils se déplaçaient. Certains se déplacent en spirale, d’autres ont roulé ou ont des contractions et certains sont devenus morbides obèses à cause de leurs mutations. Dans mon installation, j’ai cinq boîtes de Pétri remplies de cinq vers mutés différents, chacun se déplaçant légèrement différemment. Ces cinq groupes d’interprètes sont filmés avec un microscope USB diffusé en direct sur les cinq écrans. J’ai écrit un logiciel spécial qui suit les vers et traduit leurs mouvements en sons, faisant d’eux les interprètes non avertis de la musique dans le monde macroscopique au-dessus de leurs têtes. Alors que les chercheurs sont presque comme des dieux pour ces vers impuissants, les contrôlant de leur première à leur dernière division cellulaire , j’espérais donner aux vers le pouvoir de nous affecter également dans notre monde.

Peter Eötvö

Peter Eötvös

Multiversum

Multiversum is written for two solo instruments and orchestra, for two instruments of the same family: the traditional organ with its rich but static colours and the modern Hammond, which can continuously change colours. It was very important for me that the sound of the two organs could completely wrap around the audience, like we imagine the cosmos envelops us. The traditional organ sounds from the front, the Hammond from the back. If we visualise the two organs as our galaxy, then the different groups of the orchestra can represent different galaxies. That’s how the “Universe” becomes the “Multiversum”.

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.

RICHARD DUPONT

理查德·杜邦
리처드 듀퐁

Mr. Dupont makes these sculptures based on a full-body scan of his own body. He says viewers relate to them like they’re three dimensional illusions: The viewer walks around the figures and gets all these different perspectives as the surfaces change. That’s one way the distortions are interesting, because no two perspectives are the same.

ANDY LOMAS

Morphogenetic Creations
Created by a mathematician, digital artist and Emmy award winning supervisor of computer generated effects – Andy Lomas, Morphogenetic Creations is a collection of works that explore the nature of complex forms that can be produced by digital simulation of growth systems. These pieces start with a simple initial form which is incrementally developed over time by adding iterative layers of complexity to the structure.The aim is to create structures emergently: exploring generic similarities between many different forms in nature rather than recreating any particular organism. In the process he is exploring universal archetypal forms that can come from growth processes rather than top-down externally engineered design.Programmed using C++ with CUDA, the series use a system of growth by deposition: small particles of matter are repeatedly deposited onto a growing structure to build incrementally over time. Rules are used to determine how new particles are created, and how they move before being deposited. Small changes to these rules can have dramatic effects on the final structure, in effect changing the environment in which the form is grown. To create these works, Andy uses the GPU as a compute device rather than as a display device. All the data is held in memory on the GPU and various kernel functions are called to do things like apply forces to the cells, make cells split, and to render the cells using ray-tracing. The simulations and rendering for each of the different animated structures within this piece take about 12 hours to run, Andy explains. By the end of the simulations there are over 50,000,000 cells in each structure.The Cellular Forms use a more biological model, representing a simplified system of cellular growth. Structures are created out of interconnected cells, with rules for the forces between cells, as well as rules for how cells accumulate internal nutrients. When the nutrient level in a cell exceeds a given threshold the cell splits into two, with both the parent and daughter cells reconnecting to their immediate neighbours. Many different complex organic structures are seen to arise from subtle variations on these rules, creating forms with strong reminiscences of plants, corals, internal organs and micro-organisms.

STEVE WILHITE

STEVE WILHITE
R.I.P
dancing baby
GIF (JIF)
graphics interchange format

The inventor of the Gif file has revealed that the world has been mispronouncing his creation.
Steve Wilhite, who invented the Gif file in 1987, told the New York Times that the word is pronounced “jif” not “giff”.
“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story,” he said.
The internet has reacted strongly to Wilhite’s claim, pointing to a range of evidence from the White House announcing their allegiance via a note on their Tumblr: “Animated GIFs (Hard ‘G’)”, to simple common consensus.
Others have suggested that the hard ‘G’ relates to the acronym that the word springs from, which stands for Graphical Interface Format.
The Gif has enjoyed a surge of success in the last five years thanks to Buzzfeed-style listings of puppies and kittens and ‘live-giffing’, a form of on-the-spot reporting that had its first major outing during the 2012 presidential debates.
Wilhite may be the parent of the Gif, but most agree that the creation has outgrown its creator.
When even the White House is on the other side of the debate, it seems it might be best if Wilhite concedes defeat with grace.

Snarkitecture

스나 키테
蛇纹石
אדריכלות נחשים
Sway
Commandée pour la galerie Intersect par Lexus, Sway est une installation participative composée de 150 sphères blanches montées sur des poteaux se balançant doucement et disposés dans deux champs précis. Entourés de miroirs, les plans du sol et du plafond sont réfléchis pour former une enceinte parabolique infinie. En réponse directe au mouvement humain et au toucher, chaque sphère légèrement éclairée révèle un changement de teinte et d’intensité.

Kimchi and Chips

Difference and Repetition
The title references Deleuzes thesis ‘Difference and Repetition’ – his attempt to understand reality without referring to identities. The artists aim to ‘unidentify’ the audience – to criticize the bubbles of reality which technology has helped us to build around ourselves. By allowing ourselves to remove our identity occasionally, we can better understand the thoughts of those we disagree with and therefore better work together to build a combined reality. Difference (in both senses) is generated by the motion control system which continuously changes the pose of the mirrors relative to the viewer. This movement disrupts space itself, creating a transformation similar to that of a Lorentz transformation when one travels close to the speed of light. This causes space itself to compress, twist and break, giving the viewer a tool for observing the non-absolute nature of time.

nohlab

prima materia

Prima materia, as the first element, the ubiquitous starting material required for the alchemical processes, reveal transformation of our times.The matter of all forms create various transmutations, attached to laboratory processes, form and color changes in 3D, used as a model for the individuation process, and as a device in art and technology.That pure matter, existing in nature, is converted to other imperfect bodies that it interacts with, and this way is rediscovered and brought to the front by art and technology.

Michael Najjar

Terraforming
The video work “terraforming” focusses on the transformation of a natural environment through energy input. The underpinning idea is that of three phase system change. This begins with the stage of equilibrium where a system is in a certain balance and not changing at all. In the next stage an evolving system enters a state of motion and change where it moves away from equilibrium. The third and final stage is the phase of transformation in which the original system becomes something else. The key element in this transformation process is the sun. This process is called terraforming, whereby a hostile environment, i.e. a planet that is too cold, too hot, or has an unbreathable atmosphere, can be altered to make it suitable for human life. Such a process is not merely a futuristic scenario but represents exactly what is happening on Earth at this moment as the process of atmospheric change brought about by increasing CO2 emissions heats up our planet and speeds up the process of climate change.
video

Sheri Simons

After All
After All is a wooden, robotic interpretation of the Phonautograph, a 19th century apparatus created by the Frenchman, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. His invention predated Edison’s phonograph by 17 years and promised a new kind of visual literacy for those who could learn to read, translate, and recite its mechanically created marks. The air pressure from a voice speaking into a cone pushed and deformed the surface of a sensitive diaphragm to which a boar’s bristle was attached. Inflection in the voice moved the diaphragm and the bristle touched a revolving soot-covered wheel, scratching marks in response to air pressure changes. The marks could be ‘read back’ by those literate in a sound-to-writing technique.

Iannis Xenakis

Oresteia Opera

Scored for soloists, mixed chorus, children’s chorus and chamber ensemble, Iannis Xenakis’ music for Oresteia has been cited as “ruggedly dissonant” since its 1987 première in Sicily. A wooden-planked stage is empty save three platforms, one each for the chamber players and percussion, another for a drummer on a separate perch. On a high screen to start, a loop video shows an almost-naked woman stretched out face down in a bathtub who is being hosed down uninterruptedly with water. No forewarning, and the clip changes to a thick forest, a small girl being physically abused by an adult man. While the same video images reappear at the end of the opera, but it’s nebulous soft-edged shapes –mood landscapes as it were – that are the usual backdrop for the 90-minute piece.

 

Ouchhh

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

404.zero

7.0
Audio visual installation with sound and seven spinning motorized laser mounted on rotating bars. As the bars spin, the straight-line laser beams spread into a cylinder and cone-shaped sculptures. The inclination and position of the laser changes the geometry.

Zeitguised

geist.xyz
A synthetic ghost shifts simulated textiles from passive matter to live organisms. They behave like apparitions in an artificial choreography, with movements that are imaginary yet familiar. Like a constant metamorphosis, the same sequence gets transformed over and over again. At each step, all aspects of the designs are modified, from algorithmic pattern to color scheme to fabric behaviour. The results are meandering layers of style changes. A linear montage shows the intricate details. Shuffled layers of metronomic sounds emphasize the transformation fluctuating in and out of sync.

Pedro Reyes

Return to Sender
Disarm music box
For the work group Disarm, he was able to use 6,700 weapons confiscated in the Mexican drug war and transform these into musical instruments[…] They play well-known, classical music pieces from the respective manufacturer’s country of origin. A musical box made with Glock pistol parts plays Mozart, Beretta barrels Vivaldi, while Reyes’s weapon of choice for Swiss songwriter Mani Matter is the Carabine. Reyes is concerned with «upcycling» – transforming an instrument of death into a musical instrument that stands for dialog and exchange. He undertakes this transformation process with the conviction that the physical act is always accompanied by an idealistic one and appeals to the spiritual dimension of this quasi-alchemical operation towards the good.

Lauren Bowker

The Unseen Collection
Lauren Bowker describes herself a materials alchemist. After developing a pollution sensing compound while studying at Manchester School of Art, she went on to study textiles at the Royal College of Art in London and created a series of inks which change colour in response to heat, light, wind and environmental changes.

ANDREAS LUTZ

FILE SAO PAULO 2017
HYPERGRADIENT
“Hypergradient” analyzes the different interpretations of an impartial consistent statement. The installation repeatedly changes between two states: the “statement” state and the “interpretation” state. The statement state displays a sequence of characters of a distinct semiotic system, which can be described as a deputy for all known semiotic systems. These single characters are grouped to strings and then form string orders into an abstract proposition.

Pedro Veneroso

file festival 2019
‘Tempo: cor’(Time:color) consists of an immersive installation that seeks to modify our experience of time by converting hours into color. A set of chromatic clocks, each set to a different GMT time zone, projects, in a semicircle, the current time in their mathematical and chromatic representations. The conversion between these two forms of time representation is based on an algorithm composed of sinusoidal functions that modulates the RGB colors as a function of the current time, gradually modifying the intensities of blue, green and red throughout the day: at midday yellow predominates, while at four in the afternoon the hour is red; midnight is blue, six o’clock in the morning is green. Side by side, the colors projected by the clocks merge, creating an immersive experience of a continuous and circular time, between the different time zones, that crosses the entire chromatic spectrum. This installation is part of a series of works in which I investigate the relationships between human notations and codes and our experience of space-time, seeking to change the ways we understand it; in this case, visitors immerse themselves in a spatial experience of time that provokes the questioning of notations and perceptions that we usually consider axiomatic. Changing the way we represent time will change our way of experiencing it?

ALICE HALDENWANG, LAURA COUTO ROSADO AND TINGTING ZHANG

Telepathy 2012-2112
“TELEPATHY” immerses the viewer in the heart of a fiction where telepathy would become the predominant means of communication at the expense of means of current communication. The ten glass helmets enable to visualize a telepathic communication, by definition invisible. “TELEPATHY” proposes to reverse the current trend which consists in basing its communication on technology, and in exchange it reveals the parapsychological and subjective communication of psychic phenomena.

SPIROS HADJIDJANOS

Network Time

“Network Time consists of several wifi routers set up in an exhibition space to be freely accessed by any mobile internet device. Attached to each router is a slender fiber optic cable, aligned to absorb and magnify the incessant flicker of its traffic LED. The visualized data exchange creates a space viewers can interact with not only physically, but also informationally.” Gregor Quack

Godfried Toussaint

The Geometry of Musical Rhythm: What Makes a “Good” Rhythm Good? ” is a book on the mathematics of rhythms and drum beats. It was written by Godfried Toussaint, in order to study rhythms mathematically, Toussaint abstracts away many of their features that are important musically, involving the sounds or strengths of the individual beats, the phasing of the beats, hierarchically-structured rhythms, or the possibility of music that changes from one rhythm to another. The information that remains describes the beats of each bar (an evenly-spaced cyclic sequence of times) as being either on-beats (times at which a beat is emphasized in the musical performance) or off-beats (times at which it is skipped or performed only weakly). This can be represented combinatorially as a necklace, an equivalence class of binary sequences under rotations, with true binary values representing on-beats and false representing off-beats.

imagen: Ethan-Hein-blog

Iris van Herpen

Transmotion
The term transmotion not only depicts the process of change from one state, form, style or place to another, it is also the visionary perceptions of the seasons and the visual scenes of motion in art and literature. In parallel to Iris van Herpen’s drive to visualise the invisible, her quest to question reality and urge to explore the realms of impossibility, the project aims to narrate the process that ushers change, to materialise an unconscious state of meditation.

olga kisseleva

anthropOcean

AnthropOcean, interactive project created by the artist-researcher Olga Kisseleva, brings the public to question its implication in an environment which we keep adjusting to our aspirations, with a particular focus on the ocean. At the heart of this project is an online database dedicated to climate change and to the broader ties between ocean, climate and society. This database is the source of all visual displays seen by the public and it also has an interactive dimension: the public itself is able to feed the database thanks to a specific barcode. In other words, the art piece takes the shape of a visual display installation composed of digital objects that it visually maps and connects to one another.

FKA TWIGS

water me
The English Tahliah Debrett Barnett, born on January 16, 1988 and a descendant of Jamaicans and Spaniards, began to gain space in the music scene at the age of 17 as a dancer, appearing in music videos by artists such as Jessie J, Ed Sheeran and Kylie Minogue. Using the stage name of Twigs, in 2012 she released ‘EP1’ on the Bandcamp website, an EP with four tracks.
Due to the existence of another artist with the name Twigs, she changed it to FKA twigs. FKA is an abbreviation for the English expression “Formerly Known As”, which in free translation is “formerly known as”.
In August 2013, Twigs released the video for her first single, “Water Me”, on YouTube.[27] The video was directed by Jesse Kanda.

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NANINE LINNING

ZERO
Tanzkompanie Heidelberg

Nanine Linning is responsible for die best niederländischen Choreographers. After the successful performance “Synthetic Twin”, the fiery “Requiem” and the apokalyptic “Voice Over” she is once again going big. ‘ZERO’ is an excitement Crossover, In which Dance, Game, Film, Music and costumes – by Iris van Herpen – ensure that you are short of eyes and ears. Was it born there when the world changed drastically? What are people different in the last hours before everything else? To the spherical music of, among others, Julia Wolf, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arvo Pärt and Philip Glass phantasieren von Linning und Haarspangen von faszinierenden Ideen.

Olafur Eliasson

Your Body Of Work
Transparent sheets of coloured plastic – in either cyan, magenta, or yellow – are suspended from the ceiling to form a maze. Additional colours appear where these hues visually overlap, forming spontaneous compositions that continually change in response to viewers’ movement through the space. ‘Seu corpo da obra’ was inspired by the work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980).

bart hess

바트 헤스
巴特·赫斯
בארט הס
БАРТА ХЕССА
SIlVERNanine Linning
Nothing has changed as radically in the last few decades as the technology we surround ourselves with on a daily basis. Modern means of communication let the world shrink to a pocket size Global Village. Medical technology promises life beyond its natural limits. Robotics, cybernetics and developments in the field of artificial intelligence put the equally fascinating as disquieting idea of artificial life within our grasp. Nanine Linning’s new production SILVER addresses the intimate – and increasingly intrusive – relationship between the human and the technological, showing the beauty of its aesthetics, but also questioning its promise of ever increasing progress and self-improvement.

Oleg Kulik

Sportswoman installation
Born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1961, Kulik graduated from Kiev Art School in 1979. In 1982 he went on to graduate from the Geological Survey College and moved to Moscow in 1988. In Moscow, while developing his own artistic practice, Kulik also became the art-director at the renowned Regina Gallery between 1990-93. In 1996 he was awarded a scholarship by the Berlin Senate and was given the medal ‘The Worthy’ by the Russian Art Academy in 2005. Now an infamous international artist, he won the III Annual Russian National Award for contemporary visual arts Innovation 2007 and the Kandinsky Prize in London at the Louise Blouin Foundation in 2009. In 2009 Kulik came officer of the Order of Arts and Letters, France. A performance artist, sculpture and curator, Oleg Kulik is best known for his work with animals, particularly his violent performances where he assumes the character of a dog. Channeling specific cultural discontent through his performances at a time of rapid change in Russia, Kulik’s work has continued to provoke and unsettle audiences globally.

Geoffrey Drake-Brockman

The Coppelia Project
via highlike submit

The Coppelia Project is inspired by the story about a clockwork girl from the 1870 ballet ‘Coppelia’ by Saint-Léon, Nuitter, and Delibes, based on a story by Hoffmann. It also draws the commonplace metaphor of clockwork music boxes, with the little ballerinas that pop up and rotate in front of a mirror when you open the lid. Coppelia is part of the traditional classical ballet repertoire and is performed frequently by ballet companies around the world. It belongs to a small group of enduring stories in Western Culture that directly address the limits of humanity when confronted by our creations. The Coppelia story is unusual in approaching this theme through love and attraction, rather than horror and revulsion, as emphasised by Mary Shelly in ‘Frankenstein’. The Coppelia story deals with some of the issues at the edge of humanity; machines interchangeable with persons, love and attraction confused at this boundary.

james casebere

on the water edge

bright yellow house on water

An interest in architecture and coastal living led Casebere to develop the project, which is a follow up to a set of images he created in 2016 based on the buildings of Luis Barragán. Casebere created the series titled On the Water’s Edge to draw attention to issues relating to climate change and, in particular, the need for humans to respond creatively to the threat posed by rising sea levels.

 

NICHOLAS SITTON

“These photos are a result of how intriguing the concept of distortion translates to architecture. It creates a sense of falling into itself, like capturing a moment of demolition. I can destroy titanous steel structures with the click of a mouse and create new twisted versions of reality. I was also inspired by San Francisco. I had just moved here and being a new city was disorienting and exciting and I wanted to capture how my whole world had changed.”

TAE GON KIM

تاي غون كيم
Robes de mémoire

Amant imaginaire
L’œuvre éthérée de Tae Gon Kim, Dresses of Memory, façonne des centaines de brins de fibre optique sous la forme de quatre robes magnifiques et extravagantes. Suspendues dans l’obscurité, les robes apparaissent comme des apparitions, scintillantes des royaumes de la fantaisie. Lentement, la fibre optique illuminée de chaque robe change de couleur, symbolisant son histoire et sa transformation au fil du temps.En créant l’œuvre, l’artiste s’est inspirée de l’écriture du théoricien et philosophe littéraire français Roland Barthes. Dans sa publication de 1978 A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Barthes écrivait: «Je veux être un, je veux que ce soit comme si nous étions unis, enfermés dans le même sac de peau, les vêtements étant l’enveloppe lisse du matériau fusionnant qui est en fait mon amant imaginaire.
Tae Gon Kim a interprété ce texte en créant des œuvres qui reflètent également sa propre fascination pour les relations et l’amour. Il veut que les robes amènent le spectateur à imaginer «que nous devenons les gens que nous aimons». En projetant des images sur les robes, il invite le spectateur à l’intérieur, «comme si nous portions nos désirs». Les différentes images racontent également l’histoire et en constante évolution de chaque robe.

NINA CANELL

Temporary Encampment (Five Blue Solids)

The precarious installations of Nina Canell (born 1979 in Växjö, Sweden, lives and works in Berlin, Germany) could be read as essays on changeability and uncertainty. Hinged upon a fabric of electromagnetics, her communities of objects quietly interact with each other through modest arrangements, balancing careful ambitions to sustain certain frequencies, movements or altitudes. Electrical debris, wires and neon gas establish temporary, almost performative sculptural unions with natural findings such as water, wood or stones, yielding open-ended moments of synchronicity. An improvisational methodology and a flexibility of form highlight Canell’s quest for sculpture, which exists somewhere in between the material and the immaterial, forming and questioning the conductive relations between solid objects and mental events.
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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.

Klaus Leidorf

Scrap Tires

Photographer – Pilot – Aerial Archaeologist
Already in his childhood Klaus Leidorf enjoyed taking photographs from all kind of perspectives – that this is going to be his profession one day he would not think of yet. He studied protestant theology, but realized soon that this is not what he wants to do his whole life. So he changed the subject to pre- and early history.
After his studies he worked at the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments and after two years there was the possibility to continue the aerial archaeology for Bavaria. Therefor he got his pilot license and from the late 80ies on, his workplace is several hundred meters above ground in a Cessna 172.

KAZUHIRO KOJIMA

moon tensegrity membrane structure

This is an experimental housing complex that sought to regenerate the shops-cum-houses in an old area of Hanoi, Vietnam. This district, popularly known as “the 36th street district”, is composed primarily of houses inhabited by traditionally large Chinese families. The buildings have narrow frontages and an unusually extended depth of 70-80 m. These high-density, low-rise buildings were considered to be a comfortable domestic environment until the changes of government in Vietnam during the 20th century.
Han,” became such a high-density city (1,000 people per hectare} that many families began to live together within one unit and even to transform courtyards into actual rooms. As a result the standard of living deteriorated.

YOKO ISHII AND HIROSHI HOMURA

It´s fire, you can touch it

On the other hand, an example of a work representing a difference in which the viewer is faced with participation in the event, is an installation by Yoko Ishii and Hiroshi Homura It’s fire, you can’t touch it (2007). In this work which appoints the active environment, onto the hands reached out by the participants, miniature light signs are projected—a Japanese tanka poem is running through, glyphs change form, fuse together, move. Here we deal with a poetic spectacle in which the perspective of cognitive interactivity, set off in contact with poetry, is complemented by tactile sensations and poems themselves are as if extracted from the environment by interactive gestures of receivers-readers.

POTLATCH

Gretchen at the Potlatch Feast

“Potlatch is a festive event within a regional exchange system among tribes of the North pacific Coast of North America, including the Salish and Kwakiutl of Washington and British Columbia.”
The potlatch takes the form of governance, economy, social status and continuing spiritual practices. A potlatch, usually involving ceremony, includes celebration of births, rites of passages, weddings, funerals, puberty,and honoring of the deceased. Through political, economic and social exchange, it is a vital part of these Indigenous people’s culture. Although protocol differs among the Indigenous nations, the potlatch could involve a feast, with music, dance, theatricality and spiritual ceremonies. The most sacred ceremonies are usually observed in the winter.
Within it, hierarchical relations within and between clans, villages, and nations, are observed and reinforced through the distribution of wealth, dance performances, and other ceremonies. Status of families are raised by those who do not have the most resources, but distribute the resources. The host demonstrates their wealth and prominence through giving away the resources gathered for the event, which in turn prominent participants reciprocate when they hold their own potlatches.
Before the arrival of the Europeans, gifts included storable food (oolichan [candle fish] oil or dried food), canoes, and slaves among the very wealthy, but otherwise not income-generating assets such as resource rights. The influx of manufactured trade goods such as blankets and sheet copper into the Pacific Northwest caused inflation in the potlatch in the late eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. Some groups, such as the Kwakwaka’wakw, used the potlatch as an arena in which highly competitive contests of status took place. In rare cases, goods were actually destroyed after being received. The catastrophic mortalities due to introduced diseases laid many inherited ranks vacant or open to remote or dubious claim—providing they could be validated—with a suitable potlatch.
Sponsors of a potlatch give away many useful items such as food, blankets, worked ornamental mediums of exchange called “coppers”, and many other various items. In return, they earned prestige. To give a potlatch enhanced one’s reputation and validated social rank, the rank and requisite potlatch being proportional, both for the host and for the recipients by the gifts exchanged. Prestige increased with the lavishness of the potlatch, the value of the goods given away in it.

STEVE REICH

スティーヴ・ライヒ
סטיב רייך
스티브 라이히
Стив Райх
Vermont Counterpoint
Vermont Counterpoint (1982) a été commandé par le flûtiste Ransom Wilson et est dédié à Betty Freeman. Il est composé pour trois flûtes alto, trois flûtes, trois piccolos et une partie solo, tous préenregistrés sur bande, plus une partie solo en direct. Le soliste en direct joue de la flûte alto, de la flûte et du piccolo et participe au contrepoint en cours ainsi qu’à des mélodies plus étendues. La pièce pourrait être interprétée par onze flûtistes, mais elle est principalement destinée à un solo avec bande. La durée est d’environ dix minutes. Dans ce laps de temps relativement court, quatre sections dans quatre touches différentes, avec la troisième dans un tempo plus lent, sont présentées. Les techniques de composition utilisées consistent principalement à construire des canons entre de courts motifs mélodiques répétitifs en substituant des notes à des silences, puis en jouant des mélodies qui résultent de leur combinaison. Ces mélodies ou motifs mélodiques qui en résultent deviennent alors la base de la section suivante au fur et à mesure que les autres parties environnantes de la bande contrapuntique disparaissent. Bien que les techniques utilisées en incluent plusieurs que j’ai découvertes dès 1967, la vitesse de changement relativement rapide (il y a rarement plus de trois répétitions d’une mesure), la modulation métrique dans et hors d’un tempo plus lent, et des changements de clé relativement rapides peuvent bien créer une impression plus concentrée et concise.

Steve Reich